How to Reach Peak Performance in Your Life - One Step at a Time
Posted 4th May 2014 at 07:06 AM by markdawes
Tags making money, market on the internet, positive mental attitude, positive thinking, roger bannister
I want to give you some very interesting stuff but it starts within the depths of despair. It starts by looking at some research and study that was done at some of the worst periods of our history, after the Holocaust.
At the end of World War II the Russians freed many people who were in concentration camps, people who had been put there by the Nazis during the Second World War.
They saw people who had been living through horrendous devastation, terrible acts of dehumanization had been done to them, they’d been tortured they’d been terrorised, they’d been living in squalor.
But some people had survived where others hadn’t and it started to trigger an interest with the Russians and they started to look in to and research this.
They thought: "why did those people survive and those people didn’t, when they were the same basic human beings given the same environment and the same rough treatment how come one has survived and one didn’t?"
So they started to explore this and they found that it was the mental mind-set of the survivors that helped them survive.
They ten broadened their research by also looking further in to successful artists, painters, musicians, business people, athletes, and they started to find some common traits. This research the Russians undertook was the starting point for where a lot of the psychological peak performance training came from today.
Now in the West, back in that era, people were still obviously training, but if they weren’t performing to their optimum level their coach or their trainer would give them a bit of a pep talk, and that was about as far as it went. In fact that still happens today.
The Russians however, were different. They implemented good psychological training right at the beginning of an athlete’s training regime and where one study on this was done, was just prior to the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Here they took a group of Olympic athletes, Winter Olympic athletes, and they split them in to four groups.
One group did 0% psychological training, and 100% physical. All they did was major on the physical. The second group did 25% psychological mental training and 75% physical. The third group did a 50/50 split. and the fourth group had 75% psychological mental training, and only 25% physical training.
The improvement in peak performance went in this order: those athletes that did the most psychological mental training improved the most. Followed by those that did the second most, then the third most, then those that didn’t do any whatsoever.
So what this survey proved, this research showed, was that at peak performance, those athletes who focused more on the psychological aspect improved the most.
Now this has been known for years in NLP circles and in psychology circles, but bizarrely it’s not used.
Even today if people can’t learn something properly they are simply told to 'try harder'!
But the evidence shows that you need to change what’s going on inside your head.
Your state (mood) produces your behaviour and it is dependant not only on your physiology but also on your psychology. So the words you use, the thought processes you actually have, these actually need to be changed.
Now one of a person who did this was Roger Bannister in 1954. He broke the four-minute mile. Now up to that point there was a limiting belief that was believed throughout society, because it was promoted by very eminent and qualified people who had certificates and letters after their names because they had become qualified enough to give out this information.
What they said was that if you ran a mile under four minutes, your internal organs, or some of them, would self-combust, and you would basically die.
So there’s a pretty strong motivator not to wanting to break the four-minute mile because if you get to the tape in 3 minutes 59 seconds and your heart and lungs self-combust and you fall there and you’re dead, there’s no point in winning because you’re going to win as a dead person. So, no point.
However, Roger Bannister's world view at the time was: ‘if a man can run mile in four minutes and two seconds then there is no logic in someone saying they can’t run it in under four minutes’.
He researched it and he couldn’t find any substantial evidence that proved this point. So he decided that he would be that man to break the four minute mile and in 1954 he ran a mile under four minutes.
But here’s the real impact of this. Not only did he break the four-minute mile, but three years after he did that, hundreds of other people had done it too. He changed the way people think by destroying a limiting belief that held others back.
Now just think about this. How many people will get out of bed in the morning, put their feet on the floor and go “Ah, another shit day in Paradise, I’m not going to enjoy this, I hate my job, I hate my life”, whatever; that internal dialogue is affecting you psychologically. We have an internal dialogue of somewhere between 48,000 to 60,000 words a day, and if we are not using it right that needs to change.
The Russians proved this could work; they’ve implemented this in all their training programs and we in the West, thankfully, have caught up in a lot of areas and we do a lot of this too because we understand that if you want to change someone’s state to produce a different behaviour, you have to change the physical aspect of what they do and you also have to change their psychology.
Now if you are reading this then you are a marketeer and you can learn something from Roger Bannister, and it is this; little changes in belief can have dramatic life-changing results.
Roger Bannister only ran three seconds faster but those three seconds changed not only his life but what the world believed a human being was capable of.
