Success Thinking? - the New Positive

Positive Thinking: we all love to do it. Build yourself up, visualise success, just believe... and yet, it's proven to be fundamentally flawed.

As a Pitch Coach, I often find all kinds of people of various professional levels asking me: How do I manage my nerves? I'm just terrified of presenting in front of an audience!

In recent months, I've learned the best way to manage nerves and prepare for the big moment is what I call Success Thinking?. It's my new and proven method of turning something that seems huge and impossible into a manageable set of tasks, which can almost guarantee improvement and success.

But first - why does Positive Thinking not work?

When we imagine success and tell ourselves that we can do something, a part of the brain believes we have already achieved what we tell ourselves we can achieve. (See Rethinking Positive Thinking, by psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen - and thanks to Melissa Chu for the link.)

There can be two results. Either the urgency to do what it takes to succeed can drop, and our motivation to take action reduces. Alternatively, it simply doesn't work because the goal is too large and overwhelming to believe that it can be a success - and we crumble anyway.

As Amy Cuddy pointed out in her book Presence, telling ourselves things like, I'm going to make a great pitch! are ineffective, because a part of our brain just doesn't believe it. Another voice whispers loudly, No you won't!

We need a new approach to dealing with stressful moments in our personal and professional lives - especially when it comes to presenting and pitching.

What is Success Thinking??

It's about breaking large, daunting tasks into pieces of process and work that are manageable, and which you are able to believe you can be successful at. When it comes to pitching, instead of focusing on making a great pitch, you break the task down into smaller pieces. That's why I created the Open-3-Close? model.

When training startups and innovation teams, I encourage them to work on; Audience, Objective, Brainstorm with The Pitch Canvas?, Opening, Power Of Three, Closing. Each of these six items is broken down into an exercise of 5-30 minutes.

Within this framework, I created The Pitch Canvas?, which guides on which 11 blocks of content you need to prepare to build your storyline.

This means instead of telling yourself, I'm going to crush this pitch! you say, I need to make a strong opening - let's do a good job to make sure it's great! Or you motivate yourself with, 'Let's get the essence of this story clear, which are the three points that really matter, that they must remember? How can I tell that with emphasis?

This way you focus on being excellent at pieces of preparation, instead of the end result. And you get to work with urgency on each piece.

How do we know it works?

In sport, this Success Thinking? approach is overtaking Visualisation as a way to bring high performance athletes to the absolute top of their game. Heptathlete Katarina Johnson Thompson failed at the Beijing Olympics. Here's an excerpt from an article in The Guardian about her.

In the past Johnson-Thompson would visualise herself standing on the podium, the national anthem striking up and a gold medal round her neck, thinking that if she only believed enough it would happen. She was cruelly disabused of such notions at the 2015 world championships in Beijing, when she fouled three times in a row in the long jump while favourite to win – dropping her to 28th place. She said;

“I used to visualise being on the podium all the time. That is why Beijing was so devastating because I’d seen myself succeeding so many times.

I don’t do that any more. I just focus on each event and what I need to do to nail it.”

She went on to win the Silver medal at the European Championships in August 2018.

World Cup Myth Busters

Before the 2018 World Cup, England had failed in 6 out of 7 penalty shootouts - their last success was in 1996. The manager Gareth Southgate took a new approach (most previous managers macho'd it out, saying boldly 'we don't practice penalties'.) Instead of trying to get the players to be more accurate, or practice more regularly, he broke down the process of taking a penalty into different pieces, and had them work on each piece.

He identified that the stress started on the walk from the centre circle to the penalty spot. He saw that some players slipped because the grass next to the ball was loose, and others changed their minds when about to take the penalty. They often didn't have a plan before they stood in front of the goal, relying on basic talent to succeed. It was the equivalent of throwing a few slides together and hoping to be able to 'wing it' in front of 80,000 people.

And England finally won on penalties. How? Southgate said;

"We coached the players to take control of the process. And we told them they could write their own story."

Gareth had his players train for each piece of the shootout an build a pattern for how each player would take it. How they would walk from the centre circle, flatten the grass, where to look, how they would run up, where to place the ball. They followed a process, and owned that process. Nerves evaporated, and success followed.

Break your pitch down into pieces. Focus on each part of the process of building your story, and make each piece manageable. This will help you overcome nerves, and develop a confident and powerful story.

Success Thinking is the new Positive. Apply this approach to your pitches and presentations and you will succeed too.

David Beckett has trained over 750 Startups to make confident, persuasive pitches raise over €180Million investment, and trained over 9000 professionals at companies like Booking.com, Tommy Hilfiger, Unilever, Google and PwC. He's the author of the book Pitch To Win, and creator of The Pitch Canvas?.

Find out more about how David can help you can make a business and investment winning pitch at Best3Minutes.com.

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