Developing a Winning Attitude

performance winning attitude Jun 03, 2022

The secret to developing a Winning Attitude

“Every battle is won before it’s fought.” Sun Tzu.

A winning attitude takes time. Most battles, in sport or business, are won or lost before the events take place. Developing a strong competitive mentality and the mind of a champion takes experience. You need years of repetition and learning. You need years of gaining personal power through knowledge and wisdom, often gained after the disappointment of losing. The key to a winning attitude is knowing how to react to losses.

Each time you improve the discipline and the control of your thoughts under pressure adds to the creation of a champion’s mind. Star performers have a competitive desire for success that becomes instinctive.

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – in the mind, behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” (Muhammad Ali)

Remaining in the Present

The key to a winning attitude in all competition is the discipline to manage excess emotion, to stay in the present and remain focused on the immediate job at hand. If things are going well and you let your mind drift, then focus on the present task is lost.

When you are winning, it is tempting to project forward into the future, imagining all the wonderful things that will come with victory. However, victory may not be the outcome if your mind is not properly present.

When your mind wanders, who will play for you in your absence?

Clearly, the answer to this question is no-one. When your mind returns to the scene, it is often a vastly different place (with a different score) to the one you left. Panic sets in. This can easily lead to another mental error, which is falling into a state of regret for failing to capitalise on a winning position. In these circumstances it is easy for the mind to jump into the immediate past or into a negative future (“I’m never going to win now,” or “what are the papers going to say if I lose to this guy again?”). Yet, only moments earlier, the situation seemed so rosy.

If you slip into the past and think of all the opportunities you blew, you are not fully present in the current match. You cannot play properly when mentally you are not fully there. Repeatedly, players invite the same result again and again because they cannot discipline themselves to keep bringing their mind back to the present.

When you slip into the past or project yourself into the future, you will attach the emotions of that time to your actions of the present. The baggage of these emotions is detrimental to achieving peak performance in the present. Each present situation has no link to the past unless you create the link. The horror of the past will not be repeated if you take different actions in the present. Remember, the glory of the future cannot happen without the work done in the present.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”

(Anthony Robbins; American speaker and author)

Unsettling Your Opponent

Another key to being a brilliant competitor with a winning attitude is to understand that you often need to unsettle your opponent’s mind rather than try to defeat their game. Champions read people well; they constantly monitor their opponents’ reactions and moods to find a way of using pressure to erode their confidence.

Case Study

There is a strong element of poker in sport and business. One of the finest examples of this was the wonderful Rumble in the Jungle where Muhammad Ali, who was past his best, fought George Foreman, a boxer in his prime and full of confidence. George was the better boxer at that point in their careers and was a hot favourite to destroy Ali. However, Ali had other ideas – a plan that attacked Foreman’s mind and a strategy that turned the fight into a personal contest rather than a pure boxing match.

The rope-a-dope tactic employed by Ali (He shielded his face with his gloves and leaned back on the ropes, allowing Foreman to hit him repeatedly) worked because it was unexpected (Ali had always prided himself on his speed). Ali talked non-stop during the fight, taunting Foreman into a fury by constantly asking him after each hammer blow Foreman landed: “Is that all you got? I thought they said you had the hardest punch ever. Is that your best?” Foreman’s anger and desire to show his superior power to hurt Ali clouded his judgment and his ability to listen to his corner. As he set about beating Ali, showing him how powerful his punches were, how badly he could beat him and how he would shut him up, he punched himself into exhaustion. At that point, Ali attacked and knocked him out! Ali had found the key to beating the person, not the boxer.

The contest was not about boxing; it was about one man unsettling another’s mental equilibrium. It is important to understand that for this tactic to work, Ali had to know himself well and have total faith in himself. He had to have the conviction that he was brave and strong enough to take the punishment, a sustained beating, without losing his discipline or his clarity of mind during the painful seven or more rounds it would take for George to tire.

Power of Imagination

Transform your fear

The power of imagination cannot be underestimated. What we think about and picture in our minds has a huge effect on how we perform and on the outcome. The ability to convert negatives into concepts that work powerfully to our advantage is epitomised in the quote by Michael Jordan, where he transforms his interpretation of fear. This is an example of a winning attitude.

“I realized that if I was going to achieve anything in life, I had to be aggressive. I had to get out there and go for it... I know fear is an obstacle for some people, but it’s an illusion to me.”

(Michael Jordan)

Pitfalls

The various pitfalls athletes can fall into that prevent them from competing effectively are many. When athletes are nervous of an upcoming contest, they can slip into a negative mindset, thinking of all the things that might go wrong and the consequences of losing. Imagining a poor outcome, sometimes to prepare for the disappointment they will feel if they have to deal with a loss, often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The self-protection of a having visualised possible defeat becomes a comfortable friend, but is in fact a powerful enemy of performance and success. It is difficult to win when imagining failure. Simply having a “hope” of winning can quickly evaporate, especially if the start is poor. Athletes often hope and want to believe they can win, but at the first sign of trouble, their minds drift quickly into justifying defeat. A winning attitude never slips into the losing mentality. If being beaten, the winner looks to learn for the next time and this allows them to keep fighting and working to win, even when losing badly.

The False Deciding Moment

When is the battle lost?

Another powerful enemy of the competitor is the notion that a battle is won or lost through one key moment during a contest. It is simply too easy to say “just a little luck at a key moment decided it.” While this cliché can be true, and we can admire the frankness and realism of a reasonably brave competitor who only accepts defeat when a key moment goes against him, it is the champion who fights this enemy of excellence and works to create another decisive moment.

“I never thought of losing, but now that it’s happened, the only thing is to do it right. That’s my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life.”

(Muhammad Ali)

Who is a winner?

A winner will only concede defeat and stop trying to find an answer when the contest is over. A winner is not someone who never loses; it is someone who competes with a winning attitude until the game is over.

Find an opportunity

Champions, since they are human, cannot always be mentally tough and sometimes lose through a poor mental performance. However, these lapses are rare. They have few preconceptions and rarely do one key moment dent their resolve to fight and hang in until the end. The hardest part of defeating a true champion is finishing them off. This is because they are always looking for an opportunity to get back into a match and remain truly competitive until the contest is over. In fact, champions can be most dangerous when their chances of winning are remote. They relax, accept the reality of the situation, and just go for it with a controlled yet high risk strategy. This daring competitiveness is often a turning point because it is disconcerting and difficult to stop a high-risk strategy if it works.