John Amaechi: The voice in your head is lying to you. Here’s how to shut it down

A high-performance mindset requires being eager in the face of the mundane and the vexing

Part of the challenge of understanding this is simply that we see the products of success

And so you might see an NBA player at the peak of their career doing something amazing

You might see a captain of business handling with aplomb the challenges of their work

but you don't see the precursors to that. Training in basketball, for me, was so boring

I remember doing entire sessions that were just me catching a ball, doing a pivot, pivoting back

passing the ball for half an hour. But that's what you need to be able to tolerate if you're trying to achieve something remarkable

because it comes through handling stuff that frustrates and confuses you. And it comes through repetition ad nauseum of things that seem small and unimportant until they're combined

Hello, my name is John Amache. I'm a psychologist, a professor of leadership at the University of Exeter Business School

I've written a couple of books, including The Promises of Giants, and I used to play basketball in the NBA

I wrote in my school yearbook that I was going to earn a lot of money and play in an NBA team

It was a stupid teenager's kind of goal and something so rare in terms of Britain

Everybody told me it was ridiculous. Everybody told me it had never been done. Everybody told me that a fat kid from Stockport who liked eating pie and reading books was hardly a candidate for the world's best basketball league

but to me it was compelling. So I dedicated myself, my young life anyway, to trying to become

an NBA basketball player. I played for a year in England before I wrote 3,000 letters to American

high schools. I received three replies, two of which were no, and ended up going to a school in

Toledo, Ohio, where a coach, Ed Heinschel, took care of me for a year and guided me to Penn State

University. And then I broke into the MBA. I didn't get drafted, so my success has been lumpy

But that's probably the way that it is for most people. People make the mistake of thinking that

I am a basketball player that is now a psychologist, and that is not true. I knew at the age of seven

that I would be a psychologist So I was always a psychologist who played basketball for a time Studying for a doctorate while you play in the NBA is not as hard as people think There is an inordinate amount of downtime as a professional athlete

Hours where you're in a plane for you to do stuff that might energize your brain

And so that's what I did. I had a distance education and I studied while I was in transit

It's an amazing way to get your degree at 30,000 feet. success does require a clear vivid and bold picture of the future it's part of what makes

all the dull hard stuff worth it as you go along but then you say what needs to be true to get to

that and not just what needs to be true in two years time or three years time if it's a long-term

vision, but today, what do I need to do today? What one small step will take me towards this

vision or goal that I have? And what will I need to do tomorrow? What muscles will I need to build

What skills will I need to develop in order that in six months or a year's time, I can do something

even more consequential that drives me towards what I want to achieve. So I adopted something

called the fee model when I started talking to young people at basketball camps in the summertime

paying the fee, focus, effort, execution. You ask kids who wants to play in the NBA and their hands would shoot up

Their minds had already transported them onto an NBA court. They were already there

But they hadn't considered, as I watched them play in the summer camps

they weren't doing some of the fundamentals that I thought would be essential to get them there

And so the fee model was a way of encapsulating what's required. focus focus is the idea that you can curate your whole attention into this moment regardless of how

dull and uninteresting it might feel regardless of how consequential or important for your future

it might be in your mind regardless of whether you like or don't like the person talking to you

can you lever your whole mental faculties to that point in time and pay attention in a really proactive way

Effort is the first E. It seems obvious. The idea that if you're going to achieve something, frankly, whether it be remarkable or ordinary, you have to put in some effort

It seems obvious, but most people don't think that. And indeed most people spend most of their life whether it be at work or in sport seeing just how many percentage points off 100 they can offer How little effort can I get away with Rather than thinking how about for the time that I doing this which will not be forever and should not be forever my effort

will be 100%. But effort alone isn't enough because effort is often boundless activity and

energy. And that's great, but it requires that that is done in a way that's going to drive you

forward. Execution. Somebody did a great disservice to the idea of practice by

misunderstanding the research on practice. They just said practice makes perfect. And it's like

no, it doesn't. No, no, no, no. Well executed practice makes perfect. Practicing in a way

that is very conscious of the right ways of doing things, of the structures that must be in place

of the movement of your body, of the activity of your brain, that's a really key element

to success. And that's the fee, paying the fee. The first question that kids would be interested in asking me is, have you ever been dunked on

And I'm like, of course I've been dunked on. My first game was against Michael Jordan

Yeah, I've been dunked on. If you haven't been dunked on in whatever context you're in, you set your sights too low

because that is an inevitable part of challenging yourself to meet and then stretch your potential

And when bad stuff happens to you, you're allowed to be down for a bit

People think resilience is this idea that your performance is here and something happens to you

and your performance stays here. And that's not what resilience is. It never has been

Resilience in the face of setbacks is the idea that here you go, something happens and there's a dip

But resilience is the idea that you recognize this setback is a part of your achievement pathway and you're going to return and maybe even exceed your previous performance despite it

You learn from those experiences. But more than that, they are just going to happen if you have ambition

One of the reasons that setbacks are often disproportionately negative for people is because it sets off a cascade of voices in their head

well, you were never any good. You'll never be any good. This is just a sign of your failure

And they echo around you. And I encourage people to remember a couple of things

One, the voice in your head is not you. You are listening to that voice

That's you. That voice in your head is not you. It is a Frankenstein's monster of all the disapproving looks

all the unsupportive managers or teachers, all the friends who told you that you couldn possibly achieve this thing that you wanted to achieve It a Frankenstein monster that has only one purpose to make you feel bad And we need to treat it like

what it is. It's a heckler in your head. If any of us, with our brilliance, all the stuff that we

really do do well, our jobs that are complex and sophisticated, if we walked along the street

and a random stranger, perhaps hanging from a scaffold, yelled at us

oh yeah, you're not prioritizing your strategy correctly, you wouldn't look up at them and say, oh yeah, you make some good points

You'd recognize that this is a detached stranger with no goal other than to make you feel bad

and you would ignore them. And that's what we need to do, ignore them

And if you do struggle with this, remember that the heckler responds badly to really smart questions being asked

Oh yeah, you're going to do terribly in this next speech. Why do you say that

You can literally ask the voice in your head, why do you say that? And it's amazing how silent it will become

Because in your head, you have evidence of times you've succeeded in exactly that circumstance

In your head, you have evidence of all the work you've done to get to this point and be capable in that moment

And the heckler falls silent. If you want to achieve something extraordinary

You have to recognize that rarely is that achieved alone. You need to build a group to go with you

Who's going to help you on your quest? No good story about achieving something remarkable is just one person trudging with their own thoughts

It is lots of often unexpected roles around you. Some of them are always with you and some of them appear and disappear in different contexts

But who are you building around you? Who's your tribe that's going to help you do something remarkable

I've had that my whole life. my mother while she was alive, and even now as a guiding force for me. My sisters, two very

different people, but with skills and perspectives that has often slapped me when I'm being morose

and cynical as they do lift me. Who are these people who are going to see that vision of yours

and hold you to it in those moments when you doubt, in those moments when you're deciding

it's too much hard work. Who are those people who will support you? Build that group of people

and they will help you thrive. They don't detract from your success in the end. You don't need to

deny that they ever existed because only a fool believes that success achieved alone is real