Think Of Work Like A Sport
Edition #069
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Six Habits of Ambitious People
This fascinating article by Fast Company on the six habits of ambitious people unpeels insights different from those habits widely believed, promoted, published, written, or talked about!
Here are the top takeaways:
Habit #1: They Set Goals but Don’t Share Them - Healthy ambition involves keeping your goals private. When you tell someone your goal, and they acknowledge it, then the mind is tricked into feeling that it’s already done.
Habit #2: They are willing to take risks - Ambitious people act with purpose but allow themselves room to explore, experiment and discover.
Habit #3: They expose themselves to new ways of thinking - They talk with and learn from people different from them. It forces them to grow, often in unexpected ways.
Habit #4: They Are Focused On Execution - People often spend the most time building their skill set and researching solutions or possibilities. Ambitious people put the main emphasis on pulling the trigger. If your execution is better, nothing matters.
Habit #5: They Don’t Compete With Other People - They avoid comparing themselves with others. Your most significant competitor should be yourself.
Habit #6: They Surround Themselves With Other Ambitious People - They Network with clusters of successful people. They find role models, befriend and learn from mentors.
Read the entire article here.
Uncovered: The Essential Mental Skills for Ambitious Youngsters
Jeremy Snape is a former English Cricketer who played limited over internationals and holds a master's degree in sports psychology. He has worked with a number of teams in cricket, football, and rugby union.
Jerry’s podcast, Inside The Minds of Champions, is a fabulous collection of thoughts and conversations on what it takes to be a champion. In this episode, he talks about the essential mental skills needed for ambitious youngsters.
Jerry covers various aspects of the skills needed with brilliant anecdotes from different sports people like, say, Graham Smith, former captain of the South African Cricket team, who talks about the importance of goal setting at an early age, which happened in his case when he was only 11 years old when he put this dream and goal to captain South Africa Cricket team, as a note on the refrigerator door!
Here are a few others:
The importance of identifying a dream and then having a target. Also, accepting that they can hit their target daily due to a disciplined process gives them a higher probability of winning, but knowing that is not a necessary condition to win!
Controlling the mind is an important skill that needs to be developed.
Accept that setbacks are going to happen. Therefore, another critical skill to build is ‘Playing The Error in the Mind’, not to kick themselves up for the error but not repeat it the next game and build resilience to handle the significant and minor setbacks.
Don’t let outcomes affect them; rigorous practice and discipline are essential. They look for who’s the best in their network or club, or school and let them learn from them. They keep learning all the time.
Over time as they get older and gain more experience, they become the ‘CEO of Their Own Performance’.
There are a lot more compelling thoughts here. So take time, listen to them, and, more importantly, put them to practice in your work and life.
You Aren’t At The Mercy Of Your Emotions - Your Brain Creates Them
Lisa Feldman Barrett is among the top one per cent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.
In this TED Talk, she talks about how emotions are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable. She asserts that no brain on this planet has emotion circuits. Instead, she says emotions are guesses that your brain constructs in a moment where billions of brain cells are working together, and you have more control over those guesses than you think!
Lisa brings out this very powerfully with an example of how we get ‘experiential blindness’ and how the brain sifts through past experiences to ‘predict’ what it sees to make sense of the world quickly and efficiently.
Prediction is primal by nature, and the emotion we see in others is deeply rooted in predictions. Under the hood, the brain makes predictions and tries to make meaning using past situations, experiences and the facial movements it sees. It connects back to the past experiences it has observed and recorded.
Therefore, Lisa postulates:
‘The Emotion You Seem to Detect in Other People Are Partly Inside Your Own Head.’
‘Emotions that seem to happen to you are made by you.’
These are buried deep in some ancient part of your brain!
Therefore, you can teach your brain how to predict differently tomorrow! Listen to this video and learn how to practice and improve in controlling your emotions.
Think Of Work Like A Sport
Right from the time we get into school and then at college, and finally, at work, we are prepared to be anti-ambitious. Moreover, we are trained not to take risks and taught to compete with others! This is precisely the opposite of how ambitious people think and practice their craft!
