Win Before You Even Play

28 Dec
2012

Social Capitalist

 
Mark Divine, founder of CrossFit, former Navy Seal and all around truly inspiring guy, was a guest on The Social Capitalist a few months back. He shared a ton of information about motivation, metal toughness, teamwork and achievement. In this excerpt he shares one key premise of success - win in your mind before you even start to play.
The whole first and second lesson of Unbeatable Mind is what I call the first premise. The first premise is that you’ve got to win in your mind before you can even attempt to win on the battlefield. That’s a famous Sunsu quote. And so how do we do this? How do we develop awareness?
Really, it starts with cultivating a love for silence. We don’t spend much time alone or in silence in our society. We’re always with our Blackberries and iPhones and TV in the background, running from one meeting to another, then jumping in the car and dealing with traffic and listening to the radio. We never shut off the constant and incessant stream coming into our minds.
As a result, our minds are like that choppy, turbulent water, the rapids. They’re just bouncing all around, failing to concentrate deeply on any one task. Everyone thinks, “Well, I’ve got to multitask.” Well, you can’t multitask, and research is finally showing that you can’t. Your mind can only focus on one thing at a time. So, a multi-tasker, really what they’re doing is giving short shift to everything and not doing anything really well.
So what we have people do is just start to sit in silence and watch their breath – very classic breath awareness meditation that you’ll find in every kind of spiritual tradition and all warrior traditions – and then try to cultivate a connection with what I call your witness, which is that part of you which is watching everything, in spite of what your mind is doing. Cultivation of that witness then leads to greater awareness of both what’s going on in your mind – your thoughts and emotions – as well as what’s going on in your body. You develop what I would call a spaciousness. So, that space between the stimulus and the response, that’s cultivated through silence, and you want to develop that spaciousness.
One simple practice that I teach, and this is also relevant for all your listeners, is what I call the three breath practice. I didn’t invent this. This is for anytime you have something that comes at you that is typically going to stimulate a reactive response, typically driven by this background of obviousness, a subconscious belief system or some variation thereof. You just pause and take three deep, controlled breaths before you respond. That has the double whammy of controlling the arousal response, so everything is settled down in you. Your mind and your body settle in that three breath space, and it also allows the mind to be aware of the stimulus that was arising and about to fly out of your mouth and to maybe reorganize it for a much more powerful response.
So take a few deep breaths, and then go check out the rest of Mark's incredible insights in the recording and transcript from the interview.
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