There are many similarities between the elite Crossfit athlete and the self-made millionaire and sometimes they’re the same person. Both people work hard and stay focused on their craft, but sometimes when things aren’t going their way they wonder what’s going wrong. In these times it’s good to know what you need to be doing to keep yourself on the path to greatness.
This list is compiled of the 12 most stated “secrets” self-made millionaires use in their daily routine and implement into their mindset that we can use to accelerate our success in Crossfit.
12 Mental Success Secrets of Self-made Millionaires For Crossfit Athletes
1. Dream Big
Imagine all the things that you want to accomplish. Think passionately about what your life would be like if everything was perfect and your dream was already accomplished. Visualize yourself as a Crossfit Games athlete and think about all that comes with that. These are your dreams, it is not about what anyone else around you wants, it is about who you want to be and what you want to do. If you do not have a dream, you do not have a chance.
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2. Do What You Love To Do
The easiest way to endure the trials that come with pursuing your dream is to absolutely love what you do. When you do what you love the hours and days all seem to blend together because you’re not waiting for the weekend and you’re not waiting to get off work so you can do what you really want. You’re already doing what you love to do!
People who love what they do will never have a lack of energy or motivation, waking up early and staying late will never be an issue for them.
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3. Commit To Excellence
If your goal is to be an athlete at the Crossfit Games you already know how hard it is and what it takes to get there. Even if you work on your goal everyday it is not just enough to go through the motions, you have to take every day of training to the next level and commit to excellence. Many self-made millionaires say that it takes on average 5-7 years to be a master in your field, that is 5-7 years of hard work day in and day out. The time will pass anyway, why not start now?
This is another reason why you have to have such a burning passion in your chest for your dream. When you’re loving what you’re doing committing to excellence will be no problem at all. If you love what you do you will automatically want to be the best.
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4. Develop a Clear Sense of Direction
“You can’t hit a target that you can not see.” Even if you kind of have an idea of what you want that is not good enough, you have to pull these ideas out of your subconscious and clearly determine exactly where your big dreams will take you, just like tip #1. Take it a step further and write down your direction, write down what the end goal is for you and look at that paper everyday.
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5. Refuse To Consider The Possibility of Failure
It is often the fear of failure that holds us back, not the actual failure. Successful people know that there is no failure, only feedback. Every extremely successful person tries to find the good thing about every failure. With every failure is the opportunity to learn and eventually you will become so smart that eventually success will be inevitable.
The thing about failure is that you have actually only failed once you quit, besides quitting there is no true failure. If your goal was to make regionals this year but you didn’t make it, that doesn’t mean you failed, you’ve just learned how to better prepare for next year.
6. Dedicate Yourself To Lifelong Learning
It has been stated by numerous self-made millionaires that reading for just an hour a day will accelerate your path to success, you will get where you want faster and with more wisdom. Reading books is a great way to put yourself into any situation that may arise in your life and the great benefit of this is that when you actually have to deal with a similar situation you have already been mentally prepared.
If you constantly read books and watch videos from successful coaches and athletes who have attained elite status you can learn a variety of ways that each person used throughout their journey and use those tips and training strategies that best work for you.
7. Be Around The Right People
Changing a person’s reference group changes their behavior, we all know this. “Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.” People are like chameleons in the way that we start to become like the people around us. If you spend time with extremely positive people it is inevitable that you will become positive. When you are around positive people you will not hear complaints and excuses, you will hear encouragement and support. Another fantastic quality about positive people is that they won’t allow you to be negative either.
Just as you know who you should be spending time with you also need to know who you should be avoiding. You absolutely need to avoid negative people like the plague as there is no faster way to get discouraged than to hear the words of a negative person.
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8. Be Prepared To Climb From Peak to Peak
Not every day is going to be great and not every day is going to be bad, you are going to have peaks and you are going to have valleys. The key is to keep the same attitude towards yourself and your dream of greatness whether it is a good or bad day. Don’t get overconfident on your good days and don’t get discouraged on your bad days.Take training one day at a time and keep moving forward, you will notice how the problems seem to worry you less and less as you go on.
9. Develop Resilience and Bounce Back
A workout is going to show up that includes one, if not a few of your weaknesses and you are not going to win that workout and you are not going to get the time or score that you want. You have been working on these weaknesses but you’re still not performing the way you know you need to and so you get discouraged. When this happens it is important to use this as motivation and a sign that you need to hammer these weaknesses even harder so that when a workout like that shows up you are prepared.
One of the best ways to develop resilience is to go through mental rehearsal, which is mentally and physically preparing for the bad things before they happen. Just like reading, this practice puts you in difficult situations before you have to actually deal with them. How you respond to setbacks determines who you are.
Another activity to practice is to write down on paper what you are most worried about and write down how you would solve that. Often just by having that worry cleared from your mind the solution will present itself to you. Write down your worst movements/lifts and work on those multiple times per week.
10. Become an Unshakable Optimist
A main feature of optimists is that they think about and act upon what they want most of the time. When you are around someone with such a strong passion for something have you ever noticed how they never stop talking about it? They are so happy and optimistic about what they are doing that it carries over to all parts of their life.
Pessimists may be constantly talking about something all the time as well, but they are too busy complaining and making excuses to take action.
A few huge differences between optimists and pessimists:
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Optimists learn more things.
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Optimists try more things.
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Optimists continue to persist.
11. Develop Courage
Above all forms of courage the most important is to develop the courage to begin. If you waited for all obstacles to disappear before you began you would never get started. It’s all nice when everything looks great in your imagination, but nothing will happen unless you have the courage to take action.
If your olympic lifts are 100+ pounds/kilos less than the pros, but you don’t want to work on getting stronger because you’re afraid of what people will think and say when they see you missing lifts, then you will not make gains. Ask questions, research technique tips, go in the corner and forget what people think.
You also need to develop the courage to endure. You have to learn how to endure when it looks like things aren’t going your way. You have to endure when it hasn’t been going your way for a long while now. You have to endure because if you don’t things will never go your way.
12. Develop Self-Discipline
The best definition of self-discipline I’ve heard is “The ability to make yourself do what you know you should do, when you should do it, even though you don’t want to.” No one wants to do the hard stuff, but that’s exactly what we need to be doing.
Doing the hard stuff is picking your two worst movements, putting them in your worst time domain and hitting that workout often. Doing the hard stuff is working on your technique with light weights when you want to lift heavy and look cool.
Self-discipline also has a strong connection to persistence. Every time you persist you are building your self-discipline.
I hope that this post was not only educational, but motivational as well.
We as athletes can learn a lot from self-made millionaires as they have went through the process and have been generous enough to share their knowledge with us. You probably have already heard of many of these “secrets” on this page, but maybe you have never specifically applied them to Crossfit and now you can look at your training in a different way.
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