FACTOR #44: INTERNAL ENEMY
[3rd LEC] - Good morning, everyone.
I guess it might be useful to share with all of you some passages from my new book [Sport Mindset for Excellence], because they are certainly effective for the Business Man, although they are designed for the Professional Athlete and Coaches. I look forward to your comments and wish you a good read.
The third of these topics is "Managing the INTERNAL ENEMY", one of the 55 factors of the Sport Mindset.
Contextualization
The power of Goals is much bigger than you can believe. If you apply yourself to the highest targets and accept to start the intensive process of training, which will lead you to achieve, many things will happen to you. You cannot become the World Champion of your sports discipline unless you go through peculiar aspects of your personality which strongly affect your performance. The whole of these elements will remain after your retirement from competitions because you should have consolidated them into your psychology and your arsenal. As a first attainment, you will have to develop a deep knowledge of yourself: the inner origin of your motivation as a sports professional and as a human being, your sense of responsibility, your fears and weaknesses, your uniqueness, your will, and your internal enemy. Your Goal forces you to clearly understand who are you now because you will progressively fill the gaps between this and the future version of yourself, that version which is capable to perform at maximum potential and to win the gold medal in the World Championship. To become that second and ideal version of you, you need to know the current one: its limits, its potentials, its psyche, its power, because you can only start on it, on the current version of you: that’s your unique resource.
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Self-Consciousness: Aware of oneself as an individual or of one’s own being, actions, or thoughts.
Self-Consciousness features, which are significant for the development of the Champion’s Mindset, are 10: (1) Self Confidence – (2) Criticism Management – (3) Strong Will – (4) Resistance to Flattery – (5) Uniqueness – (6) Framing the Failure – (7) Ambition – (8) Framing the Victory – (8) Inner Self Vulnerability – (10) Managing the Internal Enemy.
FACTOR #44: Managing the Internal Enemy: There is no greater pain that can be inflicted on you, than your own internal enemy. Your own thoughts will cause you more pain than anyone or anything.
There is a dangerous individual everyone has to deal with, lifelong. Any person in this world cannot escape such a rule. This entity has got your same name, your same face, your voice, and your age: it is born with you. Has got your same friends, your same partner, and drives the same car: it behaves through your same actions. Unlike you, this person is full of fears and has always got concerned about your ideas and initiatives, on your non-ordinary behaviors. This person is always convinced that you are not able, not yet ready, or not capable. That neither you will succeed, nor you deserve to succeed. This person wants you average, mediocre, ordinary: a loser. This person doesn’t want you to try, to strive for new challenges: the more you avoid, the better. This person wants your feet stuck on the ground: poor, dreamless, surrendered, condemned to an unhappy and unsatisfactory life. Wants you dead. This is your Internal Enemy. It lives within you, cohabits your same body with that special person whom you named “I” and tries to affect your rational brain. This person is not your friend. The problem is that most of the time, you even ignore that you are two. The second problem is that, whenever you realize this, you feel encouraged, because you believe this person will support you, and that you’re not alone. In spite of these childish beliefs what you have to accept is that the entity is hostile. You have to realize that, then you have to develop a plan to catch it, push it against the ring ropes, and start hitting until you kill it definitely, once and for all.
THREATs
You are not alone, down there in the heart of your mind: this needs to be clear, accepted, and understood. If you fail to accept such a truth, you’d better understand you’re going to fail in performing at your max, your possible best. The best option is that you will perform well in mediocre competitions and mediocre in good competitions. The worst option is that you will be stuck because your internal enemy will easily convince the best and most courageous part of yourself that you’re not enough skilled and that you’d better stay at home, rather than be publicly humiliated during an official competition. Then mediocrity waits for you: no choice and no contest.
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OPPORTUNITIEs
Your bigger and most dangerous enemy is just yourself, your Ego. If you become the Master, you have completed more than half of your task. If you do not, you are wrapped around your fingers and will not ever be able to express yourself at your best potential. Peak performance can only be based on inner calmness and on silence which means your internal enemy is definitely off.
