Imagine what would happen in both your personal and professional life if you simply up-leveled your belief to include four fundamental truths:
1. You can’t coach results—you can only coach behavior.
2. Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion—you fall to the level of your training. That’s why you train and practice so hard.
3. I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.
4. No one can exceed their potential. We just misjudge it.
Behavior vs. Beliefs
When you amalgamate these truths together into a single integrated management philosophy, not only do they interface one with another to assist you in making the toughest decisions, but they guarantee that you will become the extraordinary and significant corporate executive, entrepreneur, military leader, educator, athletic coach, teammate, parent, spouse, significant other, or friend you have been “called” to be.
How? Why? Goethe said, “When we treat a man as he is, we make him worse than he is, but when we treat him as if he is already what he potentially could be, he becomes what he should be.”
Translation:
Behavior is caused 100 percent by a belief. Because the purpose of a leader is to grow more leaders who believe what you believe, not generate more followers, when we live by a higher belief, we organically become the leader/coach/parent worth following. When everybody in our organization/team/family believes what we believe (they have decided that their “why” is our “why” and is bigger than the “why not”), they lead with and without a title and make the same integrity-based decisions that we would make to achieve our desired results because they are their desired results!
In sports, once the game starts, the coach is stuck on the sideline. For the team to win, somebody on the field/court/ice has to make a play. Therefore, to be a champion athlete, it’s what we do when the coach is not around that makes us a respected champion teammate. To be a champion employee, it’s what we do when the employer is not around that makes us an irreplaceable worker. To be a champion son or daughter, it’s what we do when our dad and mom are not around that makes us the responsible citizen they have spent their lives teaching us to be!
Process vs. Outcome
Pressure is not something that is naturally there. It’s created when you question your own ability. When you know what you’ve been trained to do, there is never any pressure. Which means training, reading, studying, progressing, loving, listening, forgiving, and transforming ourselves and our organizations from successful to significant must be a daily activity—accomplished by focusing on the process more than the outcome.
An outcome goal forces us to focus on the future. A process goal inspires us to focus on the present. An outcome evaluation only tells us if we achieved the desired result. A process evaluation tells us why and how we did it. When we have an outcome goal, we use that desired outcome as the target. However, when we have a process goal, we use the individual steps and daily effort as the target that leads us to accomplishing the desired projected outcome.
Studies indicate that people are 22 percent happier when we can celebrate the minor accomplishments, cherish the small wins, and appreciate the daily/hourly victories in our lives instead of waiting to find that fulfillment in some big, audacious outcome goal.
Working Past Limiting Beliefs
It’s not what happens to you that defines who you are. It’s how you respond to it knowing you never lose if you always learn. Success is simply getting up one more time than you fell down. Remember, while others might think Thomas Edison failed 999 times in his attempt to invent the electric light bulb, which would have caused most to quit along the way, Edison rose above his past by looking at the light bulb as an invention with 1,000 steps.
Also, no one can give 110 percent. It’s a slang statement that ironically lowers a person’s productivity. The glass, the container, the person cannot hold more than 100 percent. It’s impossible to put more liquid or sand or substance into a specific container than it has the capacity to hold.
The reason why leaders and coaches compliment someone in the organization or on the team, stating they gave it 110 percent effort, is because the leader/coach is comparing that person to everybody else. Bad idea! It creates limiting beliefs. The only person you need to be better than is the person you were yesterday! Peak performance is giving it everything you’ve got when less would be sufficient—and every one of us can do this!
Becoming Our Best Selves
For these reasons, let us stop letting what we cannot do interfere with what we can do and start becoming everything we were born to be: physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, socially, financially, in our families, and in our charitable giving.
No more misjudging the extent of our potential. And rather than compare ourselves with others, let us compete with ourselves, for we all will make a lousy somebody else.
Because we are all interconnected brothers and sisters in the family of humanity, if each person concentrated solely on mastering every phase of themselves—particularly in striving to be the best version of ourselves in our thoughts, words, and deeds—we would not have time to think negatively about anyone else and would actually accelerate becoming the complete person we have the potential to be!
Dan Clark is a Hall of Fame speaker and The New York Times best-selling author of The Art of Significance. Follow Dan Clark at @danclarkspeak on Facebook and Instagram or visit danclark.com.
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