[00:00] Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man. Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harshaw, Jr. And today I’m bringing you a solo episode. We’re talking about something I call a cognitive conversion.

[00:20] And I’m going to unpack that and explain this to you and how you can have one of these for yourself. So, I have worked with Hundreds of men to help them change their beliefs about what’s possible in their business and what’s possible in their career and their lives. And by the end of this episode, you’re going to have a simple strategy for changing your own belief system, your own unconscious beliefs that are holding you back.

[00:42] I don’t care what level you’re at. We all have these. You’re just hardwired into us and I’m going to help you implement this system. Use this strategy to help you achieve even higher level goals. I’m going to walk you through a process to change your beliefs about what’s possible for you. So let me start by telling you a story.

[00:59] There’s a story about a sandwich shop owner, a very successful sandwich shop. And you know, they had lines out the door and had been a great group of patrons who would just frequent the restaurant. And the owner had been, you know, owned it for decades. And he gave away. Big servings and big sandwiches and pickles and free pickles and free potato chips and all of this stuff.

[01:20] And which is why, you know, one of the reasons why people would always come back and they just loved it. Well, his son went off to business school, came back and he said he was in business for himself. And he said, boy, dad, I don’t know if you realize, but you know, people are really struggling out there. And, you know, you got to be careful giving away the free stuff, the big servings and the free chips and pickles.

[01:41] And, you know, you really should be cutting back on that because the economy, the economy is bad out there and you should be aware of that. And his dad said, okay, well, gosh, you’re, you’re in business. You got your MBA and I’ll take this. This advice. And he started cutting back and as he cut back, some of his customers didn’t like that, and they saw the reduction in the sizes and the portions and the, the, you know, now charging for pickles and charging for chips.

[02:04] And so people started just coming less and less, right. They didn’t, you know, all of a sudden stop coming and started thinking this is, this is a terrible restaurant. They just. They just didn’t come quite as often and, you know, they’d go to other places. And, and so all of a sudden he start, the restaurant owner starts seeing his business shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.

[02:23] The lines are no longer out the door. Some of his regulars aren’t coming quite as regular anymore. And his son comes to visit again and says, dad, how you doing? How’s the shop going? So you’ve, you’ve cut back. And, and he said, boy, son, you’re right. It really is tough out there. I’ve seen my, my business is shrinking and it’s getting a lot tougher here.

[02:41] So there’s this confirmation bias, right? So this belief, this limiting belief, this belief of the fear of what’s going on out there impacts this restaurant owner, this, this sandwich shop owner. And he changes what he does. He changes his actions based on this new belief, this new limiting Belief this new fear and and all of his fears come true, right?

[03:04] It is confirmed. The economy is bad in the year. Your customers aren’t don’t have quite the money to spend and and his restaurant shrinks and his customer base shrinks and he starts to struggle just like everybody else. And you see this happening every day. There are these beliefs that are planted into you by the news, by the social media, by your parents.

[03:24] And now that little voice that’s inside of your own head, telling you stories, telling you, you know, stories of fear and doubt and what could happen. And so let me tell you a different story about fear and doubt and how you can approach this. Uh, let’s say there was a college football player. Imagine a college football player.

[03:45] He’s. Goes to, to play for his dream college and, and he doesn’t make the starting lineup, but, but eventually, you know, the, there’s a blowout and they’re beating a team really, really bad. And it’s like fourth quarter, late in the game, they’re just destroying this team. And, and coach says, you know what, we’re going to put the rookie in, we’re going to put this freshman in and see how he can do because we’re up so big.

[04:06] Well, freshman goes in and first pass. ever throws a pick six. What is your beliefs? What are your beliefs when that happened? If that were to happen to you, what, what all of a sudden do you believe about yourself? Well, imagine this same player, quarterback, he ends up having an okay career and makes a starting lineup later in his career and hopes to get drafted high in the NFL, but he doesn’t, he doesn’t get drafted high.

[04:33] He gets drafted at right around 200th pick. So what is your belief around that? How good do you think you can really be if all the experts, all the pros, all the best people out there at evaluating talent don’t think you’re very good? What is your belief? What is your unconscious belief? Not even at a conscious level, just unconsciously, what are you thinking?

