How I Got Here
Imagine it’s the final pairing of the Masters or time for an NBA coach to decide which of two star players should take the winning shot with seconds left in the game. All the players involved have comparable skill levels. They’re already good enough to have reached the pinnacle of their sport after all! There’s just one crucial difference. One player is a veteran who’s played and won in these situations before. The other is a rookie having reached this stage for the first time. Who will you bet on?
Chances are you picked the veteran.
Why? My guess is you intuitively understand that they likely have a stronger mental game. They’ve spent as much time training their mind as they have honing their tactical skills and building expertise.
What’s often struck me as a mindset and performance coach is that we all benefit from becoming mental athletes and that honing your mental game isn’t just a skill that should be encouraged in the realm of professional sports.
When it comes to the realms of entrepreneurship and leadership, people tend to focus on things like know-how, tactics, and domain expertise. Think managing cash flow, sales and marketing, hiring, firing, culture building, annual planning, product market fit, KPIs. In the era of the internet, this information is overflowing across podcasts, books, articles, networking events, conferences, and depending on where you live, also your neighborhood gym, grocery store, and coffee shop. These are important topics to be sure. Yet every entrepreneur knows that there is a whole other arena that accompanies the daily figuring out that is the bedrock of entrepreneurship.
This “second” arena is mental in nature. It involves things like learning to exist within a reality uncertainty, understanding your relationship to control, knowing when to take a step back to gain perspective, the impact of internal timelines and expectations, building self belief, detaching from outcomes and learning to love the process, burnout, focusing on what’s truly important, and so much more. It’s an arena that I find very few of us have spent time cultivating until we're thrust into personal and professional situations that require different tools to succeed.
I had this recognition when I was promoted from an individual performer investing role into a leadership role overseeing strategy and operations in my prior career as a growth equity investor at Anthos Capital. For all the knowledge and experience I’d amassed, I felt wholly unprepared to operate in this mental arena. After thousands of interactions with other leaders and entrepreneurs, I also got the sense that I wasn’t alone and that it was a problem space that I couldn’t stop thinking about. As American neuroscientist and author, Sam Harris, wrote in the book, Waking Up, “Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.” This is the foundation of my work as a mindset and performance coach.