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Yourself
There’s a deep self-awareness part to motivation that’s important. It’s understanding the things about you that are going to get in the way. The biggest key for me early on was discovering that I am intensely, and in a most dedicated way, lazy. Physical exertion, sweating, exercise, stretching my body to its limits are not things that are on my list of fun things to do, and yet I was setting out to become a professional athlete. Knowing that was incredibly important because I knew that a life without real rigor, without schedules in a sense, that I organized my life in a way that I didn’t have to be disciplined, instead I could just be obedient, and those two things are not the same. Allowed me to achieve something that I couldn’t otherwise have achieved.
I know the elements of me that will hijack my experience as I move forward, the things that will let me down. And I also knew the kind of motivations that would be important to me, the things that would help me travel through the more mundane elements of success and get the reward that I needed from that. Because if you’re trying to achieve something remarkable, there’s a long time that travels before you actually achieve that point. And if you have nothing that rewards you in the interim, nothing that makes you feel like what you’re persevering through is worthwhile. It becomes quite tragic.
Setbacks
When I played in the NBA, I’d come back to England for basketball camps, and the first question that kids would be interested in asking me is, “Have you ever been dunked on?” Of course, I’ve been dunked on. My first game was against Michael Jordan. Yeah. I’ve been dunked on.” If you haven’t been dunked on in whatever context you’re in, you set your sights too low because that is an inevitable part of challenging yourself to meet and then stretch your potential.
If you can keep that in your mind, then when you achieve a setback, when you achieve a blow, when everybody points and laughs because you failed in a moment, you will know that this is simply a part of the stretch that you have put yourself up for. That’s the biggest key to managing these setbacks. The second key, though, is the idea that you’re allowed to be down for a bit. When bad stuff happens to you, you’re allowed to be down for a bit.
People think resilience is this idea that your performance is here, and something happens to you, and your performance stays here. And that’s not what resilience is. It never has been. Something happens, and there’s a dip. But resilience is the idea that you recognize this. This setback is a part of your achievement pathway, and you’re going to return and maybe even exceed your previous performance despite it. But give yourself a moment to lick your wounds, to feel a bit sad, and then get back on that horse.
Your Inner Critic
One of the reasons that setbacks are often disproportionately negative for people is because it sets off a cascade of voices in their head, these unhelpful voices that tell you, “You were never any good.” “You’ll never be any good.” “This is just a sign of your failure,” and they echo around you.
The voice in your head is not you. You are listening to that voice. That’s you. That voice in your head is not you. It is a Frankenstein’s monster of all the disapproving looks, all the unsupportive managers or teachers, all the friends who told you that you couldn’t possibly achieve this thing that you wanted to achieve. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster that has only one purpose, to make you feel bad. And we need to treat it like what it is. It’s a heckler in your head.
If any of us, with our brilliance, all the stuff that we really do do well, our jobs that are complex and sophisticated, if we walked along the street and a random stranger perhaps hanging from a scaffold yelled at us, “Oh, yeah. You’re not you’re not prioritizing your strategy correctly,” or, “Oh, yeah. That’s not the right way for a surgeon to do x y zed.” You wouldn’t look up at them and say, “Oh, yeah. You make some good points.” You’d recognize that this is a detached stranger with no goal other than to make you feel bad, and you would ignore them.
And that’s what we need to do. Ignore them. And if you do struggle with this, remember that the heckler responds badly to really smart questions being asked. “Oh, yeah. You’re going to do terribly in this next speech.” Why do you say that? And it’s amazing how silent it will become. Because in your head, you have evidence of times you’ve succeeded in exactly that circumstance. In your head, you have evidence of all the work you’ve done to get to this point and be capable in that moment. And the heckler falls silent.