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Top Rituals = Top Performance

No athlete in the world just throws on their gear and runs out to compete.

Ahead of every performance, they follow a pre-game ritual.

For some athletes this ritual begins days or even weeks ahead of the competition.

Thinking ahead they are changing their physical and mental habits, such as those athletes who cut out sex ahead of a big game.

On the day of the competition, their rituals are even more specific.

Some will wake at a specific time, eat a specific breakfast, listen to specific music, and run through specific exercises.

Some have a prayer or a mantra they repeat to get their head in the game.

Once they arrive at the venue, another sequence of rituals begins.

If they are doing it right, they will peak at the right moment, driving themselves into the zone for optimum performance.

But, again, their rituals don’t end there.

Watch them and you see they have small rituals they go back to over and over again.

Like a basketball player always sets up her shot a certain way, a quarterback might move the ball around in his hands a certain way.

Pushing and pulling on the ball, to the casual observer he might look to be fidgeting, but he is starting the ritual from which his next actions naturally flow.

While these rituals are essential for a top performing athlete, we can all adopt our own rituals that enable us to reach top performance in any meeting, sport, or event.

Here’s how.

To identify for yourself a top performance ritual, ask these three questions:

To perform at my best, how must I feel? For instance, you might need to be feeling confident, or charismatic, or certain.
How do I feel this way? Now, here is the trick, you want to step inside this feeling as fully as you can, really, deeply, experiencing this feeling.
What is a physical gesture or movement or idea I can repeat to trigger this feeling? For instance, it might be standing a certain way, or a fist pump, or some simple gesture or statement that triggers this feeling in you.

Most People Should Give Up On What They Want

Doing what you want is not for everyone.

Most people are better off simply doing what they have to do.

For instance, life is much easier when you tell yourself you have to go to your job.

You have to do it, so you don’t get all confused with choice.

You have to be there at a certain time.

You have to get things done.

You never need to worry about motivating yourself, instead like having to go to school, the fear of failure is motivation enough.

It’s an easy way to live.

You don’t have a choice, so you just get on with it.

Feeling like you have no choice, you give up struggling to figure out what you want.

By giving up the idea that life isn’t about doing what you want, but doing what you have to do, you no longer have to find the motivation to make changes.

By submitting to what you have to do, you avoid the need to figure out how to get what you want, and face the risk of failure and disappointment.

It’s just much easier this way.

But, of course there is a cost to this easier path in life.

How many people feel good doing something they have to do, versus doing what they want to do?

This is the choice we face every day.

If you accept your lot in life is to do the things you have to do, when will you live the life you want?

Perhaps your next life.

Keep Going!

The secret to living the life you truly want is to keep going.

Rather than stop at a good life or even a great life, to create the life you dream to live, you must keep going.

Keep going back to it every day in your mind, imagining yourself living this life.

Dream it up with so much intensity and delight that you commit yourself to do what it takes to get it.

Every day take actions.

And day after day after day, keep going.

When shit gets hard, which if you’re doing it right it will all the time, even if you don’t think you can persist, keep going.

Every marathon runner hits the wall, but those who finish keep going.

Most people will never live the life they truly want because at some point they gave up the desire and the will to keep going.

They might register a heart rate, but you are no longer alive on the inside if you have nothing that gets you going, and keeps you going.

To truly live we must set outrageous goals and relish in the delight of keep going.

What is life, but movement; a journey of keep going.

More On Mastery…

I received a number of follow-up questions on the topic of mastery, so I thought I would share with you an excerpt from Do What You Want on Wall Street.

Mastery is one of seven principles that matter to taking action and getting what you want, so take mastery seriously, and watch yourself accelerate towards what you want!

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BUILD MASTERY

Ray Dalio runs the largest hedge fund in the world for many reasons. He writes about one of them in Principles: “I often hear people say, ‘It’s getting better,’ as though that is good enough, when ‘it’ is both below that bar and improving at an inadequate rate. That isn’t good enough.”