Take, for example, Habit #5 - Don’t compete with others, but that is what we are taught to do in every institution we are either sent or enrolled or join. In schools, we are constantly assessed against each other, and our grades are compared with others. Our parents discuss nothing but how one child is the best in the group, and their grades reflect the centre of this comparison. Hence, we are trained from a very young age to compare ourselves with others and do enough to do better than others or be told we are not better than the best ones around us. This happens with every test in every subject or major that we graduate. Finally, when we start to work, we are assessed against a goal( which, according to Habit #1, the ambitious people keep to themselves and don’t share) that is explicitly agreed upon at the start of the year!
All this happens because most of us know or understand only this language - ‘We are trained to explicitly agree to a goal and compete to be better than others, and we are rewarded for it.’ We don’t understand any other language, so we become anti-ambitious people as we constantly compare our effort with others, our growth with others, our salary with others, and our success with others! However, this is precisely the opposite of how ambitious people think - Habit #5: Don’t compete with others! Then, the companies fret about why their performance is below the mark when the entire system is tuned to being an ‘Average Mindset’.
When we look at sports, there are some great learnings from there that we can take to our business, profession and workplace. We must rethink fundamentally, re-engineer our minds, and change our beliefs and work ethic. Here are some of them that we need to reconfigure:
We are taught to worship a ‘Degree’ and not a ‘Professional’ who brought breakthrough, respect and value to that degree or profession. However, in real life, we don’t give all doctors, lawyers, and architects the same recognition and value, as they all have the same degrees. When you speak about sportspeople, they ‘Differentiate The Profession From The Professional’. We need to start embracing this change as it drives a different discipline and practice to get better every day in improving our professional skills.
We must unlearn to compete with others. Instead, we should learn to compete with ourselves. This is a massive change in mindset. That’s when the benchmarks of success are redrawn. The youngest and the brightest must be allowed space to challenge and collaborate with the best and most experienced. We must not allow experience to override expertise.
Like most sports professionals, we should build better mental skills to handle risks and setbacks. Right from a young age, we are taught that these have a higher chance of failure and are not worth considering or being pursued. Therefore, we look for success in resumes and not failures. Little wonder, like most people, we become risk-averse and cannot handle the trauma of a setback. We need to get better emotionally at this, and we also now know emotions are made by you based on past experiences you have seen or been told about.
You have to become the “CEO of Your Own Performance’. It means a ruthless evaluation of whether you will employ yourself if you were in charge of recruiting and running the company. Again, we are trained to compare our performance with others, but Habit #6 of Ambitious People is to surround themselves with cohorts of the best people in their business. And often, they themselves may not be the best, but this keeps helping them learn constantly. You must be ready to reconfigure your benchmarks and assessment. You will extend your longevity at work if you build this skill.
Companies are still steeped in industrial-era thinking. They seek mass-produced professionals with average mindset training to achieve best-in-class performance. The traditional form of employment contracts that stood the test of time for over five to ten decades no more delivers value. The best no more want to work for the average. Also, companies don’t want the average to work permanently with them. Rather they can’t afford it any more. Companies must find ways to ‘engage’ the best rather than ‘employ’ the best going forward. The era of life-long employment is dead. Companies need to become like football and cricket leagues, where the best are given contracts for a limited time, and it does not matter which country the players belong to.
To get a sense of whether you are ambitious and are the best at what you do, you may want to find answers to these questions continuously:
‘Am I living in a myth of certainty?’
‘What is my reality-perception skill gap?’
‘What am I doing daily to close the reality-perception skill gap?’
‘ Does my performance reflect stagnation or continuous progress?’
‘ Would I still want to hire myself?’
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
The ambitious people take a path hitherto not taken and believe in or practice habits unlike most.
Mental skills play a vital role in how champions are made.
Emotions are guesses your brain constructs in a moment. However, it can be controlled because the emotions that seem to happen to you are made by you.