The other day I was listening to an episode of Ethan Suplee’s podcast American Glutton and he was interviewing Tom Kier, who is a tactical training expert. It was a great listen that I recommend to everyone, but he spoke about one particular concept that resonated with me and I wanted to share those core principles.
The Importance of Refocusing Your Mindset
One of the key chords that Tom hits on is that it’s important to work out the mind the same as the body. A mindset is nothing more than how you as an individual think about things, and in order to make improvements to mind or body you sometimes need a reset.
Mental Model: Kill Your Clone
Imagine this: Every night at midnight a clone of yourself comes to meet you. That clone is always a version of yourself from exactly 24 hours before. Every night at midnight you and your clone from 24 hours ago will fight to the death.
A little morbid, sure, but the concept is that if you did anything at all in the previous 24 hours to make yourself even a fraction of a percent better than you was the previous day you will be victorious. This can be better at anything. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Your focus is clearer. You’re more determined.
It doesn’t matter what it is, but the purpose is to do something every day that makes you better, even if it is small. Many problems or goals look like an enormous mountain to have to climb. Often that causes people to feel overwhelmed and you can be paralyzed by inaction because you don’t know where to start. It reminds me of a baseball hitter that is in a big slump and his batting average has taken a dive. The problem spirals because that hitter is then trying to get their numbers back with one swing of the bat. It doesn’t work like that; you have to take it one at bat at a time and incrementally get to your goal.
We live in a world of instant gratification. That is one reason why incremental improvement is challenging, because we often want things to be the way we want right when we want them. However, if you focus on resetting your mindset and focus on ensuring you do something each day to get better, before you know it you will have killed thousands of clones. This is true for everyone, whether you are a leader working to get better, a salesperson wanting to hit your goals, or someone working towards achieving a physical goal of some nature.
