Entrepreneurship is a game of life and death, and many of the setbacks and failures you encounter are essentially due to demons. Learning how to mobilize one's physical and mental state is even more important than learning business management!
The feeling of starting a business recently is that we must learn from top athletes. The daily life of athletes includes sprinting, training, and rest, so that they can freely adjust their state and face market competition with full energy.
In my opinion, there are a lot of similarities between athletes and entrepreneurs. Both sides are facing a high-pressure environment and fierce competition. More importantly, neither athletes nor entrepreneurs can win with hard work alone.
Athletes should have "skills and tactics", study opponents, study themselves, study style, study psychology, and study physical fitness...... Thus winning the game. Entrepreneurship is also about analyzing competition, analyzing the market, and grasping opportunities.
After understanding this truth, I began to collect a large number of books on the so-called "energy management", but I think, but I think that most of the content stays at the theoretical level, and it will be "natural" in real life, until I learned Deng Yaping's method.
Deng Yaping has always been known for her strong mentality, she is not only the first real big devil in Chinese women's table tennis, she has won gold medals at home and abroad, she even read a doctorate in economics from Cambridge University after retiring, became a member of the Olympic Committee, established a sports industry investment fund in Henan, and became an investor......
The biggest difference between top athletes and ordinary athletes is that the top athletes are at their best when it is crucial.
I've summarized 7 methods for 7 emotional scenarios, which are not only suitable for "entrepreneurial dogs" like me, but also for all "workplace dogs".
- How do we regain energy when we have a breakdown?
- How do we pull ourselves back from the edge of the runaway cliff when we get out of control?
- How do we cheer ourselves up when we are not confident?
- When we want to beat the blood and cheer ourselves up, what is the correct posture? How to not drop the chain at a critical moment?
- How to bring out the best in the most critical moments?
- When others deny you, how do you find your own direction in life and build strong self-confidence?
01 Before the crash: Design a small action to clear your mind
The first method is called thought blocking.
In 1996, Deng Yaping reached the final of the Atlanta Olympics against Chen Jing of Chinese Taipei. At that time, it was a best-of-five game, and in the face of his old opponent, Deng Yaping was high-spirited and soon led the overall situation 2:0.
But in this process, perhaps because Chen Jing had already fought against the water, she let go of the fight, and she quickly recovered 2 games. The situation became, after Deng Yaping won 2 games in a row, she lost 2 games in a row. She and her opponent can only rely on the final game to decide the winner.
In such a high-pressure environment, how did Deng Yaping withstand the high pressure and finally win 3:2?
She made a very interesting move: "Before each serve, I would be very focused on pressing the tee with my hand, once, twice, three times, and then start serving. This move helped her regain her best form and establish a psychological advantage.
The purpose behind this action is what we call "thought blocking". By touching the tee, she pulled her entire attention and physical state from the court to the touch of the table, from a high-pressure environment to an irrelevant matter.
Normally, when we enter a state of tension, we will give ourselves a psychological cue, telling ourselves "don't be nervous, it's okay, I'm strong, I can get it back", but many times it doesn't work.
Because the brain is very difficult to deceive, and the brain will be slow to respond to the reception of negative sentences.
For example, when you are practicing at a driving school, there is a tree in front of you, and the instructor tells you not to hit the tree, not to hit the tree, you will be more likely to hit it.
Because hitting a tree is the brain's first reaction, don't hit the tree The brain has to react again, and it will take longer. If the coach is a veteran, he will tell you very calmly, brake to turn right, and give you an affirmative sentence for the brain to react directly, rather than telling you not to do anything.
The advantage of thought blocking is that when you have been thinking about something, pulling your mind to an unrelated matter, your brain is emptied for a period of time, and you will return to a quiet, ethereal state instead.
This method sounds simple, but there are many key tips, share three:
First, you want to use an action to stimulate your own reaction.
When we're stuck in a chaotic state of thought, and you use one more thought against that chaotic thought, the two thoughts will fight each other. New, positive thoughts don't have that much power to suppress those negative thoughts.
But when you take out one action, it's different. When your body moves, your brain doesn't bother to think about it, it pulls you out of the chaos of your thoughts.
Second, this move must have been practiced countless times before, not on the spot.
For example, if you use the action of pressing your wrist to remind yourself not to be nervous, this action is definitely not something that you can do when you are particularly nervous, such as during an interview. It should be that once you encounter tension in your daily life, you will habitually press your wrist, tell yourself that you can calm down after pressing, and become your own knee-jerk reaction after continuous practice, so that in tense moments, you can press your wrist.
Third, when doing an action, you must be focused, and you must mobilize all your attention to do this action.
It's just an action, and it's not good if you don't invest physically and mentally. Deng Yaping usually focuses on feeling the touch of the table with the palm of her hand before pulling her attention back.
To sum up, whether it is a collapse of mentality or an emotional collapse, when you are about to face a collapse, but you know that you can't collapse and must survive, you can clear your mind by designing an action. Remember, this method is called thought blocking.
02 Out of control: Make a list of failures to give your brain a "sense of control"
The second method is called the failure list.
In the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, why Deng Yaping was able to get back when she was overturned 2:2 was because she failed in 94.