As a marketeer if you can show others how to make those little changes then you can help them break through the mental barriers that may be holding them back from achieving greatness.
Take one step forward every day. Tiny tweaks (baby steps) every day will, over time, take you on a tremendous journey.
At the end of World War II the Russians freed many people who were in concentration camps, people who had been put there by the Nazis during the Second World War.
They saw people who had been living through horrendous devastation, terrible acts of dehumanization had been done to them, they’d been tortured they’d been terrorised, they’d been living in squalor.
But some people had survived where others hadn’t and it started to trigger an interest with the Russians and they started to look in to and research this.
They thought: "why did those people survive and those people didn’t, when they were the same basic human beings given the same environment and the same rough treatment how come one has survived and one didn’t?"
So they started to explore this and they found that it was the mental mind-set of the survivors that helped them survive.
They ten broadened their research by also looking further in to successful artists, painters, musicians, business people, athletes, and they started to find some common traits. This research the Russians undertook was the starting point for where a lot of the psychological peak performance training came from today.
Now in the West, back in that era, people were still obviously training, but if they weren’t performing to their optimum level their coach or their trainer would give them a bit of a pep talk, and that was about as far as it went. In fact that still happens today.
The Russians however, were different. They implemented good psychological training right at the beginning of an athlete’s training regime and where one study on this was done, was just prior to the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Here they took a group of Olympic athletes, Winter Olympic athletes, and they split them in to four groups.
One group did 0% psychological training, and 100% physical. All they did was major on the physical. The second group did 25% psychological mental training and 75% physical. The third group did a 50/50 split. and the fourth group had 75% psychological mental training, and only 25% physical training.
The improvement in peak performance went in this order: those athletes that did the most psychological mental training improved the most. Followed by those that did the second most, then the third most, then those that didn’t do any whatsoever.
So what this survey proved, this research showed, was that at peak performance, those athletes who focused more on the psychological aspect improved the most.
Now this has been known for years in NLP circles and in psychology circles, but bizarrely it’s not used.
Even today if people can’t learn something properly they are simply told to 'try harder'!
But the evidence shows that you need to change what’s going on inside your head.
Your state (mood) produces your behaviour and it is dependant not only on your physiology but also on your psychology. So the words you use, the thought processes you actually have, these actually need to be changed.
Now one of a person who did this was Roger Bannister in 1954. He broke the four-minute mile. Now up to that point there was a limiting belief that was believed throughout society, because it was promoted by very eminent and qualified people who had certificates and letters after their names because they had become qualified enough to give out this information.
What they said was that if you ran a mile under four minutes, your internal organs, or some of them, would self-combust, and you would basically die.
So there’s a pretty strong motivator not to wanting to break the four-minute mile because if you get to the tape in 3 minutes 59 seconds and your heart and lungs self-combust and you fall there and you’re dead, there’s no point in winning because you’re going to win as a dead person. So, no point.
However, Roger Bannister's world view at the time was: ‘if a man can run mile in four minutes and two seconds then there is no logic in someone saying they can’t run it in under four minutes’.
He researched it and he couldn’t find any substantial evidence that proved this point. So he decided that he would be that man to break the four minute mile and in 1954 he ran a mile under four minutes.
But here’s the real impact of this. Not only did he break the four-minute mile, but three years after he did that, hundreds of other people had done it too. He changed the way people think by destroying a limiting belief that held others back.
Now just think about this. How many people will get out of bed in the morning, put their feet on the floor and go “Ah, another shit day in Paradise, I’m not going to enjoy this, I hate my job, I hate my life”, whatever; that internal dialogue is affecting you psychologically. We have an internal dialogue of somewhere between 48,000 to 60,000 words a day, and if we are not using it right that needs to change.
The Russians proved this could work; they’ve implemented this in all their training programs and we in the West, thankfully, have caught up in a lot of areas and we do a lot of this too because we understand that if you want to change someone’s state to produce a different behaviour, you have to change the physical aspect of what they do and you also have to change their psychology.
Now if you are reading this then you are a marketeer and you can learn something from Roger Bannister, and it is this; little changes in belief can have dramatic life-changing results.
Roger Bannister only ran three seconds faster but those three seconds changed not only his life but what the world believed a human being was capable of.
As a marketeer if you can show others how to make those little changes then you can help them break through the mental barriers that may be holding them back from achieving greatness.
Take one step forward every day. Tiny tweaks (baby steps) every day will, over time, take you on a tremendous journey.
Total Comments 0
