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Feeling Undervalued? Do This

In life and in our work, it can be easy to lose our sense of value.

We look around at other people who are seemingly achieving more than us, “worth more,” or otherwise more valued, and we can get down on ourselves.

But when we look at situations differently, take control of our thoughts, and begin taking new actions, we quickly turn around those old ways of being.

This begins with seeing that only you are in control of how you value yourself, and influencing others to value you the same!

Common Problem In Our Careers

A world of hard-charging ambitious people, every year many people find themselves feeling undervalued.

Lots of things in our jobs, whether it be compensation, promotion, recognition, or otherwises can leave you feeling undervalued.

It’s not to say that it’s “never enough,” but that for the amount you put in, you deserve to expect a lot in return!

I had a meeting last week with a Wall Street investor who felt let down on his comp.

And to be honest, he was right, the head of his firm did let him down.

It’s not because he didn’t pay him what he “deserved” but because of the way he had handled the conversation.

Rather than sit with him and explain why the firm’s performance didn’t enable him to pay his team as he would have liked, the boss got angry and defensive.

That left him feeling undervalued, and in the wrong state of mind to drive more value in his career.

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Mike Tyson’s Daily Routine Was Simple, Predictable, And Unstoppable

In his latest book, Iron Ambition: My life with Cus D’Amato, Mike Tyson lays out what it took to become a champ.

Inside, Tyson details his relationship with his trainer and what took him from a punk kid in Brooklyn involved in petty crime to 7 years later becoming the youngest heavyweight champ.

How did he do it?

Simply. There was no secret bullet, no expensive course he took that “catapulted him to reach his full potential.”

He became the best in the world by building a daily training routine with a simple set of tools—tools you can use to become a champ in your own life.

Tyson’s Daily Routine Uses Tools You Already Have

Cus D’Amato, Tyson’s trainer, gave Tyson a “secret sauce” of mental training anyone can practice:

Affirmations
Hypnosis
Visualization

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Why I Don’t Charge For Coaching

What most people call “coaching,” I do for free.

Sitting with someone and spewing advice is a service people charge for, but it’s not particularly valuable. It might get someone to feel better about their day and life, but it’s unlikely to lead to transformational results.

To get transformational results, you have to take the best knowledge and build systems of continuous improvement that you work and re-work every day until you get what you want.

Results are valuable, and they are the only thing I can imagine charging people for.

Do You Want Advice, Or Results?

A concern I have when I write each and every one of these newsletters is that I’m leading you into the same trap that I found myself in.

Spending more than 10 years of my life reading thousands of books on personal development, I learned a lot, but, honestly, I mostly just filled my head with redundant knowledge.

That knowledge is incredibly interesting to me, but knowledge by itself is next to useless. Just like that piece of meat between your, um, ears, it’s what you do with it that counts.

I’ve read many amazing books that gave me amazing knowledge. I’ve sat with top executive coaches—who charge six and seven figures per client—who have also shared ridiculously good knowledge with me, but on its own, it all fails to get the job done.

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Don’t Read This Book 100 Times!

Just a quick note.

An entrepreneur I met told me that he had the goal to read Think and Grow Rich 100 times in the next year.

Now, that’s my favorite book, and I certainly recommend everyone read it over and over again, but I also suggest that you do much more than just read it.

In school you might be well rewarded for being able to regurgitate what someone else thinks, but in life, it’s not what you think that matters.

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Elon Musk is an Idiot. You can be too

This week Elon Musk unveiled a new “master plan” for his ambitions with Tesla and SolarCity.

Doing so, he said: “Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.”

Don’t you love that?

Someone who knows how “idiotic” his ambitions are, but who only keeps doubling down.

What enables him to do that? What does it take to keep driving your grandest vision for your life?

Only One Thing…

Well, of course there are many things that can unleash us in life but principally there is one…

A tough one. A real tough one… Stop fear from holding you back.

Look, fear holds us all back. It leads us to question ourselves, to be tentative, to look for the easy way out, and so on, yet it is an emotion we can learn to master.

As I wrote about some time ago in reference to Adam Grant’s fantastic book, Originals.

It’s not that men and women who do remarkable things never suffer from fear, it’s that they are unwilling to let fear dictate their choices.

How do you do this for yourself? Honestly, it’s not easy, and, it can take constant vigilance, yet here are three powerful ways to do it:

Three Steps to Eradicate Fears

If you want to be a Mind Champ at this, I suggest downloading my free e-book to Building Your Limitless Mind.

But, you can also make a lot of progress eradicating fears, simply following these three steps:

1. Ask, what do you possibly have to fear? You do something, it goes wrong, so what? Maybe you lose some money. Maybe you lose some time. But, if the consequences were terribly dire, you wouldn’t be considering it anyways, right?

