Being the best version of yourself starts with self belief, says leadership expert

James Laughlin is a leadership expert who has coached business executives and elite athletes. In this chapter from his best-selling book Habits of High Performers, he explains his theory on the connection between self belief and high performance, and how we can build better self belief through our use of language.

The key to high performance is understanding your self-beliefs. You need to uncover your beliefs about yourself, the people around you and your purpose here on earth. I work with everyday people who want to become the greatest version of themselves, and I’m very attuned and alert to the language they use. When people come to me with problems or obstacles, I often sit and listen, because the words they use to express themselves outwardly are a mirror of their inner feelings and beliefs. Often they see roadblocks as external forces, but for the most part they are inner challenges.

People are often their own greatest obstacle, but the great thing is that, more often than not, the obstacle is the way.

What I mean is, when we move towards an obstacle and start to consider the possibilities, we begin to find a way to overcome it. The only way to grow is to overcome the obstacle in front of you.

Self-limiting beliefs are one of the greatest barriers in the worlds of business and sport. Andrew Blackman, a former Wall Street Journal staff reporter, described them as, ‘assumptions or perceptions that you’ve got about yourself and about the way the world works. These assumptions are “self-limiting” because in some way they’re holding you back from achieving what you are capable of.’

Before we attempt to step towards our big personal goal, our El Capitan, we need to get clear on our inner self-beliefs – because otherwise we are hamstringing ourselves from the outset. What happens within dictates what unfolds without. The thoughts you focus on inside your mind have a significant impact on your life in the physical world. Your mind is the single greatest determining factor in whether you reach your personal summit or not.

Over the years, I’ve discovered that high performers can unlock success by rewiring four specific beliefs:

1. success

2. failure

3. money

4. happiness.

These are the most common areas that accelerate people towards their El Cap or stop them before they even take the first step. Here are some excuses I’ve heard over the years from clients, friends and most certainly myself. Never forget that beneath every excuse there is always a self-sabotaging belief:

• ‘I’m too busy.’

• ‘I’m too old.’

• ‘I’m too young.’

• ‘I come from a family of big-boned people.’

• ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees.’

• ‘I don’t have the money.’

• ‘I don’t have the resources.’

• ‘I’m a night owl.’

• ‘I’m not a morning person.’

• ‘I don’t like to read.’

• ‘I’m too fat.’

• ‘I’m too slow.’

• ‘I have a bad memory.’

• ‘I don’t have a network of influential friends.’

• ‘The world doesn’t help people like me succeed.’

And the list goes on. Have you said any of the above? I most certainly have. I remember looking at successful people and thinking, ‘I could never achieve that.’ I came from a working class town. I wasn’t a trust-fund baby. I didn’t have a private school education … My list was literally endless. Until my beliefs were challenged. Reading great books and seeing underdogs win was what truly rewrote the narrative of what I believed. I realised that high performance is a choice. And it begins with you choosing how you define your beliefs.

The modern era has brought with it a modern language – or should I say a lazy language. Humans like to shorten words and adapt words from urban slang, but we need to realise that language plays a prominent part in shaping how we feel and act.

How about describing that world-class figure-skating performance as ‘sick’. Or that sublime gelato you had as ‘dope’. Or wishing a friend luck for an exam with ‘Go crush it’? How about telling a colleague to ‘Kill it’ with their upcoming public speech?

Scientific studies show that positive and negative words not only affect us on a psychological level, but also have a significant impact on the outcome of our lives. Using painful or negative words increases implicit processing within the brain, which simply means that our stress and anxiety levels can be increased by the words we decide to use. When neuroscience proves that our use of words can dictate our level of psychological stress, that’s a pretty compelling reason to choose the high road with our language.

Neuroscience has shown that words can literally change your brain. When you hold a positive and optimistic word in your mind, you stimulate frontal lobe activity. To impact the world around you in a positive way, the positivity must start within. Your self-talk is the seed of self-mastery. Choosing to use exquisite words and sublime language will have a compounding effect on your mindset, your emotions and your behaviours.

PRACTICAL EXERCISE: LEVEL-UP YOUR LANGUAGE

If you want to play the high-performance game, then you need to commit to a language level-up each and every day.

The first step in levelling up your inner dialogue is to become aware of the words you use, out loud but especially in your mind. For the next 24 hours, I want you to take stock of the words you’re using to describe yourself, your abilities and your actions. Are they uplifting words? Do you swear frequently? Do you use vulgar language? Pay attention to that little voice in your head to see what it’s saying.

Each time you identify a negative word, my challenge to you is to replace it with the most sublime word you can muster. When you actively start to look for the optimistic slant in everyday challenges, you begin to rewrite the neural narrative inside your head. This is the starting point for every action you take.

I catch myself frequently reverting to negative self-talk, and negative descriptors about situations, events and people. We all possess a negativity bias, an ancient survival mechanism that helped our ancestors stay alert to physical threats and dangers, which is largely redundant in our relatively safe modern landscape.

We have thousands of thoughts every day. It’s important to know that more than 85 per cent of what we worry about never happens and 97 per cent of our worries are baseless. In short, it’s paramount that we take the time to focus on what is positive and what is possible. If we don’t take charge of where our focus goes, it will naturally revert to worry and rumination. Where your focus goes, your energy flows. The price of entry to the realm of high performance is being actively focused on our language.

When I do find myself saying negative words, or thinking them, I implement a rule of replacing each one with three positive words. Negativity has a longer shelf life than positivity because of nature’s hard-wired design of the nervous system. Scientists have discovered that it takes three positives to counteract one negative experience. So, for every awful experience you endure in an activity or from a person, you need to experience at least three positive emotional experiences to counteract that.

High performers know that practice makes permanent. Get started today. Pay attention to your thoughts and spoken words, and when you hear a negative one, simply replace it with three positive words. Or if you speak negatively of another person, choose to find three things you admire about them. If something upsetting, frustrating or disappointing happens to you, then seek to create three positive experiences throughout the day. The micro-wins are the macro-wins. Don’t set yourself up for disappointment. Keep your positives to something very achievable: perhaps it’s carving out five minutes to meditate, or watching the sunset, or reading a book for 20 minutes or savouring a hot drink. Look for the gold in the small moments to truly take ownership of your positive psychology.

Extracted from Habits of High Performers, by James Laughlin (published by HarperCollins Aotearoa NZ).