How To Get Out Of A Slump

How To Get Out Of A Slump

Sept. 6, 2019

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Maybe things haven’t been going well lately.

What do you do?

The quickest, most surefire way to get out of a slump is this:

Deny the slump exists.

That seems crazy. That seems like lying and self-denial.

Maybe. But it’s also a tool that never fails.

What’s the best weapon used by elite performers? A short memory.

Say our favorite superstar misses six shots in row in the biggest match of the year. What would the superstar do?

Would he worry about all the misses? Would she think, “I’m playing lousy–look at all the shots I’ve missed.”

Nope.

The misses wouldn’t even register.

Because the next one is going in. No doubt about it.

And do you know what happens to that next one?

It goes in.

By not acknowledging the negativity around them, superstars can thrive every day. Of course, not every day is perfect. Not every game is going to easily go the superstar’s way.

But by expecting it to go their way, their chances of success rise exponentially. By not giving any time to all the negative scenarios that might occur, guess what?

They don’t occur.

Wise people have said: We are what we repeatedly do. We become what we constantly think about.

If we think about the slump, the slump stays strong. It stays real.

By slapping thoughts of a slump away, positive thoughts are free to invade our brains. Our brain is free to picture success.

And whatever our brain pictures, our body performs.

As Martin Seligman explains:

The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of the world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe it’s not their fault.

The best way to get out of a slump?

What slump?

 

My book is called The Inevitability of Becoming Rich, and you can find that here.