Summary: Is self-doubt and negativity holding you back—in business, sports, or life? Craig Willard, author of <a href="http://a.co/clyvFKV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The High-Performance Mindset</a>, believes that you need more than just exercise or a change in diet to achieve peak performance. You need to change your thinking.<br> In this episode, Craig shows you how you can immediately sharpen your focus, boost your confidence, and shift your personal performance into hyperdrive. Whether you’re an athlete, executive, or an entrepreneur, this episode is for you.<br> <br> <a href="http://a.co/clyvFKV" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Craig’s book <a href="http://a.co/clyvFKV" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The High Performance Mindset</a> on Amazon.<br> Learn more about Craig’s coaching program at <a href="http://craigwillard.com/home" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CraigWillard.com</a>.<br> <br> When did Craig Willard first become interested in mindset?<br> I actually was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, so I was on some pretty strong medication. That experience became a bit of a turning point for me as I felt like I was in this fog of sorts; the medication had gotten me to a point where I was just bland.<br> I didn’t have the highs, I didn’t have the lows, I was right in the middle and at that point I said, “This isn’t okay. There’s got to be a better way than medication to help my anxiety and I have to figure this out.”<br> I literally went on a road trip of sorts to figure out what it was about our mind that created this fear. I wanted to figure out what anxiety was. A lot of that I put into this book. I go into great detail about anxiety because I think it steals so much from us.<br> <br> From that point moving forward, I realized that the mind was key to everything and thus, I was able to move on from my anxiety.<br> What did you learn from your anxiety?<br> Let me fast-forward a bit to my coaching career.<br> When I started working with people with all different backgrounds, I started to recognize that people all have different opinions of the word. It’s almost as if my clients were creating their own dictionary of sorts.<br> It was a really big breakthrough for me to recognize that because I could then begin to change how people perceive the world and how they think based on the words they use.<br> If you think about motivational speakers, they love to tell you what to do and why you should do it but they don’t really tell you the how; that middle ground seems to get missed quite a bit.<br> <br> You hear this phrase, “Change your mindset, change your life.”<br> But if I just tell you to “change your thoughts, change your outcomes,” that doesn’t help you. I know that I need to do that, but how?<br> Figuring out the how was a really big breakthrough for me. I’ll go through it with you.<br> First, ask these questions, “What is self-talk?” and “What is thought?”<br> When I would ask my coaching clients they’d give me sometimes odd, strange answers. Then I would ask them “What is focus?” and they would usually say something like “concentration.”<br> Well okay, “What is concentration?” and they would kind of laugh and say, “Focus?”<br> So people really don’t have a true definition of these words, yet we tell people to focus, to concentrate, all the time. But what does that mean?<br> Well, here’s how I break it down. If you have a thought in your head, you’re consciously thinking to yourself about that thought; essentially you’re talking to yourself about that thought. Over the course of a day, we may have 40, 50, or 60,000 thoughts. So we talk to ourselves all day long.<br> While we have a thought in our head, we’re focused on it,
