Latest / From Chad / Telling #1161
Transcript
- 0:00What am I telling myself right now?
- 0:03There's a story behind that. This is your daily message from
- 0:07Chad #1161 to upgrade your mental game today by telling
- 0:11yourself a better story. Because the most important story
- 0:14you hear is the story you tell yourself.
- 0:17This message is dedicated to Jaden Francis on his birthday.
- 0:20You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in
- 0:23the World by going to from chad.gumroad.com.
- 0:27The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are
- 0:29always available at www.fromchad.com.
- 0:33Here's the upgrade. You think self talk is just
- 0:35noise in your head. Upgraded thinking knows it's the
- 0:38most powerful drug you take all day and you get to write the
- 0:41prescription. Here's the story.
- 0:44Andre Agassi won 869 professional tennis matches in
- 0:48his career, and he'll tell you he won a good number of them in
- 0:52the shower. He calls tennis the closest
- 0:54thing to solitary confinement. There is no coach, no teammate,
- 0:58no timeout, Just you and the voice in your head.
- 1:01So in the afternoons before a match, he'd stand in the shower
- 1:04and say crazy things to himself over and over.
- 1:08He'd say them until he believed them, And he credits the winds
- 1:11to that ritual. Then he tells you the other
- 1:14side. One day he read a columnist who
- 1:16declared flatly that Agassi simply wasn't a champion.
- 1:20And he nearly cracked under it, because Agassi handed his story
- 1:24to a stranger sitting behind a keyboard whom he didn't know and
- 1:27who didn't know him, and let that man narrate who he was.
- 1:31You are talking to yourself all day, whether you plan to or not.
- 1:36You might be thinking, Chad, I don't talk to myself.
- 1:39That's what crazy people do. Well, that thought you just had
- 1:42is what I'm talking about. The only question is who's
- 1:46holding the pin? You or some voice you picked up
- 1:48from someone who doesn't know you, love you, or have your best
- 1:51interest at heart. Brad Jacobs has built eight
- 1:55companies with more than a billion dollars of revenue each,
- 1:59and he believes mindset is the most important tool in all of
- 2:03his companies. He opens his book not with
- 2:05strategy, but with one question to run all day long.
- 2:09What am I telling myself right now?
- 2:11Most of us never once stopped to check.
- 2:15This podcast started as audio text I sent to all the kids each
- 2:18morning. The most important story you
- 2:20hear is the one you tell yourself is the maxim I shared
- 2:23on that first voice message. All we have is story.
- 2:28You can't change the past, but you can change the story you
- 2:30tell yourself about it. You can't control anyone around
- 2:34you, but you can control the story of how you respond.
- 2:37You can't foresee the future, but you can write the story of
- 2:41what to expect. Rick Rubin says doubting your
- 2:44work makes you better. You can say this isn't as good
- 2:47as it can be and it will sharpen you, but doubting yourself by
- 2:51saying I'm not a champion only leads to hopelessness.
- 2:55You can talk yourself all the way to excellence, but only
- 2:59through one of those two doors. So get in the shower today, ask
- 3:04the question, and when you catch the voice running away with the
- 3:08story, take the pin back. The better story to tell
- 3:11yourself is today I will focus on telling myself the story I
- 3:15need to hear. Tell me the story you tell
- 3:18yourself to from chadsmith@gmail.com.
- 3:21Send someone a text and ask them what's the most important story
- 3:24you'll ever hear.