Changing Your Story #1917

In our last +1, I might have vented a bit (😉) about my slight annoyance that some people don’t see themselves in the stories I share about elite performers.

I REPEAT.

“In the faces of men and women, we see Heroes!”

👆 Starting with YOU!

And…

I playfully repeat…

We’re HEROIC!!

If you don’t see yourself as the Hero of your own life, delete our app and search for the app “MEDIOCRE.”

I kid…

Mostly…

😲 😆 😉

Now…

If you don’t currently see the Heroic within yourself every time you look in the mirror and/or read one of these +1s or Philosopher’s Notes, etc, then I have more work to do.

Perfect.

Let’s get to work.

Today we’re going to talk about a book called Changing Your Story by Bill Beswick.

Bill Beswick is an applied performance psychologist who specializes in working with elite teams. As a gold-medal winner coaching the England basketball team in the Commonwealth Championships, Bill became the first performance psychologist operating fully in professional football, where he has worked with eight Premier and English Championship League teams, including Manchester United.

As per the title of the book, it’s all about “changing your story” so you can (as per the sub-title!) “take control of your life, create change and achieve your goals.” It features 20 chapters featuring 20 life lessons drawn from elite sport we can apply to our lives.

The first thing we need to do?

We need to “Take control of your story and own it rather than letting it own you.”

How do we do that?

Bill tells us we need to connect your why and your how.

As he puts it: “To make an important change in your situation, the important thing is to establish clarity of passion and purpose—the reason why you want to change and where you want to get. To do this I always start my mentoring support by asking a client three key questions:

• What do you want?
• How badly do you want it?
• How much are you willing to suffer?

The answers to these questions form the foundation for a behavioral drive to change and improve. A key part of my work is to help clients connect their reason why—what they want to achieve—with their how—the plan to make it happen.”

That’s from Lesson #2 of his book: “Find Your Reason Why.”

Note: Lesson #1 is “Take Responsibility.”

As we’ve discussed MANY times...

We can’t do ANYTHING Heroic until we’ve taken ABSOLUTE responsibility for our lives—which is why Stephen Covey says this quality of being proactive/response-able is Habit #1 of Highly Effective People and why Jocko Willink wrote an entire book on the subject called Extreme Ownership.

It’s also why Bill quotes another legendary coach named Bill.

Bill Belichick tells us: “Responsibility means doing what you’re supposed to do, when you’re supposed to do it. It means being where you’re supposed to be, when you’re supposed to be there. It means doing what you say you’re going to do, and doing right by yourself and by others.”

In short...

Victims make excuses, whine, complain, and blame others for their problems. Heroes decide what they want, set a clear target, and do their best to hit it.

So...

Once we’ve taken 100% responsibility for our lives, it’s time to ask ourselves what we REALLY (REALLY!) (REALLY!!) want to see in our lives.

Asking this question is, for the record, THE fastest way to shift from Victim to Hero.

Rather than acting like a Victim and complaining about all the things that AREN’T going the way we want, we need to act like a Hero and ask ourselves, “WHAT DO I WANT?”

So...

With that in mind...

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

As in...

What do you really (!) REALLY (!!) REALLY (!!!) want?

Get clear on that.

Then ask yourself: How badly do I want it?

As in...

What price are you going to need to pay?

Get clear on that.

Then get busy paying it.

All day.

Every day.

Especially…

TODAY.