So Billy Buckner, who just passed away recently was
an incredible eight time Gold Glove, a great baseball player
for the Boston Red Sox.
But he made a mistake in sports that would be
one of the biggest sport bloopers in history, in 1986,
he let the game winning run score on a ground ball through his legs
that ultimately would give the Mets the World Series.
Now, I was just watching an ESPN E:60 Jeremy Shaap story,
and I saw an interview that was done, that resurfaced in 1995,
where Buckner was interviewed 12 days before the World Series
and he said, “the dreams are to win,
to win the World Series, and the nightmare would be for me to let the game
winning run score on a ground ball through my legs”.
And then ultimately that's exactly what would happen.
Now, by saying that out loud, what did he do?
He didn't make it happen, but he increased the probability.
When we started the study, what we learned was that negative thinking
was the most powerful element that our players were combating,
that negative thinking was weaponizing them against them.
So how is negativity carried?
Well, is it your internal thoughts?
Well, if you're dealing with trying to change internal thoughts
then you've got to go to affirmations, you've got to go to imagery,
you've got to go to visualizations, very difficult skills.
But we started to look at the externalization, when somebody says something out loud
it's ten times more powerful than if they think it.
And then as we started to study the data, particularly data that was just reinforced
by Christine Porath from Georgetown and Harvard,
that negativity is a multiple of four to seven times
more powerful than positivity.
So think about that, if I say something out loud, it's 10 X,
if it's negative, it's four to seven times more powerful,
so when I say negative things out loud it's 40 to 70 times more likely that that
will happen or cause a result that won't be good for me
then if I just didn't say anything.
The stories in and around negativity are incredible.
So Pistol Pete Maravich, a basketball player, I'll give you two other
examples, but he was interviewed at 26 years old and
he said, “I don't want to play 10 years of pro basketball
and die at the age of 40 of a heart attack”.
Well, he played 10 years of pro basketball and in
Pasadena, California, died of a heart attack at 40.
There's another great story that I saw from a magazine called Success Unlimited in
1973.
A guy is hired to fix a refrigerated boxcar in back of a train,
he goes into the train, he panics, gets himself locked inside the boxcar.
So now he's pounding on the door there's nothing to do,
he starts to panic and thinks he's going to freeze to death.
He finds a pen, he starts writing down what's going through his mind,
and he writes down, “I'm becoming colder”.
As people one of the things we do to ourselves is observe and report,
“I'm not playing well, I'm having a bad day,
we're having a bad quarter, my marriage isn't going well”,
we observe and report.
Still colder now, he writes, “nothing to do but wait, half asleep, I
can hardly write”.
Finally, he says, “these may be my last words”, and I'll show you the article,
they opened up the box car many hours later and they find him, he's dead.
But the temperature inside the box car was 56 degrees.
The freezing apparatus was broken, there was plenty of air in the boxcar,
there was no physical reason for his death, the best they could say is somehow he'd talked
himself into dying.
And as you know, the book covers the psychogenic death in and around the Korean
War, in the Korean War, one third of all American
POWs died and they said that one of the things that
was done in the PW Camps was the negativity,
they manufactured articles about the United States being bombed,
they withheld all positivity, they didn't give them any mail,
believe it or not, there are like regulations for POW camps throughout the world,
and ultimately they filled up these healthy American soldiers
with all this doubt, a priest would end up calling it give-up-itis,
and healthy American soldiers over a period of days would walk over to a
corner sit down and die of broken hearts.
So, A, your language is powerful, but number two, your behavior is way ahead
of your success.
And when I feel like I can control my behavior, when I feel like I'm in control of
even if I'm going through cancer, even if I'm going through a difficult challenge,
even if I'm going through a reorgan a business, if I still feel like,
“ok, this is not optimal, but there's something I can do”,
then I'm helpful to myself, and when I'm helpful, I'm hopeful,
and when I'm helpless, I'm hopeless.
So my dad's belief always was to make hope a habit.
And that hope was the most powerful medicine that we all have,
and then I think we have to believe that we can influence our future.
And so what are the things that are in our control?
What we watch when we get home, what we listen to when we're in our car,
who we talk to when we get on her cell phone, and what we say out always as we speak,
and I think that those are the powerful things and ultimately
our behavior is what's going to define our success.
But so many people think the self-help industry is about things you do,
I think one of the things that makes athletes so incredible is
what they're willing not to do, what they're willing not to say,
what they're willing not to eat, what they're willing not to consume,
what they're willing not to watch, that's what makes.
Think about it, it's January 2020, what are five things you can not do right
now that will instantly make your life better?