Consider my client Dean. When Dean walks into a meeting, he knows why he is there. He knows his ask, and he has designed the meeting to get to the ask. He knows who he needs to be, how to position himself and his firm, and he has profiled the client. Dean knows what drives him, how he thinks, and what he values. He even knows when he is creating pictures in his mind while he speaks. He acts strategically with intent, bringing the most advanced tools and skills. He is exceptional at reading people, controlling conversational frames, and using persuasive language and narrative to drive emotion in every meeting.

None of this has happened by accident. He has learned this because he is dedicated to achieving mastery.

Mastery comes from exceptional dedication to excellence. Kanye West said it took him five thousand hours to create one song, Power. Even if he were working around the clock, this is more than six months, for one song that runs four minutes and fifty-two seconds!

Mastery doesn’t come easily. As Albert Einstein said, “Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person.”

For a professional footballer, mastery does not happen by picking up the ball and running with it.

And no one imagines that thousands of hours of welding on a production line qualifies you to be CEO of Ford. The key to an exceptional career is building mastery at the right things.

It is easy to see how targeting mastery and driving your system through continuous improvement builds you into someone of great and unique value, which is an unstoppable formula for getting what you want.

Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. SUCCESS

A secret to success is to embrace failure.

As Michael Jordan put it: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

If you are taking shots, you are going to miss, it is merely a matter of whether you keep going for it.

In selling, it is said that 90% of sales happen after the fifth closing attempt, which means a successful salesperson is one who keeps asking for the order over and over and over and over and over and over again.

That’s hard to do, which is why less than 10% of salespeople, the ones who keep asking for the order, close the majority of sales.

As they say in selling: Timid salespeople have skinny kids!

The secret to persisting is how you “frame” failure.

Rather than seeing himself as having failed 10,000 times to invent the incandescent light bulb, Thomas Edison saw he had 10,000 learning experiences that kept him moving in the right direction.

Most people never reach that point.

They are unwilling to fail enough to succeed, and more likely, they fail by failing to even take their shot.

As hockey hall of famer Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

True champions keep taking their shot and that is why they succeed.

So, be willing to miss, learn from your experiences, and just keep taking shots.

Want To Walk The Red Carpet?

Target mastery.

If you want more success, go for mastery.

When you are focused on mastery, you bring excellence to what you do, and you are compelled to become better and better through daily practice.

Look at any professional athlete and you see mastery in their approach to continuous improvement, always striving to be bigger, better, faster, stronger.

And mastery is more than this.

Mastery is the pursuit that keeps you forever engaged in your craft.

There can be no such thing as boredom when you are always challenging yourself to grow and become better.

And, of course, when you are focused on mastery, you are far more likely to get crushing results through crushing performance.

Recently I saw this article about the actor Bradley Cooper, which describes his process for becoming the character of Chris Kyle in his film American Sniper.

As did I, you might have thought of Cooper as a somewhat laid back fellow, yet what you see in this article is the mastery he brings to his craft.

For those of you who want the crib notes, here’s three ideas I enjoyed:

Every day before going on location Bradley Cooper recited the six pages of exercises. They had been pieced together by his speech coach, Tim Monich, to further reinforce a Texas accent and dialect that Cooper knew, if it didn’t come to him automatically, would rob all credibility.

It probably wasn’t necessary for Cooper to do the six-page exercise by the time shooting on the film started, last April. During three months of prior preparation, he had temporarily relocated Tim Monich from Connecticut to Los Angeles so they could have two face-to-face sessions of two hours each day except for Saturday and Sunday.

The sessions were in the morning and early evening, sandwiched around two workouts a day of two hours each to gain the 40-odd pounds of pure muscle to resemble Kyle physically…During his workouts, Cooper listened to the exact playlist that Kyle had when he worked out as a navy SEAL in Iraq in between shifts.