METHODOLOGY
The real enemy is not your opponent: you can train, you can work hard, you can strive the hardest to be better than him/her and finally, you can succeed. Your opponent is visible and tangible: you can get a big bundle of information related to his/her personality, attitudes, approach, and strategies. The real enemy lives inside you, but, in most cases, you are unaware of this strange cohabitation. Your worst enemy is your Internal Enemy. This dangerous individual must be hunted down, put on the ropes, and eliminated forever. You need a safe and effective strategy to contrast him, otherwise, you could imagine you won it, while he just hid for a bit.
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You need to know how your Internal Enemy works so that you can contrast him effectively. (1) Your Internal Enemy floods you with impulses. No indulgence will ever destroy your life, but that’s what’s so insidious about your Enemy because he is reducing your potential. Your life becomes focused on self- gratification, rather than on fulfilling your inner potential. You try to turn inward. At first, all you will probably find is a vast emptiness; a void you’ve always tried to fill with the outside world. But if you’re patient, you’ll find an unexpected source of abundance arising from within the void. Over time, by filling yourself up from the inside, your whole relationship with the outside world will change: you’ll be able to bring something to the world, rather than trying to extract something from it. Such a principle is called Inside-Out Approach. (2) Your Internal Enemy convinces you to disengage from the world. You create energy when you engage with the world, and you destroy energy when you withdraw from the world. The reality is that we all have access to an infinite source of energy. Life’s energy comes from the meeting, not disengaging from, the demands of life. Contrast your Internal Enemy by taking action and empowering your engagement with the world in spite of escaping it. (3) Your Internal Enemy gets you to give up in the face of setbacks. What he actually does is convert the disappointment into all- pervading darkness that smothers every part of your life, a deep hole that feels impossible to climb out of. You must create hope out of despair. You must train yourself to be resilient. That’s the ultimate reason why the world knocks you down: you need to train yourself to get back up again. (4) Your Internal Enemy stops you from recovering when you are wronged. Instead of recovering, you “reinjure yourself ” by replaying what happened over and over again. If you stay in this “victim” state too long, you stop taking the emotional and creative risks that are essential to living a full life. In the long run, you lose relationships, opportunities, and chances for revenge and success. There’s only one solution: you must learn to die an emotional death and accept all the hurt feelings in your heart. (5) Finally, your Internal Enemy wants to be right and wants you to agree with him. Be confident, take strong action, and prove him to be wrong. This will progressively weaken him until you will manage to silence your Internal Enemy.
POWERFUL QUESTIONs
Use these questions to force yourself (as an athlete) or your coachees to switch to a higher mental perspective and unlock additional energy to keep being in the right direction. All the questions require specific and honest answers which may also take a few minutes or more, to be developed.
10.1 What do you think is your strongest enemy and why?
Your self-awareness is tested.
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10.2 Who is belonging the voice of that person who continuously talks to you?
SAME, from a different perspective.
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10.3 What does your internal enemy prevent you from figuring out? (about your capabilities, your qualities, and your goals).
The Internal Enemy power starts by preventing you from visualizing successful events and only stops when making you stuck.
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领英推荐
10.4 Which activities does your internal enemy prevent you from doing? Which decisions? Which chances?
The details of the previous concept.
10.5 How can you better deal with him? Can you manage to handle a parenthetical confrontation with him or are you only his favorite victim? Explain.
Start a manly confrontation with your internal enemy.
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10.6 How often do you suffer his power?
Start a systematic exploration of your internal enemy’s interference in your ordinary life. Start being aware of such a hostile person inside.
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10.7 Develop a kind of reasonable talk to oppose him, then make your promise and commit yourself to prove he is totally wrong.
Develop rational arguments and reasoning to oppose him, when needed.
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10.8 List the most important things your enemy does not want you to do or to be involved in, take each of these elements and develop a pattern that includes the following stages and act accordingly.
Start developing a program to contrast your Internal Enemy
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10.9 Develop a personal strategy to put him on the ring rope, to beat him, and to kill him definitely.
Your personal internal enemy must be eliminated. When you’re able to do that, you will start to express yourself as a free human being and as a free athlete.
