“So what do you do when the doubt creeps in? When you think maybe you’ll never get what you want, and all the effort is a waste?”
I asked a friend on our Friday hike this morning.
“I just don’t let that thought take space. I don’t give it my focus.”
That’s a superpower🦸
Every high performer I’ve worked with, or read about, shares this ability: they don’t indulge unhelpful thought loops. They redirect their focus to where it's needed to help them keep going and eventually succeed.
What fascinates me even more is how selective our mindset strength is.
We can be relentless and disciplined in one area of life… and completely chaotic in another.
I see it all the time.
Brilliant founders who’ve built multi-million-dollar companies saying things like:
“But I have no discipline around food. If I crave something, I must have it.”
These are people who’ve pushed through failure for decades. They’ve survived the kind of pressure most humans never experience. They’ve done the hardest things.
And yet they doubt their “mental skill” in this tiny, simpler area.
It fascinates me how humans work.
It’s never a lack of ability.
It’s a lack of mindset skill transfer (which you can learn and improve).
We often forget we already have everything we need to succeed. We forget our wins. We forget the mindset we’ve practiced for years in one context, and don't see how it applies to where we need to overcome current challenges.
Conversations like this remind me that all of us already possess the strength, discipline, the systems of self-management we think we’re missing. We just haven’t learned to reuse it everywhere we need it.
We learn and adapt in some areas (like business) better than in other areas (like fitness or food).
We stay closed-minded somewhere, stuck in our ways like it's our fate, while being flexible like rubber elsewhere.
So if you’re doubting yourself right now, try asking yourself this with me:
Where are you already succeeding, big or small?
And how can you apply the same mental system, the same way of focusing, to the part of your life that needs growth?
That’s usually the unlock.
What area of your life needs a skill transfer?