I Bet I Have A Few Dozen Kids By Now

None of my own, but those I sponsor through a global childrens fund.

Like the other day, I invested in Namza.

He’s a five year old kid living in a mud hut with his muslim parents and two sisters.

The fund calls it “sponsoring,” but I see it as investing in humanity.

For so little money, you can give these kids a chance to keep expanding their opportunities in life.

They get to go to school.

To buy books.

To wear shoes.

They get these things that give them the chance to start working up the economic ladder.

It is exciting to me.

The pictures, I admit, are like all the posters for adopting a shelter pet, a little fucking depressing.

But, it is uplifting to see what you can do for some kid in some country for one third the cost of one of my gym memberships back in New York that I am not using.

Basically the cost of the glove I dropped off the lift the other day, while I live in my second home and ski every day.

It’s cool to me.

That I get to see this kid’s face and say, I can do something for this one impoverished kid out of the billions of impoverished kids of the world.

If each of us rich ones would sponsor a few dozen not yet rich ones, can you imagine what we can do for their part of the world?

The other investment vehicle I like is Kiva.

There, for the cost of one of my awesome suits that is sitting in a closet back in New York with 20 other awesome suits, I can invest in democracy.

Through offering loans to local business partners all over the world, they are spreading the values of capitalism and self reliance.

It is powerful, for the cost of some Jimmy Choo leopard print shoes that I wore once and then put away with my few dozen pairs of other shoes, some kid won’t have to walk around bare foot.

That’s pretty cool to me.

And it feels good to give.

It feels good to invest in building the world that I want to live in.

One where every single one of us is born free!

Most Fail Because They FAIL at 93% Of Communications

For those contemplating hanging out their own shingle, Steve Schwarzman has a warning for you.

In a discussion at Harvard Business School, he discouraged Wall Streeters from leaving established firms and starting their own.

He’s right, Wall Street is different to Silicon Valley, and the cost of failure is greater.

He’s also right that to succeed as an entrepreneur on Wall Street takes an established reputation and a track record of success.

He’s even more right in suggesting that if you expect to build a me-too business, like the vast majority of buy-side funds that are started and shuttered, then think twice.

And, too he’s right that succeeding on your own takes a different set of skills, which is where most people fail.

With great experience and a solid track record many think they have what it takes, but unless they are willing to become expert at raising capital they will fail.

Many highly successful people believe they are excellent communicators and they think that with some half-baked pitch capital will flow to them.

They are wrong.

Not only will capital not flow to them, but they are likely far from excellent communicators.

At best having picked up a few books on communications and influence, even most highly successful people are unconsciously incompetent at communications.

They don’t yet know how bad they are, and, more importantly, they don’t realize how damn good they can be!

Almost everyone you meet believes communications is talking proper…but savvy people know that only 7% of your communication is the words you use.

That’s right, 7%!

All those fancy words and ideas and sounding smart, well, that is worth about one foot relative to moving an entire human being.

So, if you want to get damn good at raising capital (or otherwise influencing anybody), you want to get focused on the other 93%.

What is that? And how do you master it?

Disappointed On Comp? What Do You Do?

If you are disappointed on comp, you are in good company.

My client’s firm stretched hard for him, his bosses did all they could, but he still didn’t feel good about his number.

What do you do?

Look: There’s the short answer and there is the long answer.

Get To Your Answer

The short answer is you figure out your leverage and your options, and you either choose to stay put, or you explore your options.

The long answer is you step back from your career.

You figure out, how are you winning?

How are you not? What specific approach to success must you build if you are to get what you want?

And you ask yourself, who must I become?

What sort of person do I need to be? How much confidence and personal power do I need?

What skills does it take for me to take my game to a higher level?

You want to allocate the maximum time where you have the most impact, so you want to become a master of time management.

And you want to have more and more impact, so you want to train the skills that matter to building more success: mindset, communications, and selling.

OK, How?