INSTRUCTIONs & RECOMMENDATIONs
Apart from the cycle of action, which describes the way the decision is made, if you do not take action, you cannot transform your reality. Your condition is the same unless you take action. Action, on the other hand, is initiated by a decision, but is driven by will. Strong will is everything. Strong will is connected to strong desire: an inner and unstoppable pulsion to achieve something. Find your motivation and let it be your boss. Listen carefully to your voice tone and let your will take action. Test it, develop, and strengthen your willpower unless you succeed: everything depends on it, in any area of your life. When you prove to yourself that your will is strong and your actions can transform reality, you will equally strengthen your self-confidence: I see --> I make a decision --> I initiate an action --> I engage my will driving this action --> I succeed --> I feel adequate --> I feel self-confident --> I rely on my resources --> “I can do that”. So take action, aggressively, achieve your results and become tougher and tougher. Then come back to your expectations and realign your ambition and your aspiration to your higher level of self-confidence: the two elements cannot be asynchronous.
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Start realizing you feed a hostile individual who wants to prevent you from doing. Observe, listen to his voice, and learn his strategy. Once you feel strong enough, engage your energies and start the fight: you have to face and beat him on his battlefield. You know the rules (5: see above), you know his strengths, and you know how much the impact of his action is, over your life and career. Engage the fight and make him silent, once and forever. Your decision-making process will become quicker and quicker. Your willpower will become stronger and you will take action more frequently. You won’t be stopped and stuck anymore.
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If you want to become a champion you need to develop a resistance to external judgment and criticism which needs to be generated inside, as the consequence of a mental switch to the upper level. PROs and champions actually evolve to a higher level of consciousness where outside approval is no longer necessary. There is still a kind of gratification and sense of emotional compensation coming from the external approval, but the champion is no longer motivated to take action to achieve this acceptance. The champion is motivated by self-expression, which means affirming and confirming their creativity through their sports performance. It’s a kind of emotional and psychic evolution: from proving themselves to be that champion ( first stage) they quickly evolve to the state of expressing themselves (upper level). Such a mental attitude is hugely significant to understand the champion’s mindset. The contender, the high-level athlete who wants to become the champion is motivated by the urge to prove him/herself,
to demonstrate to himself (and to others) that he/she can succeed and be the best. The champion, e.g.: the contender who has overcome all the hurdles, barriers, and adversities and has already become the champion, is no longer motivated by such a mix (internal/external). The act of proving oneself is based in spirit and rooted in the fear of not being good enough (lack of self-effectiveness), while the act of expressing oneself is based in spirit and rooted in the love and passion to share and celebrate that any person is unique and is provided with a special talent. Expressing oneself is a natural process that has no attachment to anything and anyone. Leadership is first being, then doing. Everything the leader does reflects what he or she is. Therefore, leadership is about expressing yourself, not proving. That’s the reason why you need to learn how to switch from the basic level (proving) to the next (expressing): you cannot be the champion until you are convinced you to need to prove something to someone.
In fact, both champions and top/peak performers belonging to any field of sport and business are pushed from the inside to improve their performance, ever and ever. They are committed to never- ending personal, sports, and professional growth. For such a reason they are so-called “Growth Mindset Provided Persons” (GMPP). They are willing to fail on their way to success. The typical self- talk of the champion is something similar to the following: “I cannot fail, I do not fail. I can only learn, I can only grow, I can only win”. The core principle behind such a skill is the “learn and grow” attitude. Such skill requires a propensity to risk, criticism resistance, and, finally, strong self-confidence, which through you can lock your internal enemy and take action repeatedly. Learn and Grow mantra is one of the so-called “world-class beliefs” of top performers. Champions cannot escape such a mental hack to succeed.
As for Self-Image, we must accept the current psychological theory according to which everyone on the planet is inferior and superior to everyone, in some way. Everyone is unique, just like you and me. People are provided with multiple kinds of intelligence depending on their personality, style, experiences, cultural roots, language, inner beliefs, and individual talents: artistic, mathematical, emotional, rational, and physical. Champions strongly believe the question is not “Are you smart enough? ”, but “How much are you smart? How can you get smarter? ”. As a consequence, we realize that the self-image is the real foundation of their success. Self-Image really affects the way a champion approaches business, life, and sports training and competitions. Besides it determines the size and scope of the vision they create for their entire life. You ought to detect who you currently are (true self-image) and start creating your self-image for the future. You need to work on self-talk, visualization, imagery, and, obviously, your technical skills.