Visualise – Catastrophise – Energise | Prof Damien Hughes TEDx Talk on Finding your Courage

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Professor Damien Hughes has written and spoken about high performance in business and sport. He has written books and is co-host with Jame Humphry on one of the top podcasts in the UK – The High Performance Podcast. 

In his recent TEDx Talk in Manchester – How Peak Performers Find the Path to Courage – he talks about the challenges we face when it comes to making change. This can be as individuals but also applied to organisations and teams.

There are loads of examples of people who have gone against the grain and challenged the perception of how something can be done differently. And all of them will have gone through Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘Three Stages of a Known Truth’: 

  1. Ridicule 
  2. Violently opposed 
  3. Accepted as self-evident

In his talk, Hughes uses a real life ‘hare and the tortoise story’ from the first ever ultra marathon in Australia. When the 61 year old Cliff Young turned up to enter the 875km race in his farming overalls and boots no one believed he would genuinely attempt to start the race. When the race started and the athletes all ran past him, it was clear that Cliff had his own unique shuffle style of running.

Needless to say, from his appearance, age and running style; Cliff Young was ridiculed by everyone involved in the event. But when Cliff decided not to take a break and carry on shuffling through the night while the other athletes were resting, he gradually built up a lead on them and went on to win the first ever Australian Ultra Marathon.

This was when Cliff Young’s approach was violently opposed and questioned. ‘He must have cheated’ they all thought. It was standard practice for ultra marathon athletes to stop for a 6 hour rest. But Cliff hadn’t bothered. As it turns out, there was nothing in the rules about rest times for the runners. It had just become a standard practice that everyone conformed to.

So it was no surprise 12 months later at the same race, when the majority of the race entrants had adopted the same Cliff Young shuffle running style. It had finally become accepted as self-evident.

The moral of this story isn’t the same as the ‘Hare and the Tortoise’ tale. It isn’t about chipping away at something slowly and steadily like the tortoise did. It isn’t about being humble which was the lesson for the hare. It’s about courage and having the bravery to stand out from the crowd to challenge the perceptions of others and keep going with it, even when you’re being ridiculed and opposed.

“Dead fish go with the flow”

We all like to think we can stand out from the crowd and walk our own paths. But how easy is it to do that? How strong do you have to be when faced with the challenges of doing something a different way?

For all the people who had the courage to do something differently and challenge the perceptions of the others around them, how many people didn’t? And how many ideas have been lost to the buckling of peer pressure or the fear of what others might think?

“It’s presence doesn’t always guarantee success, but it’s absence almost makes success impossible”  – Courage

Allodoxaphobia – the fear of other people’s opinions – is the second highest phobia in the UK. It’s safe to say we all suffer from this at different points in our lives. Social anxiety and a fear of being judged can seriously damage our confidence and prevent us from standing out from the crowd.

We need that feeling of belonging and we don’t want to be rejected. This is why social conformity is often the easiest option. But do we want to just be ‘dead fish’ going with the flow? Or do we want to stand out and follow the path that we believe in, even if it goes against the grain?

To help with overcoming these fears and anxieties, Damien Hughes discusses processes that are used with professional athletes and high performers to keep them on the right track.

Visualise

Visualisation helps us all literally paint a picture in our minds. There is more and more scientific evidence that suggests visualising specific activities or scenarios can activate the same neural pathways in the brain as actually performing those activities or experiencing those scenarios.

Catastrophise

We often stay away from the ‘what if’ questions. No one likes being brought down to reality when someone starts trying to pick holes in our plans. But we need to be prepared for all eventualities. What if the plan doesn’t work out like we thought? How will we react if something does go wrong?

Creating these pre-mortems and asking ourselves what could or can go wrong, will ultimately help prepare us for hurdles we might have to face. By adding catastrophising with the visualisation, our courage can increase by up to 32%. It builds resilience for if/when something does go wrong.

Damien Hughes talks about writing a ‘Zander Letter’ which is a letter to yourself written as if it is 12 months in the future. In this letter you write about how you have achieved what you set out to achieve and how you overcame the obstacles that were in your way. This encourages you to really think in detail what could get in the way and how you will deal with it for when that happens.

Energise

Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter came up with what is now known as ‘Kanter’s Law’ when it comes to change: In the middle, everything looks like a failure.

How do we keep ourselves energised to keep going when we’re stuck in the middle and it’s too far to go back and the finish line looks a million miles away?

Having the courage to keep going is the hardest part. Reminding ourselves why we are doing what we are doing. We are full of energy at the start of a project and we love the feeling when we’ve finished. But when we find ourselves in the messy middle and things start to feel overwhelming, we need to find a way to keep the energy to keep going in the times that she lost her confidence.

Hughes ends his talk with examples of reminders that athletes use to re-centre their minds in moments of doubt. He also quotes the ‘Paradoxical Commandments’ by Kent Keith which Mother Teresa often used to keep her own levels of courage high so she could keep doing what she was doing.

