Eric Potterat

This doesn't mean the client is going to say, hey, this person isn't qualified for whatever advice or whatever presentation they're given.

I think interestingly, when you look at the statistics at the world class level, the only way that individuals are more likely to make an additional mistake after they've made a mistake is if they focus on that mistake.

So if you think about it, it makes intuitive sense, right?

If I'm taking my mental energy and I just dropped that proverbial touchdown pass or I dropped that proverbial presentation to a client, I'm much more likely to fumble again

If I'm focusing on that rather than kind of what my mission was and what I've prepared for prior to that event.

So soft talk is really important.

Yeah, so think about this as, again, I'm bringing up a lot of metaphors or a lot of examples today.

Think about dominoes.

The whole idea of, you know, if I lined up 100 dominoes in front of you and me today and the first one falls, we know what's going to happen to the other 99.

The ability of controlling that self-talk is watching the first three or four dominoes fall and then grabbing that fifth domino before it can affect this, you know, sixth or seventh.

So that's metaphorically speaking, what I'm trying to state is that it's really important to put that mistake.

And here's another technique, by the way, we call it black boxing or the fancy psychological term is compartmentalization.

When you make that proverbial mistake, put it into a box and stay mission minded, meaning tell yourself, I need to.

put that away for a moment or an hour or two i need to complete whatever the mission is whether it's a game whether it's you know combat whether it's a business presentation and then at a future time when the mission is done we can unpack that unpack the proverbial box and take a look at what went wrong and try to learn from that

So interesting statistics also.

We know that most negative consequences to self-talk.

So when I say negative consequence, most of the time when I'm anxious, when I'm irritated, when I'm bummed out, 94% of the time that's due to what we call irrational thoughts.

So this ties directly to self-talk.

The elite performers don't have the 94% irrational talk.

Those irrational thoughts because they're looking for evidence.