Mindset of Champions with Dr. Jeff Spencer

THE CHAMPION’S MINDSET

• The right mindset is critical because it gives us courage.
• Courage is the ability to act despite our fear-based survival impulses.
• Fear is running rampant right now — we have to have a mindset that keeps us in the game and allows us to make good decisions to constructively move forward.
• Jeff shares a story about working with an Olympic athlete that began to experience a mental meltdown two and a half weeks before the Olympic finals.
• Even with the best coach, doctor, and equipment, the Olympian was still struggling mentally.
• Jeff realized that the Olympian and his team believed that to win the gold medal, everything needed to be perfect. They believed they needed to make a contingency for every possibility to ensure that nothing would happen to prevent him from winning the gold medal.
• Jeff refers to that thought process as a “trick and deadly trap”, because the Olympian’s fear-based human nature and survival instincts were controlling the conversation — causing him to live in terror in every moment.
• It’s not about perfection, it’s about one or two things that have to go right.
• As long as you spend time thinking about the next detail, your brain is going to make up a detail that doesn’t exist that you will put all your confidence in — it’s not possible to win like that.
• Jeff told the Olympian what he needed to do for an instant gold medal:
• 1. Don’t change your warm-up. Don’t deviate from what’s traditionally worked in the past because your body knows what to do. If you change it, your body gets scared and will respond that way.
• 2. Get your first four steps to the runup correct so your foot hits the board to get the lift to win the gold medal. Two things and you win.
• Champions know that it’s not about covering all the bases and being perfect; it’s about doing the one or two things that have to go right each moment and dedicating to them.
• Fear subsides with dedication leading to a feeling of self-mastery and confidence.
• When you demonstrate champion displays of action by going against your human-nature tendency to cave to your fear, you serve as a living, breathing example of what’s possible for others.
• In Jeff’s opinion, at this time in humanity, there has never been a greater urgency to have people serve as beacons of hope, courage and, sanity to show us a way forward while maintaining our dignity.
• The Olympian did the two things Jeff suggested for the next two weeks while also being very selective about who he would spend time with leading up to the finals.
• Jeff told him to stay away from any friends or family that were nervous about him winning because they would begin to obsess about unimportant details.
• When you take a lesson from what the champions do, the outcome becomes predictable — the Olympian won the gold medal.
• It takes every ounce of courage that you have to go against the grain of what your fear-based instincts tell you.

THE CHAMPION’S GOLDEN RULE

• It takes planning and preparation to perform your best.
• The champion’s golden rule is: you do the homework and the test is easy.
• How you prepare really dictates your performance.
• No one anticipated what would be going on today and they now feel added pressure to perform for themselves and people that count on them.
• Even if we know the methods and have the motivation, having a mindset of confusion or doubt can keep us from performing well.
• When you are prepared, you have evidence that you are ready to perform at the level you need to when it really counts. When you show up to execute, you have to trust your preparation.
• You can’t think your way to having the skill you need when you have to be applying it.
• When you know you are prepared, your anxiety drops. When your anxiety drops you have more confidence and you can get into your flow easier — instant gold medal.
• Our human nature always catastrophizes and goes to the worst scenario because that’s in survival mode.
• Our survival default has to be overridden by the application of the champion’s action.
• We need to do the courageous act of doing what needs to go right to supersede our fear-based survival instinct.
• The part telling you that you can’t do it is not you, it’s your imposter. The champion side of you is the part telling you that you can.
• As long as you consistently do and focus on that which has to go right, you keep the other side that leads to failure at bay.
• Focus on the fundamentals — fear is a potentially useful prompt that tells you that you need to prepare.
• Jim Rohn said, “What you practice in private, you are rewarded for in public.”
• Download Dr. Spencer’s free guide, “How to Not Blow it Right Before You Win”, here.
• There is only one of every one of us in all of creation and there are 7 billion people on the planet, which uniquely qualifies us to do some extraordinary things in life. We honor our talents by developing them to their fullest, and we achieve at the highest level possible to a massive legacy to show other people what’s possible.
• What we desperately need right now is examples of people who have gone against the grain of mediocrity and have chosen to create a life of distinction.
• At the end of the day, our legacy will live on in the human archive and internet space for eternity. Make a contribution to humanity that shows people what’s possible.

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• Find out more about Jeff and Cornerman Coaching, here.