?Negativity destroys performance, so it is crucial to train to move from witnessing negative thoughts to starving them and feeding the positive. This is the specific process:
I. Witness negativity.
II. Interdict, or stop, the negative thoughts with a power statement.
III. Redirect your mind with self-talk and imagery to something positive and productive for your current goal.
IV. Maintain your new mental state with a jingle or mantra.?
~ Mark Divine from Unbeatable Mind
That?s an incredibly cool, simple four-step process to get our minds right.
Mark tells the story of the two wolves battling within. The wolf of fear and the wolf of courage. Which one wins? The one we feed. Therefore, we need to STARVE the fear and FEED the courage.
Those four steps are how we do it. Quick re-cap:
First: We need to witness the negativity. That might sound easy, but it?s not. Most of the time we just get swept up in our own negative loops and think we?re in a bad mood b/c of things happening to us rather than b/c of our own negative internal patterns.
So, step one: See the negative thoughts. Train this ability via meditation and practice with the little day-to-day things that trigger us.
Once we notice the negativity, we STOP the negative thoughts. Aggressively. We interdict them with power statements.
To interdict means to ?prohibit or forbid.? It also means ?to intercept and prevent the movement of (a prohibited commodity or person).? From a military perspective, it means to ?impede (an enemy force), especially by aerial bombing of lines of communication or supply.?
Essentially, we want to bomb the enemy force of negativity. To, in Mark?s words: “blow up negative mental chatter and allow your mind to still itself and await its next set of instructions.”
We do that by dropping power statements on the negative thoughts. Stuff like, ?I?ve got this!!!? ?Piece of cake.? ?Let?s do this!? or whatever else resonates with you.
Step 3. Consistently bring your mind back to the good stuff via positive self-talk + positive imagery associated with your goals.
Step 4. Maintain our new positive state with jingles/mantras that fire you up. In Sanskrit, mantra literally means ?tools of the mind.? We want to literally work on our minds to re-tool them.Install this goodness via practice, practice, and more practice. (And then practice, practice, practice and more practice. Seriously. Never miss a moment to show your mind who?s boss.)