2. Instead of fearing actions, fear inaction. How would you feel at the end of your life knowing that you played it safe, that there was a dream you failed to pursue, that you left the grandest vision for your life on the table? Fear that feeling!

3. Pull yourself toward the feeling of what it’s like to put fears behind you. How good does it feel to crush a fear? Say, if you were terrified to jump from a high diving board, how do you feel once you’ve done it? Don’t you want more of this feeling?

Candidly, from my research and personal experience, these types of questions are not to be asked once, but constantly, daily, in a life of expanding what is possible for you.

P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.

P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.

Ali: Build the mind of a winner

This article first appeared in BOSS Magazine

So often in life, winning is about doing away with the competition. Few knew this reality better than the late, great, Muhammad Ali. His actions provide some useful lessons to anyone who wants to get out and win. Here are six of the most important ones.

Train Your Mind

Ali didn’t just train his body in the gym, although that was clearly important. He did much more by training his mind. Often, that is the only difference between a winner and the runner-up. The person who trains his or her mind always has an advantage over one who doesn’t.

It’s something that many people in business simply don’t recognize. Technical skills, like jabbing in the case of Ali, or analyzing companies in the case of bankers, go only so far. What distinguishes the truly successful is mental toughness and the ways in which they use their minds to win.

Use Your Environment

It’s not hard to see that someone training in the boxing gym from an early age will quickly develop mental strength. The regimen involves getting hit repeatedly by an opponent and yet still coming back for more, again and again and again. That alone takes mental strength—something conditioned on Ali by his environment.

Consider your job and ask yourself, how can you use the stresses of your environment to build mental toughness? Got a tough boss? Use him or her to harden you up. Face a lot of on the job stress? Take time each night after you get home from work and mentally prepare your mind to deal with the obstacles you think you will face tomorrow. You don’t have to get hit in the head every day to get mentally strong.

See Yourself as Invincible

Famously, Ali said, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” Is this the reason he is still lauded as the best ever pugilist?

Ali trained himself to believe that winning was inevitable: a sure thing, a forgone conclusion. There is no one harder to defeat than a person who believes that they are invincible. Think about that.

When your opponent doesn’t just think they can win, but just knows it, then they will keep going until the job is done. That was Ali.

What would you do, if you just knew you were going to succeed, that success was inevitable? Probably a lot more than most others.

Exploit Your Opponent’s Weak Minds

Better than just going in knowing he’d win, Ali waged psychological warfare on his opponents. He’d tell them again and again how he was going to destroy them in the ring.

His combined exuberance and eloquence were sure to raise nagging doubts in the mind of an opponent. That wasn’t just showmanship on Ali’s part, it was part of the strategy. Or put more simply, those boasts were an artillery barrage on the psyche of his opponents before he’d even stepped into the ring. By the time Ali arrived, the softening up job was already half done.

Now, I’m certainly not advocating that you taunt your colleagues or competitors, but do consider, how can you use your superior mental strength to exploit their situations to your advantage?

Use Your Opponent’s Strength Against Them

Ali wasn’t the largest heavyweight boxer in the field. He faced men who were much bigger and stronger than he was.

What did he do? He used their strength against them. Consider his match against George Foreman. Ali simply allowed Foreman to keep swinging and wearing himself out. Sure that meant Ali had to take a few hits to the body, but when the exhaustion slowed Foreman to a crawl, Ali finished him off.

Again, I’m not suggesting that you let your opponents keep swinging at you without fighting back, but consider how this idea applies to say negotiation. Fatigue your opponent, throw up roadblocks, find ways to wear them down and get what you want.

Have the Will to See it Through

Ali’s inner strength allowed him to take on the United States draft board when he refused to go fight in Vietnam. Others dodged the draft, or fled. He did not. He simply came out and took whatever was coming at him, stayed true to himself and his beliefs. He paid a price for that. But I don’t think he ever doubted that what he was doing was right.

Ali once said, “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”

To build mental strength takes time, effort, and most of all, will. You can’t expect to hit the gym once and build a rock solid body, and you can’t expect to think tough once a year and build mental strength. Practice this in everything you do; make mental toughness not something that you do, but a part of who you are.

Do You HTFU?

One of my former Carlyle colleagues starting running ultra-marathons.

Real hard-core stuff, like 4 days crossing a desert with little more than a canister of oil to keep you warm at night.

Some time ago before one of his races I remember him posting a picture of him with “HTFU” written perhaps by hand in the dusty rear window of the support vehicle.

I thought, ‘Exactly, that’s the type of support you need when you are in that situation.’

You don’t want someone to give you a hug and commiserate how hard it is to keep going.

You want them to grab your collar and ask you: “Are you the sort of person who caves or do you harden the fuck up?”

When your feet are burning.

Blistered.

Your body is hurting all over.

With only miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles…ahead of you.

Are you the type of person who focuses on how hard it will be to go the distance?

Or do you harden the fuck up?