[04:55] Now, let’s say you make it in the NFL and you eventually earn the starting job and one of your first few starts, you throw four Four interceptions. Not one, not two, not three, four in the same game. Just very short, shortly into your, your career. What’s your belief as a matter of fact, what if throughout that entire rookie season, you have four games where you actually throw more interceptions than you scored through touchdowns, what’s your belief, what’s your belief about yourself, what’s possible, how good you are.

[05:31] What are your unconscious beliefs? What are your limiting beliefs about yourself in that situation? Now imagine you’re in the biggest game of your career and you’re getting destroyed. Past halftime and you’re down by like 25 points. What’s your belief? I mean, what do you think is possible? Maybe you can make it close and maybe close the gap, but obviously you’re not going to win that game.

[05:51] Do you believe you can win it? Well, if you don’t know already who I’m talking about, this is a real person. This is Tom Brady. You know, in that game, they were losing 28 to three in the Super Bowl and came back and they won the game because he believed. And you might be sitting there thinking, well, yeah, well, Tom, that’s Tom Brady.

[06:06] He just has it right. He threw a pick six in his very first pass as a college quarterback. He was drafted 199th overall, you know, the, the best people at evaluating talent in the world told him essentially, you’re not very good. The fifth start of his NFL career, he threw four picks, had a, you know, four games that season where he threw more interceptions than he did touchdowns.

[06:27] Like, what is your belief around that? This is Tom Brady, a guy who obviously didn’t let that hold him back. Now you say, Tom Brady just has it. Well, no, Tom Brady doesn’t just have it. Tom Brady worked with a sports psychologist named Greg Harden. Who helped a lot of other great athletes, uh, including Michael Phelps and Desmond Howard.

[06:48] So he’s helped these other guys and, and he helps Tom Brady too. So Tom Brady, and Tom Brady actually credited. His mindset coach, this, this Greg Hardin for helping him in that game when they were down 28 to three, he said, these beliefs in this mindset that he instilled into me years ago actually helped me win that game.

[07:08] So Tom Brady went through this process of restructuring his beliefs, like being aware of his beliefs and structuring them in a way that could be positive. And in my research, when creating Reveal Your Path, I discovered something in cognitive behavioral therapy called cognitive restructuring. And here is a definition of cognitive restructuring.

[07:32] It’s a therapeutic technique used in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, where you identify and challenge your negative or unhelpful thoughts, sometimes called cognitive distortions. And you replace them with more balanced, Realistic thinking patterns aiming to improve your emotional state and behavior by changing the way you interpret situations, right?

[07:53] This is exactly what Tom Brady went through. And to be honest, this is the opposite of what the sandwich shop owner went through, right? He did the obvious is cognitive restructuring in the negative way, right? He had these negative thoughts implanted into his mind and he started these cognitive distortions And he believed those and these thinking patterns that led him to operate out of fear, operate out of doubt, which led to the business declining.

[08:22] Now, here’s the deal. This is absolutely normal. This is normal. Everybody has these limiting beliefs. And as a matter of fact, this used to keep us alive, right? Our ancestors You were, you know, if you were sort of high competence and low risk taking, right? High, you know, if you had, uh, great capabilities, but you had some self doubt wired into you, you tended to take less risks and therefore you didn’t get eaten by the saber tooth tiger, right?

[08:48] You survived a little bit better because you were, you know, high competence, low risk taking. And so that was okay to have those limiting beliefs. It kept us alive. But now It just holds us back, right? There’s so many ways that this does not serve you. Self doubt and limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome.

[09:07] Those things don’t serve you now, like they did our ancestors. Like for me, for example, when I was in high school as a high school wrestler, I used to be around teammates who, and friends from either, even local schools, who. We’re went on to all this incredible success. And these are guys who I practice with and guys who I would beat in wrestling matches, we would compete against each other and summer tournaments and off season matches guys like Tig Moore, Steve Pushkar, Eric Newell, Mike Ziska.

[09:34] These are all friends of mine who I were competitors as well. And guys who I had beaten during my high school career in the summer and, and throughout these different tournaments, but they all placed at the state championships. In Pennsylvania, and I never even got onto the podium, right? So I kept seeing, I had this recurring theme of other people are successful.