Courage doesn’t always come naturally. It takes work and practice like everything else. Visualising, catastrophising and keeping ourselves energised can help us all have the courage to make the changes we need to make and get to the finish line.

 

 

 

 

James Smith – Confidence Predicts Success

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James Smith is one of the main reason that I started this blog. In January 2023, I took some time to listen back to my favourite Diary of a CEO podcast episodes and write about my top 5.

It was though but fun ranking all the episodes that I’d enjoyed and then trying to pick the 5 I enjoyed the most.

James Smith wasn’t someone on my radar. I knew of him but I had never really explored who he was. My perception was that he was another one of these ‘shock jock’ fitness influencers that likes to go against the grain and say things for the shock factor.

Steven Bartlett does describe him in the show notes as having a ‘no holds barred approach to fitness advice’. But after listening to this episode and paying a bit more attention to James and what he is doing, my original perception has since changed.

He’s a confident guy. And he wants to use his confidence to breed confidence in other people through what he does. And if I hadn’t listened back to this episode, I probably wouldn’t have got my shit together and started this blog.

As a fitness coach at heart, James has spent a large part of his working life around people who are wanting to change; either get fitter, stronger, faster or lose the weight they’re not happy carrying around. But rather than just help people shift the few extra pounds or finally get the 6 pack they’ve always wanted, he cuts through to the REAL reason(s) why they want what they want.

And a lot of it comes down to confidence and how they feel. It could be that they no longer feel ‘sexy’ for their partners or don’t feel comfortable when they take their top off in public. He called these ‘pain points’ for his clients. And when he works with a client, he has to get to the core of the issue and find the real pain points so that they can work together on how to start the change process. This is more often than not a case of building confidence. 

Before he began working as a fitness instructor, he worked as a door to door salesman. This is where he believes a lot of his confidence was built and developed.  He explains that he became aware that confidence is a relationship with failure. Doors being slammed in his face, phones being hung up when he was trying to sell were demoralising. But if he got 1 sale from 100 sales calls, then he had the evidence to back himself.

Building resilience is key. We all get knock backs throughout our careers and lives. Having the resilience and strength to find a way to deal with it and bounce back is so important. So when people like James Smith share their story of how they dealt and managed failure, we can take these examples and apply them to ourselves.

“Anxiety predicts failure and confidence predicts success”

We all have anxiety. And for some of us it can vary on how severe it is and when we feel it. Managing anxiety is hard. Especially if we find ourselves in a situation where it becomes amplified. Standing in front of strangers with a mic in your hand or even just trying to hit ‘record’ on your phone camera to shoot a short video. It’s a natural feeling and completely normal to have these pangs of anxiety. But it’s our relationship with anxiety which predicts how much we let it control us.

Fear of failure naturally crosses our mind when we are anxious. ‘What if i forget what I’m supposed to say…’ or ‘What if they don’t like me and I don’t get the job…’ and ‘What if no one likes me and this flops..’. Unfortunately, shit happens sometimes.

There will be times that you don’t get the job that you wanted, or times when you do say something all jumbled up during a presentation. And for James Smith, he uses the memory of doors being slammed in his face on his door to door sales calls. But what he also uses is the knowledge that after so many doors being shut in his face, if he kept going, he’d get that one sale he needed. So using the confidence that he CAN sell the product because he had the evidence, he was able to keep going.

This rings true when he found himself on the other side of the world in Australia and his original plan wasn’t working. He wasn’t getting the same success as a PT in Australia as he’d had in the UK. His confidence was low and he was anxious about what he was going to do. So he decided to record a few videos on his phone and start putting them out on Facebook and the rest is history.

One of the main takeaways I took from this episode was the power of audacity. We can often associate audacity with negative connotations. We can look at someone like James and think that he’s over confident and has the audacity to say the things he says on his social media. We need confidence and audacity to achieve the things we want to. 

But having the audacity to ask difficult questions and not be worried about how other people think is huge when it comes to building confidence. He references a great experiment he heard on The Tim Ferris Podcast about asking for a 10% discount when buying a coffee. And goes on to quote Mark Manson with a quote I really like – “People wouldn’t care what other people thought of them so much if they realised how seldom they do.” 

We worry about what other people will think about us. And this builds anxiety in our heads. The anxiety relates to the reason we often don’t start the blog or podcast we have always wanted to. Or getting our message across the way we want to get it over.

We live in a polarised world where everything we say and put out on social media is open for others to judge us on. If you are less anxious and a bit more audacious with a positive outlook on your expectations, then with small steps you can achieve a lot more than you can by sitting wondering about it.

For me it was toss up between James Smith or Sir Richard Branson to add to my top 5 episodes. Sorry Dicky, James pipped you to the post on this one.

Check the full episode on YouTube –  HERE 

Listen to the episode HERE