How do you do all this?

In my books, I’ve already done the work for you!

PS: I WARN YOU, my books are not for the casual reader, but for people who are serious about getting what they want in their career.

It’s All BULLSHIT, and It’s Bad For Ya

I had the worst lunch in London, with two former colleagues, MDs at Goldman.

We were talking about what I do, when one of them got red-faced angry.

Frustrated, he snapped: “Stop, I don’t want to talk about this.”

Surprised, I asked, “OK, what do you want to talk about?”

He said, “Look, we get together for lunch to bitch about our jobs, and I don’t want to hear about all the ways I can change it.”

At the time I was quite shocked, but as I stepped back I realized it was my fault.

Easier To Blame Your Job

Talking about making changes made him feel bad because it implied he was responsible for his situation, and he didn’t want to hear that.

It is much easier to blame the firm.

To blame the job.

To blame being trapped, than it was to be honest with himself and see he was miserable because he had made himself that way.

Rather than looking for what was good in his job, he was looking for all the things to bitch about.

Rather than looking for what he could do differently, he was looking at the reasons he was stuck, trapped.

People are often looking for reasons to explain why my work is bullshit and why it isn’t possible for them to make the sorts of changes that I did.

Non-Wall Streeters say to me, “Well, it’s easy to take risk when you can stash away money from a lucrative Wall Street career.”

Wall Streeters list out all the reasons it is much harder for them than it was for me.

“I would do that, if I didn’t have a family.” Or “It worked for you, but it wouldn’t work in my career.”

Bullshit, Keep Going

As George Carlin said, “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.”

The truth is, I transformed my career by working at it every day for more than a decade.

At Goldman, when half my class was laid-off, rather than bitch and moan about how the firm had changed, I got focused on making change.

Instead of sitting around whining like a kid forced to go to school, in addition to working my 80 hour weeks, every night and every weekend, I focused on the actions I was taking to make change.

I won’t bullshit you, it almost destroyed me.

At times it was so hard, so confusing, so disappointing, so frustrating, so stressful, I wanted to stop, but I kept going.

Year after year after year I kept going.

And one of the reasons I left Wall Street to write my first book was to make transforming your career much, much easier.

Rather than having to read thousands of books and make it up along the way, I wrote the book that fifteen years ago I wish someone had handed me.

For those who are beyond the bullshit and committed to taking action, it is this “easy.”

Are You Risk Averse?

Many Wall Streeters consider themselves risk averse and they make the mistake of assuming I am not.

Looking at my career choices—leaving Goldman to “do nothing” and leaving Carlyle to become a self-help expert—they assume I am risk loving, but nothing could be further from the truth.

It took me five years of planning to leave Goldman and for almost three years at Carlyle I was focused on leaving and sharing my ideas.

Like the majority of us, I am risk averse, it is just I have always measured risk a little differently to most.

When I was a kid growing up poor and dreaming of a better life, the risk wasn’t that I would fail in high school and university and end up where I started, the greater risk was that I would never aspire for more.

At Goldman, when I kept my job after half the office was laid-off, the risk wasn’t that I would be next to go, the greater risk was that I would stay in a job that I didn’t love.

When I got to Carlyle and realized the buy-side wasn’t everything I imagined, the risk wasn’t that I would leave and fail, the greater risk was that I would stay and live a shadow of the life I could imagine.

You see, I am incredibly risk averse, but my entire life the greatest risk I have avoided is looking back on my life wishing I had done it differently.

To dream and imagine and chase the life that might be is only a risk if you see the world differently.

Why Do You Win?

Candide Thovex is arguably the best skier on the planet.

Born to ski, the son of a ski instructor, he strapped on planks at age 2.

At age 14 he turned pro, becoming the French mogul skiing champion.

An intense competitor, he is an X Games champion, but those of you who are into “ski porn” will have seen what he is built to do.

