Work Harder

Not Softer

From a young age, you were told that if you wanted something, you had to work hard for it. That was a good lesson to teach the child version of you because as a small child you lacked the discipline that you have as an adult.

Unfortunately if you are like many top performers, lessons that may have been really beneficial for you when you were nine years old aren't quite as applicable today.

And as a result, many of the challenges that you face on a continual basis actually persist because your intuition is misaligned with respect to how to most effectively solve them.

I'll use a pitching analogy because a lot of my most valuable lessons came from my life as a professional baseball player. When most pitchers get in trouble, they try to throw harder. If their normal stuff wasn't doing the job, they want to bring their "best" pitch. Unfortunately this often works to their detriment.

Hall of Famer Greg Maddux famously said that when he got into trouble, rather than trying to throw harder, he tried to throw softer.

For Type A individuals, this often maps directly to greater success. It certainly did for a client of mine whose performance had been throttled by his inability to relax.

Often times the key to getting to the next level is finding the right analogy that gets you to drop an antiquated mental model and replace it with a more updated version.

My job as a performance coach is to help you find that mental model. Once we do, life becomes a rocket ship.

🚀 Alex 🚀