[09:55] But I’m not, right? Successes for other people. These beliefs became hardwired into me and it’s continued in through college for years into my college career. And then finally I met with a sports psychologist, a mindset coach, and he helped me change these beliefs. He challenged by thinking, you know, he said, well, you’ve beaten some of these guys before, so I guess you’re good enough.

[10:17] Is that accurate? Yeah. Well, actually that is accurate. Uh, are you doing the hard work that’s necessary? Like, are you working hard enough? Are you putting in the hours and the time? I said, well, yeah, I am. And do you have the coaches, the teammates, the work ethic, the, you know, the, the resources? And the answer is yes, I do.

[10:34] I have this and I have that and I have this and I have that. So I realized that I had all of these things. And so then the question became, can you just let go? Can you start with the end in mind? Stephen Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Can you start with the end in mind and then just let go?

[10:50] And yeah, I could. And this mindset work that I did, this cognitive restructuring that I did allowed me to reframe my career, reframe my life. My past in a way that was helpful for me, helpful for me to move forward and, and simply perform at my best win or lose. I’ve interviewed Michael Chandler, UFC fighter on this podcast a couple of times.

[11:12] And he always talks about how he said, I was a small kid from a small town and I was taught to think small. And he now has said this on the podcast. He said, I approach my goals with total disregard for past failures. Think about that. Total disregard for past failures. Again, you go, well, Michael Chandler, one of the best in the world at what he does.

[11:34] He just has it. No, he actually works with a mindset coach. I think he has multiple guys he’s worked with. One of whom is Chris Patterson, but he works with people to help him get outside of his own head and do his own cognitive restructuring. And for me, again, another example of me, you know, having these limiting beliefs in my professional career.

[11:57] was whenever I had a failed technology company, a software company. And after a couple of years of this, I thought, and I ended up shut the business. We had revenue, we had customers, but not enough to keep the lights on. I thought to myself, gosh, I’m just not good at this technology company thing. Um, when in reality, you know, if I go back and do the cognitive restructuring type of work, then I realized, wait a second, no, you’re actually more capable and more qualified now than ever before.

[12:26] And so you have to do this for yourself too. This doesn’t just happen by default. Now, some people, sure, some people maybe have a little bit of a different hard wiring into them based on their parents or coaching type of coaching that they’ve had. And to be honest, I think I have a lot of the good wiring in me as well because of the people I got to grow up around Olympians and world class performers.

[12:48] But I have some of the negative wiring in me also. And that’s the part that I’m always working to overcome. And, and you have some of that in you too, whether it came from parents or coaches or teachers or society, or maybe you’re seeing that in social media right now, what you don’t have, but you have to do this work and here, I’m going to give you a very concrete, actionable task, something that you can do.

[13:12] And it’s called a Cognitive Conversion, right? Now, Cognitive Conversion is something that I created from this concept of the Cognitive Restructuring concept from CBT. A Cognitive Conversion is this. A Cognitive Conversion is the connecting of your logical understanding with your emotional belief. Okay. A Cognitive Conversion.

[13:35] is connecting your logical understanding with your emotional belief so that you can change your way of thinking about a challenge that you have or a goal that you want to achieve. Okay, so I have a worksheet for this. I’m going to put this worksheet into the free community, right? So my free community, if you go to JimHarshawJr.com/free, this is where we have a weekly discussion on each of these podcast episodes. I’m also going to put this resource Into the classroom area of the free community. So again, JimHarshawJr.com/free, you’ll get full access to the worksheet that I’m going to walk you through right now, and it’s called the cognitive conversion exercise.

[14:14] And there are basically. Five questions that are part of this exercise. The first question is this, it’s what is one core belief around your most exciting goal that limits your potential, right? What is the belief that you have around some exciting goal, big goal, exciting goal, something that’s just stretch goal, it’s way out there, like, you would love to do it, but, that sentence, you know, I, Jim, my big exciting goal is this, but, I can’t do it because of blank.

[14:43] I don’t have the skills, the network, or I failed in the past, et cetera. Right for myself, you know, I want to build a technology company, but dot, dot, dot, look at my prior history, right? I failed before I must not be able to do it again. Right? So what is one core belief around some exciting goal? Then you answer this next question is this.