Candide was the first person to clear Chad’s Gap, a 120 foot clearing located in the Utah back-country, and this Frenchman just loves to get wild air.

Check out this trailer to his upcoming ski movie and you will see what I mean.

Candide’s story is even more fascinating when you learn that in 2007 he broke his back trying to clear a monster 150 foot jump at his own invitational event.

Told he would never ski like he used to, two years later he returned and in his first year of competition became the Freeride World Champion.

The secret to his success: He goes bigger and harder than anyone else.

There’s no holding back when you’re Candide, and that’s why he wins.

Why do you win?

Tell me. Really, I’d like to know.

Focus on ONE Thing

My cat, Kat, loves to play angry birds.

Her favorite toy is an angry birds wand, which is a thin plastic stick with an elastic string attached to an angry birds plush toy.

She is so into her toy that just by waving the wand and ringing its bell, she will run from the other side of the house to stalk down the angry bird.

From there she is absolutely 100% focused on her goal, except when I do one thing.

If i pick up another wand and I wave two angry birds at the same time, not knowing whether to chase the one in my left or right hand, she remains paralyzed.

Us humans are much the same way.

Give us a goal, give us a clear target and us hard striving folks will run it down 100%, but often when we lack a goal, we fail to make progress.

Also, like Kat confused by two birds moving at the same time, when we have too many things to focus on, we can fail to get chasing down any of them.

The solution with Kat is to put down the other wand and give her one goal, and the same is true for us humans.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, STOP.

Step back and recognize that even if you have ten things on your plate that you only ever have one thing you are focused on right now.

Then, as you complete the one thing you are doing, pick up the next and do the same.

Focused 100% on what you are doing right now, not only do you stop being overwhelmed, but you are also operating at peak performance.

In this zone, you will drive better results, and like Kat playing with her angry birds toy, you’ll be having much more fun too!!!

The Octopus and The Beast

Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch has a skill that is of great value.

They call him “Beast Mode” because once he gets moving he’s near impossible to stop.

Watch him in any play, and you’ll see with one, two, even three tackles on him, he just keeps stepping.

In the statistic “Yards after contact,” Lynch not only dominates the league, but nearly every other running back in NFL history.

He’s a difficult man to drag down, and this is just one of his sources of value, what I call a Tentacle of Value.

Tentacles of Value

If you can imagine, like an octopus with its eight tentacles, to win in your career, you want to have multiple ways to crush it!

This requires knowing what is valued in your career and being able to do it.

In the NFL nothing is more valued than yards, and Marshawn’s skill to keep driving forward is highly valued, but this isn’t enough to win on the field.

In addition to driving yards, Lynch must create value by being a safe pair of hands and creating an opening in the defense, among other tentacles of value.

The same is true in every career.

What Are Your Tentacles of Value?

In my old business of investment banking driving revenues is the equivalent of driving yards and your tentacles of value include the ways you do it.

But even then, driving revenues is only part of the game, and if you want to win, you must define your unique tentacles of value that enable you to build comparative advantage.

This requires stepping back, determining what is valued in your career, identifying where you win, and building your skills to do it.

This is just one thing my book, Do What You Want on Wall Street, is designed to help you do.

Just Do IT!

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg’s hacker motto is, “Move fast and break things.”

LinkedIn CEO, Reid Hoffman says, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.”

My friend, a highly sought after coach says, “Take massive imperfect action and improve as you move.”

Avoid The Fatal Mistake…

Having created some far less-than-perfect products, and just launched the ninth version of wallstreetteach.com, I firmly grasp the power of getting moving.

If you are doing something new, just get started, get moving, take action.

It is inevitable you will make mistakes, but you will avoid the most fatal mistake.

The number one reason most people fail to get what they want is they never get started.

Endlessly thinking about the things that they want to do, they fail to just do it.

Keep Doing It Till You Get What You Want

Like Nike has proven, there is enormous power in just doing it.

When you just do it, you get moving.