In the 1994 Asian Games, Deng Yaping played against Tomoli Koyama, who joined Japan after changing her nationality. At that time, the national complex between China and Japan had not yet been civilized, and a Chinese changing to Japanese nationality was equivalent to a traitor in the hearts of the Chinese people. But it was this game that everyone watched, and Deng Yaping lost. Because she didn't expect Zhili Koyama to enter the finals in the pre-match rehearsal, all her preparations at that time were for Chen Jing of the Chinese Taipei team.
In this game, Deng Yaping recalled that she lost very calmly, because there were no special mistakes in it. I slapped the power and played at a normal level, but Tomori Koyama caught all her kills like crazy.
The characteristic of Deng Yaping's game is that the first three boards are particularly fierce. But because she is short, she has to constantly attack and quickly break down her opponents when she plays, which is a lot of physical exertion. When the opponent carries the first three boards, her physical fitness will decline, and the opponent's physical fitness will form a crush, so Deng Yaping lost the game.
After this defeat, she reflected that many unexpected situations in the game were unpredictable. How to prepare adequately?
Later, she came up with a method called the Failure Checklist. It means that before you go to a game, you have to take out a piece of paper or a whiteboard and write down the various situations that you might encounter defeat.
How will writing such a situation help in future competitions? The answer is that when you write about these situations, you create a sense of "control" over the unexpected in advance. Because you anticipated it before the game, even if you encounter an unexpected situation, you will feel that you have "guessed it a long time ago", and the psychological advantage will come back.
But if you don't anticipate the unexpected, you may subconsciously feel that it is over, leading to a lot of panic. When a top athlete is on a key field, a sense of mental control is crucial. Once you feel like the scene is out of control, your confidence will crumble.
This is not metaphysics, there is a scholar in the United States who specializes in stress, and he has done a very interesting experiment.
He asked a team of students to write down the worst possible outcome of the interview on a small piece of paper before the interview, and went to the interview with the note.
In the end, it was found that people who wrote small notes and predicted the worst-case scenario performed much better than those who didn't. Because of the failure list prediction on the small slip of paper, he has established a strong sense of control.
This method was particularly useful in the Uka era, when emergencies were constantly occurring.
For example, the rise of AI is a huge challenge for various industries. It's hard for us to imagine that in a few more years of AI development, banks will no longer need counters, and bank people will lose their jobs; For example, accountants who only count financial data will also face unemployment; In the future, will it be an AI robot man driving a car, and there will be no need for a driver......
In this era of frequent accidents, it is especially important to have a list of failures. It can help you build a sense of control over your life at all stages of life, help you gain a strong psychological advantage, and act as a shield against the uncertainty of the future.
03 When you are not confident: Design a lucky ritual and use superstition to build self-confidence
The third method is called using superstition to build self-confidence.
The world's top athletes have a habit of "superstition".
Jordan, the god of basketball, would put a pair of training pants from his varsity team in front of every game. That is, he will wear two pairs of pants to play each game; Every time Li Na, the goddess of tennis, goes abroad to play a match, she must book the same room in the same hotel; Every time Deng Yaping plays, she always blows on the table tennis ball; Yao Ming never shaves before a major competition......
Why do top athletes have such superstitious habits?
Deng Yaping cited a sentence from teacher Wan Weigang: "The so-called superstition is to find truth where there is no reason, find meaning where there is no meaning, find law where there is no law, and impose cause and effect where there is no cause and effect." ”
From a psychological perspective, the so-called "superstition" is essentially seeking a sense of self-control, and reducing uncertainty through a sense of self-control.
This habit is like a ritual that helps you build positive mental cues.
Just like before a big director makes a movie or a TV series, he is used to bowing before filming, which is already a tradition. In the past, before a tribe went out hunting, in order to ensure the success of the hunt, it was necessary to worship its own totem and worship God. The history of human development is full of a variety of ritual acts. The ritual act itself is a psychological cue that gives us a sense of control over all the uncertainties.
It's in this way that the athlete emphasises to himself that all the off-the-field factors are in his favor today, and that no unexpected situation will affect me, and that I have great power to do so.
But the question arises, what is the difference between this superstition in daily life and the superstitious methods adopted by athletes? For example, if we go to worship God, Buddha, Guan Gong, and Mazu before the competition, and wear two training pants and stay in the same hotel and room with athletes, what is the difference between this behavior?
The biggest difference is that the athlete's ritual keeps the sense of control to himself, while the superstitious method of ordinary people is to leave the sense of control to others.
When you go to worship God, Buddha, Mazu, and the sky, you are actually asking them to give you something. But the athlete's approach is more about giving themselves more power through their own actions, putting the choice completely on themselves and in their own hands, so they will have a stronger sense of control.
This method is also recommended for everyone, especially in life similar to "before a major event" situation, such as when going to an interview, meeting with an important client, meeting with an important investor, and when you want to win a negotiation, you can build your self-confidence through some ritualistic methods.
Columnist
General Liang, public account: 梁军 (ID-liangjiangjunisme), everyone is a product manager columnist. Brand IP strategy consultant, thinking about one marketing topic every two weeks.
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