[15:02] What is some objective supporting evidence to prove that you’re right? Well, I had objective evidence of proving that I was right in wrestling, right? Look at all these failures I had. Look at all these other guys finding success, but I don’t have success. In business it was, look at my prior failure. I of course can’t create success because look at the results.

[15:20] I’ve tried before. We have evidence that I can’t do it. So we actually have to bring that to the surface. What’s some objective supporting evidence to prove you’re right? Then here’s the kicker. And this is the fun one. What is objective contradictory evidence? What is evidence to the contrary of what you just wrote?

[15:36] And for me in wrestling, it’s the questions I said earlier, like, am I doing the work? Have I actually beat some of these guys before? Do I have the resources? And it’s like, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Well, this is actually possible for you in business. It would be the same way. Well, I’ve had other successful businesses before.

[15:52] I’ve learned a tremendous amount by, by going through, you know, the process of raising angel capital and building a software for the first time ever, not even knowing how to do it. Like you’ve gone through all that. Now, you know how to do this stuff. Now you actually. Have an MBA in how to actually do this.

[16:05] So what is some objective contradictory evidence? Then you connect the logic with the emotional belief by answering this. Based on the prior two questions, what is a more balanced and objective view of these limitations? And now this is hard to do by yourself. Like you’re on the inside of the jar, trying to read the label.

[16:23] You need somebody on the outside, helping you see your blind spots, helping you see the things that you can’t see. But this worksheet will help you get started on this process of Identifying a more balanced and objective view of your limitations. Lastly, what are your action items? Like, what are you going to do with this?

[16:40] Like, what kind of actions can you take now to move on what you learned? So let me give you an example of one of my clients who actually filled out this, this actual worksheet. I’m going to, Change the information a little bit just so, uh, you don’t know who it is. In case you’re one of my clients listening in the community right now, I’m going to just give you the information basically what he, how he answered this.

[17:01] So core belief around a super exciting goal. He said, I want to exit my business and start a new business. I believe in myself, but my fear, right? I believe I do have this belief in myself, but I have a fear. That I won’t be able to leave the current industry and build a new business that can support my family and give me the lifestyle that I desire and fulfill my purpose.

[17:20] So what is some evidence proving that he’s right? He said, well, I’ve tried before, and I actually tried this over the past couple of years, two to three years, and I’ve only landed one client. So I’m, this is proof, proof I’ve tried for years, Jim, and I’ve only gotten one client. Okay. What’s some actual contradictory evidence?

[17:38] He said, well, I’ve actually built a multimillion dollar business before. And it’s in a similar industry. I already have one client who actually renewed their contract. I’m off, obviously offering something valuable and people believe in the work that I’m doing. Okay. So we have actually some, something we can go on here now.

[17:56] Now, based on the prior two questions, what’s a more balanced feel. I’ve had success around this. And to be honest, I’ve the past two or three years where I’ve tried to build this other business, I’ve had divided attention. I’ve not been able to put a hundred percent into this. So if I actually fully commit, there’s a lot of proof that I can, I can, I can develop and grow this business.

[18:16] I just need the time and the energy and the focus. And now we identify action items. So what can you do? Well, now I can take the next step in exiting my original business. I can start pursuing new clients, freeing up my time, making sales calls, doing outreach, doing marketing. All right. So this is a cognitive conversion.

[18:33] This is how you change your thinking. This is how you get outside of the default thinking that you have. Now, listen, you’re going to need accountability for this. So join the community again, totally free. We’re going to have a discussion around this. You’ll get access to this discovery exercise. So go to JimHarshawJr.com/free. Listen, don’t just listen to this podcast episode and move on and not take action on this. It’s it’s not good. That will, that will guarantee you that you won’t get results. It’ll guarantee you that nothing will change, but if you join the community, get access to this worksheet, start doing this work, get feedback from me and others in the community, you’re going to see change start to happen.

[19:12] So I look forward to seeing you in the community. And look forward to answering your questions and giving you feedback. All right. We’ll see you over there. Talk to you soon. Take action.

Note: This text was automatically generated.