And when you get moving, you build momentum.

And when you build momentum, you feel empowered.

And when you feel empowered, you keep taking action.

And when you keep taking action, it is inevitable that you are moving closer to what you want.

97% Of People Are Focused On The Wrong Things

To most couch potatoes, the commercials are what you put up with to watch the entertaining content.

But to advertisers, the content is just what keeps your attention while they sell to you.

The content is the vehicle, but selling is the goal.

The best investment bankers know they are salespeople, but most resist this idea for two reasons.

First, almost all of us have been conditioned to have a negative connotation to selling.

Having recently bought a car I was reminded why, but excellent salespeople aren’t like that.

They are more like people who are excellent at becoming friends with their clients, and then helping their friends achieve their goals.

The second reason most investment bankers resist the idea they are salespeople is they are still living under the illusion that investment banking is about doing deals.

No it’s not. Investment banking isn’t about doing deals.

It is a deal business.

Doing deals is the service a banker performs, but it is selling deals that drives the business.

Those who don’t understand the distinction don’t go very far.

The same is true on the buy-side.

Most of us get into the business of investing because we want to be investors.

But the difference between being a great investor and being great at building an investing business is like the 3% difference between you and an Orangutan.

I know an incredibly successful investor who has generated 20%+ IRRs for nearly a decade, but he still only manages $80 million.

You don’t build a great investment business by being a great investor, but by being great at accumulating and maintaining capital.

The distinction might seem small, but the difference is enormous.

It means almost every single hardworking person will keep diddling away doing what they think is their business, never achieving a great deal.

3, 2, 1, Lift Off!

The hardest thing about reaching the stars is getting off the ground.

Perched vertically on the pad, the last of the U.S. space shuttle fleet to fly a mission, Atlantis, was twenty times the weight of the craft that returned back to earth.

Strapped to two solid rocket boosters and its external fuel tank, like a flea on the back of a dog, the shuttle is dwarfed by its transportation system.

On its own Atlantis weighs around 165,000 pounds, but fully loaded, with each of its two solid rocket boosters weighing 185,000 pounds and carrying 1.1 million pounds of fuel and its external fuel tank weighing 78,000 pounds and filled with 1.6 million pounds of fuel, sitting on the pad pointed towards the heavens, Atlantis weighs some 4.5 million pounds.

The reason of course is the tremendous amount of thrust that is required to clear gravity and once the external rockets which provide 70% of the thrust have done their job, within two minutes of launch they are cut loose, and using its three rocket boosters Atlantis positions itself in orbit for the remainder of its mission.

Hence, almost all of the heavy lifting is done in the first couple of minutes and from there the shuttle is gliding in the endless expanse of zero gravity.

The same is true with setting yourself on course for getting what you want.

In the early stages it can require a lot of heavy lifting.

You are beginning to get your mind around different ways of thinking and taking actions, thinking carefully about what you want, developing your process for getting it, and thinking about how you build yourself into the person who can do it.

Like Atlantis, all this heavy lifting is required just to get you launching in the right direction, and it can take a significant amount of lift just to get yourself on course.

This is where most people fail, and worse, they give up.

But if you persist and keep building momentum, soon you discover that your heavy lifting has blasted you off in the right direction, and like a black hole gobbling up stars as it expands, simply by continuing to take steps you are quickly building the momentum you need to finish your mission.

This isn’t to say that the path to getting what you want ever gets easy, but like exploring space, if it were easy, would it be worth it?

The ONLY Freedom

You might be oblivious to it right now, but when you begin training your mind it becomes as obvious as waking up to a jackhammer next to your bed.

You’re lying there unconscious, peacefully sleeping, and then you wake up, and it begins:

THE MIND STARTS WHIRLING

Thoughts begin flooding in. You might start thinking about your dreams. Or things from yesterday. Or things you need to do today. Or things related to your future or past or more likely things that are completely irrelevant to your past, present, or future.

