The Mental Game — How to Prepare Your Mind for Success
The following is adapted from On Guard and On Point from Jamie Douraghy.
At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, I watched these elite fencers ready themselves for their upcoming bouts. Instead of strutting or pacing, they either bounced lightly in place from left to right, much like a boxer does, or remained still. Since fencing is a combat sport, the best fencers are the ones who find a way to remain calm during the heat of the bout. Externally, they may portray a level of intensity, yet internally, their minds are quiet and focused. Before a match, they visualize successful moves or meditate to clear their minds. They don’t rehash past victories or defeats. They focus on preparing themselves for the only moment that matters, the upcoming “now.”
Olympians prepare a lifetime for their moment of a lifetime. They reach the Olympic Games because of their commitment to how they start each day and what they spend that day doing. As with all activities that require concentration, fencing is a particularly mental game. It doesn’t depend on weight, class, or age. It doesn’t matter if you are a child, a young adult with parents in the stands, or a fifty-something with your own children in those same stands. Everything is about the moment. The internal mindset must be the same for every competitor who wants to win. Those who don’t have their mental game together won’t have a chance at winning.
In both fencing and in life, people are going to surprise you and catch you off guard. As a fencer, your opponent is always trying to trap you in that one crucial moment, while you’re working away at doing the same to them. Creating a proper mindset ahead of time allows fencers to adjust quickly to unplanned events or situations. What separates excellent fencers from the rest is having a plan. What helps them move to the next round is being able to adjust to the unexpected.
This mindset isn’t the exclusive domain of fencers. It’s all around us when people engage in their craft. For example, in business, it is often the entrepreneur who possesses an uncanny ability to shift gears quickly, especially when they recognize that their plan isn’t working. That doesn’t mean abandoning the plan; it means going back to the foundation — back to their personal why-how-what.
What We Can Control
Ultimately, there are only three things we can control every day: our minds, the right use of our energy, and our time. When we control the state of our mind and what we focus on, we control our energy. In the same way that athletes warm up their bodies before they practice or compete, we need to warm up our mind at the start of each day, knowing that this will enable us to determine what we focus on, control how we use our energy and how we optimize our time.
How we start our mornings sets the tone for the rest of our day. Unfortunately, many of us currently start up our brains by turning to a digital device to check the news, text messages, unread emails, and social media updates. The glowing tablet in the dark is a beacon that draws us in. Like a deer in the headlights, we stare at the oncoming vehicle and don’t move. What a way to start anything — with a habit that simply isn’t good for us! Reading about another international crisis or the passing of someone’s loved one is a shock to the brain. It’s rare that any good news or some nugget of truly valuable information arrives in the early morning, given that at any time of the day, news is mostly negative. It’s like jumping into an icy lake in winter. The cold takes your breath away.
Athletes understand the importance of clearing their minds. Tennis players are often seen examining or readjusting their strings, even though there’s not much to adjust. It’s more about getting their mind ready for what’s to come. Fencers bend their blades, check out their tips, or adjust their masks. These are the brief rituals athletes follow to recenter themselves.
When we open our day with a digital device, we don’t give ourselves that opportunity to recenter. Instead, we start our day somewhat off-kilter.
Knowing we can control our mind and our time, we can choose to postpone dealing with all that digital noise to a scheduled moment during our day. We can decide when we are truly ready for the noise by creating or choosing different ways of waking up to the world.
Here’s one way to wake up to the world that has worked well for me over the years: The 10–10–10 Exercise of Reading, Thinking and Writing — learned from my mentor who has successfully coached Fortune 100 CEOs, top athletes, and global leaders.
The 10–10–10 Exercise: A Simple Three-Tiered Process
- Ten minutes of reading great thoughts of others
- Ten minutes of reflecting on those great thoughts
- Ten minutes of writing your own great thoughts
It’s a relatively quick exercise that’s akin to a mental warm-up. Before we tune into the noise of the day, we can prepare and center ourselves. I tend to read books that will help me learn and grow. It could be a classic novel, a self-awareness book, or a graphic novel. Ultimately, we need to read something uplifting and positive to start our day.
A time of reflection, just as it is for the boxer about to enter the ring, is a time to clear the mind and think about what it will take to create a personal win for the day. I prefer to reflect on what’s important to me and what I can do that day that will bring me closer to my goal. What will I do to keep me in alignment with my personal why-how-what?
The ten minutes devoted to writing can be used to brainstorm or to write in the style of Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages” or to write with a prompt from someone like Deepak Chopra. Ideally, this is done by hand. There’s a physicality to handwriting that helps warm up the mind and inspire a tendency to own what goes onto the page, even if we decide to adjust the thought later on. It’s far too easy today to hit the delete key or edit on the fly while we tap away on our keyboards, forgetting what we have just written, as oftentimes the words are selected for us.
When our minds are calm, we can go through the process of understanding our personal why-how-what and connect it to the day-to-day in a more deliberate manner. Clearing our mind leads to seeing the difference between reacting spontaneously and responding thoughtfully. Reacting may take us further from our goal, whereas responding can bring us closer because we don’t always know the consequences of a reaction that hasn’t been fully thought through. Do we want to spend our entire day reacting or being clear in our response?
When I decided to aim for a national championship in fencing, I knew that I needed to change my daily habits. I decided to wake up an hour earlier each day to train, and I started each morning intentionally going through the 10–10–10 Exercise. By planning it out, I knew exactly what I needed to do at a specific time and controlled my time to maximize my energy and focus. After seeing great results, I implemented a similar evening routine. Instead of checking the news, watching television, or going on social media, I looked inward. I wrote down three things I was grateful for and one goal I could accomplish the next day. The next morning, I would wake up and read my goals with the same sense of calm and focus that I had ended my day with.
What these new routines do is replace those rote habits that aren’t serving us in any meaningful way with new ones that bring us closer to our goals and into alignment with our personal why-how-what.
To learn more about preparing your mind for personal success, you can find On Guard and On Point on Amazon.
Jamie Douraghy’s why is to contribute to a greater good in all aspects of life. He does this as an executive coach, team facilitator, and founder of Life Work Integration, an organization that guides people to discover the Why, How, and What that drives them to succeed in life and work. Jamie is also a TEDx speaker, a graduate of EO’s Global Leadership Academy and has an MA from Syracuse University. He’s been married to Katty for twenty-five years, and continues to enjoy the freedom that an integrated life brings.
