Self-belief, focus and attention, training your mental model to boost performance
May 5, 2024
Welcome to Graymatter, a weekly newsletter with ideas and strategies to unlock full potential through self-leadership and technology.
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👑 Leaning into your self-belief
Your quest toward experiencing your full potential requires an unwavering belief in yourself. People quickly assess who you are and what they think you are capable of simply by how you carry yourself. Your LinkedIn headline and profile are interpreted rapidly, and the words influence the reader’s perception of your power and brand.
In my work as a coach, it’s common for people to limit their ambitions and remain in the status quo because they don’t believe in who they can become. Their identity and behaviors remain constant, as do their results. Last year, I learned about the research behind how identity controls performance in the book Mastering Leadership. Identity and your self-awareness of your identity is the single biggest factor that controls your career potential and outcomes.
What prevents you from unlocking your career potential lives within you—the self-limiting beliefs that are real but not true. These beliefs prevent you from transforming into a new identity.
How do you expect others to believe and bet on you without strong self-belief?
How does the intensity and display of your self-belief influence your compensation and net worth?
What channels and forums do you use to demonstrate your confidence in your skills, powers, and brand?
Crowning yourself as a king or queen is one strategy to neutralize self-imposed limitations.
Strategy of the Crown by Robert Greene
The Strategy of the Crown is based on a simple chain of cause and effect. If we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward, just as a crown creates an aura around a king. This outward radiance will infect people around us, who will think we must have reasons to feel so confident. People who wear crowns seem to feel no inner sense of the limits to what they can ask for or what they can accomplish. This too radiates outside. Limits and boundaries disappear.
The trick is simple: Be overcome by your self-belief. Even while you are practicing a kind of deception on yourself, act like a king. You are likely to be treated as one.
Remember: It is up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom. Even those that turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.Image: The Crown. Place it upon your head and you assume a different pose - tranquil yet radiating assurance. Never show doubt, never lose your dignity beneath the crown, or it will not fit. It will seem to be destined for one more worthy. Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emperors crown themselves.
Law 34 - Be Royal in Your Own Fashion: Act Like a King to be Treated Like One, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
🚀 Mastery is a quest for focus and attention
Continuously building skills and mastering your career craft is essential to realizing fulfillment, financial independence, and autonomy. Over the last few months, I have been studying the levers we have to accelerate mastery and unlock career potential.
Each day is an opportunity to maximize the utilization of time and energy through focus and attention. Focus is narrowing your attention on a goal or task, while attention is selectively concentrating on one thing over a sustained period. These are the keys to daily growth that compound over time to build skills and a unique value proposition. The benefits of focus and attention are not a novel idea, but I suspect you have an opportunity to dial it up, given the distractions that exist in modern work and life.
You can’t be everything to everyone. There is too much competition from people who have narrowed their focus to a strong value proposition that the market needs. Everyone has twenty-four hours in a day, but how you use them separates the winners from the average.
Here are a few ideas and strategies to strengthen focus and attention. The first step is to build mindfulness to increase your awareness of how you are spending time and the distractions that reduce your productivity. I do a daily focus meditation using the Calm and Headspace apps, which have built my focus and attention muscle. I am now tuned in when my mind wanders off task or when I am about to go down a rabbit hole online that does not align with a priority. Other ideas include:
I plan my calendar on Sunday to allocate my time for the upcoming week. This lets me focus on execution rather than ideating about what I should do.
I set specific goals for the week that I must deliver on and review my progress daily.
I close apps and silence notifications to reduce distraction.
I place my phone longer than an arm’s reach away when I need to get laser-focused on a task.
I use a timer to challenge myself to complete the task within the allotted time.
At the end of each day, I do a “day-in-review” reflection to identify what I did well and how to improve my focus and productivity.
Limit email to specific timeslots on my calendar. Monitoring and responding to email as it comes in is a focus and attention killer.
Organizing workspace to ensure it is free of clutter and optimized for execution.
🧠 Train your mental model to unlock potential
Ten years ago, I returned to grad school for the second time to study data science. Most of the coursework was learning techniques to train machine learning models to make predictions and optimize outcomes using historical data. In simple terms, these models learned an internal representation of the data and patterns to solve complex problems and predict the future. Our brains are also models, wired uniquely due to our experiences and environments that influence how we see the world. Our mind, including our intelligence and beliefs, controls the actions and quality of our lives. Your ability to periodically “retrain” your mental model is required to grow and adapt.
Much like I learned how to “feature engineer” the most significant variables of a machine learning model and tune it for high accuracy, I have learned how to re-train my brain to recognize the habits, routines, people, and environments that optimize my daily performance. Each day, you can perform and experience your best self once you understand which inputs are required to maximize the outputs. It’s like reverse engineering what you need to do to get the desired outcomes. This is similar to the process of backpropagation in machine learning, which adjusts the model networks to achieve an optimized result through training it.
Here are a few ideas to retrain your mental model by studying the relationship between inputs and outputs of a typical day. The key muscle here is the self-awareness to consciously recognize the patterns, routines, and beliefs that control our daily experiences.
Meditation—As mentioned above, tapping into mindfulness and a deeper awareness of your well-being professionally and personally is essential to overcoming the factors limiting your potential. You can then explore options to break through these limitations. You don’t know what you don’t know unless you tap into the calm and peaceful mind.
Emotions - Tuning into your positive and negative emotions gives clues into the activities and situations that influence your well-being. You will identify people you must distance yourself from, work activities that energize you, and environments that boost or limit your performance. Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown describes a taxonomy of 80+ emotions to learn the language of the human experience.
Witness - This is the idea from The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer to evaluate yourself from afar as if you were the witness to your actions.
Identity - What identity do I need to show up with to get the outcomes I want? How do I make that identity real through my actions and behaviors? What is stopping me from becoming the person of my vision? See my article on identity to learn more.
Walk and Hikes - Disconnect and freely explore your mind by walking and hiking in nature. There is much to learn about who you are and what you must do to make the most of your life.
Given the rapid adoption of AI and its impact on eliminating jobs, your ability to retrain your mental model and adapt will ensure relevancy.
Inner Quest: Unlocking Career Potential Cohort Course
One theme I consistently see when people seek a career change or want to boost their performance is that they are excited about the outcome but lack the discipline and experience to make it happen. To help people overcome the activation energy of change, I have designed a four-week cohort-based course to guide people through Strategy 1—Know Yourself—of my career framework. The course objective is to unlock your full potential by discovering your best self and shifting your mindset to catalyze change and accelerate career growth. The course includes readings, live sessions, homework, and office hour sessions. The cohort is limited to seven people to create a safe, intimate, and trusting experience.
Who will you meet on the Inner Quest? Join me to find out!
Enroll or join the email list to get updates on future cohorts.
🙏 Thanks for reading Graymatter. Please share this newsletter with friends and colleagues who can apply these ideas.
- James