Like a tornado, the mind is turning, picking up everything in its path, and there is no stopping it now.

This is normal.

In our society this is considered a normal way of being, these minds of ours incessantly turning, never stopping.

Like a constant stream of 140 character verbal diarrhea, nearly every waking hour we are bombarded with noise.

Talk to “normal” people about mediation or heaven forbid hypnosis and they look at you like you have a third eye.

Accustomed to walking around with a jackhammer in our heads, it is not until we begin training our minds that we see just how abnormal it is.

Like a person who has lived their entire life next to a construction site, when you practice quieting that noisy machine inside your head, you will begin to understand the only true definition of freedom.

When I was a kid I thought money was freedom. Then I thought freedom required both time and money.

Today i know the ONLY true freedom is peace of mind.

Avoid People Like The News

Us humans love drama.

We pretend we don’t, but really, can you imagine how lost we would be without all this drama in the world?

We pretend to despise violence and killing and war, yet our world is full of it.

In our media, all day every day, we are bombarded with the worst of humanity.

We pretend that keeping up to date with all the misery of the world is being informed but of course us humans simply enjoy the mayhem like a pig enjoys rolling around in its own shit.

After all, if you can’t get your fill of drama from the reporting of the real world, you can tune in to the 95% of what us humans call entertainment which is dedicated to violence and killing and war.

While to a sane person it might seem odd that these things we pretend to despise are the same things we tune into for entertainment, in our world this is considered normal.

The same is true for many people in their careers.

With almost two-thirds of people dis-satisfied in their jobs, all day every day the majority of people love creating drama in their career.

They complain about how they are getting paid or working long hours or how they don’t love what they do.

They whine about how their boss does this or their customer does that or how the colleague down the hall does a certain thing that makes them feel a certain way.

Hours of their day they love being absorbed in their problems, before going home and reporting to their spouse and their friends, happily dragging everyone else into the drama of their career.

Yet, every day, every week, every year, often for decades of their life, they show up for more of the same.

If you ask them what they are doing to change their career they will tell you all the reasons the world is the way it is and how there is nothing they can do to change it.

Avoid these people like the news.

Stop letting the drama of their world become yours.

Anxiety or Excitement, YOU Decide!

Looking ahead to the new year my client had himself worried sick.

Over the break, going to bed thinking about all the things he wants to achieve this year, he could barely sleep.

Waking up during the night, while trying to get back to sleep his mind would take off faster than a one night stand.

Yesterday, his first day back at work, he woke up extra early.

Waking up in the middle of the night tossing and turning, unable to get back to sleep, he decided to just get up and get to the office early.

Brushing his teeth, thinking about all the things he needs to get done this year his mind was turning.

Backing out of the driveway and driving to work it was more of the same, so by the time he reached the office he was wound up tight like a knotted muscle.

When we spoke early today, not surprisingly, he told me he was feeling a little overwhelmed about the year ahead.

“No shit,” I said to him, “With all that thinking about all the things you want to do this year you have a lot on your mind.”

I continued, “But what is surprising to me is that you aren’t feeling absolutely ecstatic about it.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

And that’s when I busted it out on him.

I asked him, “Do you know the difference between anxiety and excitement?”

“What do you mean?” he repeated.

I said, “The only difference is one is done by a pessimist and the other by an optimist.”

They are both the same thought process: Looking forward into the future, imagining it being a certain way.

The only difference is while a pessimist might look ahead and create anxiety for the future, an optimist looks ahead and gets excited for what is to come.

From there we were done.

We had broken this pattern of thinking that had haunted him for weeks and he was feeling excited about the new year.

We were done. But I wasn’t.

I feel deeply for my clients and as we left the call I found myself wishing I could have done more for him sooner.

If only he had reached out to me I could have enabled him to much more enjoy his time off with his family, but given my DeLorean is in the shop, there is nothing I can do about that now.

All I can do is spread the word!!!