There are a few problems with trying to achieve success by imitating successful people. One is that a lot of successful people had circumstances and opportuni...
There are a few problems with trying to achieve success by imitating successful people. One is that a lot of successful people had circumstances and opportunities that simply aren’t available to the rest of us. Another is that successful people tend to give advice based on their experiences after reaching success, and that might not reflect what they actually did to become successful. And apart from that, it’s not necessarily true that practices from highly successful people are transferable.
Having said that, we think there are some things we can definitely learn from people who are highly successful.
This is almost a cliché, but that doesn’t mean that it should be ignored. We are embodied creatures with a soul and have to look after both aspects of our beings.
If your goal is something related to exercise, you cannot ignore the mind. If your goal is more intellectual, like making it in your career, you cannot neglect your body.
That suggests that training your mind begins in looking after your body. Getting enough sleep, eating well and exercising are all important.
However, we want to draw attention to one particularly powerful approach to training your mind and keeping it sharp, even under pressure: conscious breathing.
Conscious breathing is a simple breathing exercise that is meant to calm you down and bring you into the moment. You force yourself to focus on your breathing and regulate it yourself.
There are different exercises that you can use. The English Football team famously used the 5-5 approach (breath in for five counts – breathe out for five counts) in the 2024 Euros for their penalty shootout win over Switzerland. Novak Djokovic uses conscious breathing on the court in high pressure situations and credits his daily conscious breathing habit as being a significant factor in regulating his mind and helping him succeed.
Learning to Accept Situations
Another powerful technique you can use to train your mind is to practice noticing negative thoughts, accepting them and then letting them go while returning to the present moment.
The same can be applied to a negative situation. You can notice it, acknowledge the terrible situation and the negative emotions and thoughts that come with it and then come back to what you need to do in the moment.
It is impossible to stay positive or neutral all the time, so we need to have a weapon in our arsenals to combat hard times and negative thoughts. Practicing this habit means that when you face some sort of crisis (like losing a major client or suffering a serious injury) you are able to quickly return to a point where you can think and act reasonably without spiralling into a very negative headspace.
A similar idea is that we should accept our failures because the greatest insight comes from contrasting success from failure rather than simply focussing on success. We learn by looking at why something worked and why something didn’t.
Part of keeping your mind healthy and sharp is knowing when to switch off. Some distractions are good – especially when they are related to friends and family – and allow you to come back to what you really need to do refreshed and refocussed.
The trick here is that you cannot allow your distractions to take over your life, and you need to know when to allow them to take over. If you’re training for a marathon, for example, you’re going to have to stop anything from encroaching into your training time.
One thing you can do is make sure you set aside time every week for time off to engage in a hobby or spend time with others.
The most powerful predictor of success is hard work over a long period of time. In the same way that consistency is often said to be the ultimate investment strategy, learning consistency is the ultimate self-investment strategy.
And it can be learnt.
It’s not easy, but you have to train yourself to be consistent about things. One thing you can do to train consistency is to create a short morning routine that takes some effort (stretching, etc. comes to mind). By practicing that every day, even when you don’t feel like it, you build up your ability to be consistent with things.
The other thing is simply to keep showing up. If you just make sure that you turn up and do the thing, every day, you train your mind and shift the needle towards success.
Keep track of the little tasks you complete and successes you enjoy as you go through the day.
Making the bed in the morning is a win. Getting to the gym is a win. Completing your routine is a win. And you could go on.
You build momentum by doing this and it helps resilience when things go wrong and you have to deal with a crisis.
Voluntarily confronting fear is one of the most powerful ways to overcome that fear and put yourself in a position where you are able to deal with setbacks and hardship.
A common practical tool is roleplaying the worst outcome of situation you’re in that you can imagine so that you can accept it, make a plan in response to it and then carry on with what’s really happening.
Similarly, avoiding things because they are hard or difficult only creates all sorts of hardship down the road. We have to train ourselves to do the hard and unpleasant thing, even when we’d rather avoid it.
A lot of success is down to decision making and making judgements on things.
And contrary to the common idea that we should teach ourselves to make better decisions, or somehow train ourselves to override our intuitions, one of the most effective things that we can do, says Spencer Greenberg, is actually to give an intuition a chance to breathe by delaying it.
This means you get a more accurate intuition and don’t have to fight it.
With all of that said, you need to find what works for you. There is no “one way” to train your mind successfully. You can take these ideas and use them, or you can choose to find your own way. We would suggest that you take some of these ideas, but you need to find things that work for you.
But that also means you can never stop searching for the answers.
