Last week we explored the play-it-safe approach of playing to not lose. If you’ve realized you tend to do this, congratulations! Awareness of a self-sabotaging behavior is the essential first step toward changing it.
So now that you’ve taken that first – and hardest – step, what can you do to shift your approach from playing to not lose to playing to flat-out win? Choose from any of the following.
- Be ruthlessly honest in identifying what you want, not just what you’re willing to settle for.
- Put your energy and efforts and attention on your ideal outcome rather than a merely acceptable one (or, worse yet, an outright bad one).
- Eliminate “I’ll try” from your vocabulary. (If necessary, channel Yoda’s advice: “Do or do not. There is no ‘try’.”) Minimize stress and maximize results by instead saying “I will,” if you’re truly committed to creating a particular outcome.
- When you’ve strategically, consciously, and courageously decided that a particular course of action will move you toward your goals, identify all the individual steps needed to implement that course of action and start taking them (in priority order).
- Catch yourself whenever you start envisioning a failure and consciously shift your thoughts to what a solid success will look like.
- Commit to an activity for several weeks; give it time to produce some sort of results. If early results are not what you want, identify what’s not working and how you can adapt for better outcomes.
- Remind yourself that there is no way to experience a positive outcome if you don’t at least make a good-faith effort to achieve it. (As hockey great Wayne Gretzky observed, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”) If you choose not to act, you’ll hold onto the possibility of success, but you’ll never have a chance to experience the reality of it.
If you realize you’ve been playing to not lose and are ready to play to win, be sure to check out the early-bird pricing for my turn-it-around course, Time to Create What’s Next, which will give you the structure and support to prepare you for that winner's platform.
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