Discover the secrets behind elite sports performance and how they can revolutionize your success in business and education. Uncover the transformative power of developing effective habits and performing under pressure, principles that Dr. Finn has successfully translated from the world of top-tier athletics to educational and business environments. Learn about focused practice and foundational habits that can lead to consistent high performance across various domains.
❓Contact us via the website: https://www.tougherminds.co.uk/contact/
📖Best-selling ‘The Habit Mechanic’ book FREE paper back (20 years in the making!): https://thehabitmechanic.tougherminds.co.uk/book
⏩ The Lazy Guide (Finish ‘The Habit Mechanic’ book in 90 mins): https://coaching.tougherminds.co.uk/the-lazy-guide-to-building-super-habits-digital-bundle?coupon=SAVE70
🙋♀️Ready to be your best? FREE Coaching Session: https://calendly.com/afostertougherminds/free-15-min-coaching-session-hm-book
📲Join ‘Habit Mechanic University’: https://thehabitmechanic.tougherminds.co.uk/habit-mechanic-university-app
Transcript (automatically generated)
Hello Habit Mechanics. It’s Dr Jon Finn here. I hope you’re having a fantastic week so far.
We have some exciting news in the family we now have our first ever Olympic gold medalist More on that later but I’ve been really enjoying the Olympic Games, because really enjoying the olympic games, because you can’t fake winning an Olympic medal.
We live in a world where we are bombarded by fake, misleading information, all designed to get us to do and believe what other people want us to do, and believe those people who don’t have our best interest at heart. Whether that’s misleading people about the lifestyle you’re living via social media to make yourself feel better and make others feel worse. Whether that’s, you know, really being scammed via an ai bot who’s telling you something unhelpful. We’re surrounded by just fake things, and what I just love is loving seeing these young people, having dedicated their lives to their disciplines, getting the results and it paying off for them and you, you know, those who don’t win can come back again. But I just, I just like the idea that you can’t fake winning these medals. They are real and they have real stories behind them and I want to dig into some of those stories today, um, particularly particularly Lola Anderson, and also I want to mention Georgina Brayshaw, who is my second cousin. So before I do that, let me step back. So one thing I often get asked is are there really any relationships, any lessons that can be learned, between performance in elite sport, where I began my career, and business performance, and also education performance? And I can wholeheartedly, with a lot of experience over the last 20 years, say yes, absolutely, because this was my journey. I started my work in elite sport and I then got asked by some elite schools could I go and work with them and embed what I’d learned from elite sport into their school curriculums to help develop their young people. And then I got asked by the parents of those young adults can I go work in their businesses, predominantly in the city of London, to apply similar principles, because they were so impressed by what they were seeing their children learning. So I’ve been on that journey.
03:04
I’m not just hypothesising and I think you can synthesise what does it take to be successful, including what does it take to win a gold medal? You can split it into two core ideas. One is you’ve got to work out which habits and which routines are going to make it easy for you to be at your best regularly, or if you want to be the real best, to be at your best every single day, and that just doesn’t mean always being on. It means resting as well and recuperating well, but that is driven by a set of habits and routines. So we need to be able to do that and by doing that we’re going to be able to engage in the type of focused, deliberate practice that we need to engage in in order to develop our skills to be the best that we can possibly be. And you know we talk about learning practice in almost every single page of the Habit Mechanic book and it underpins everything we think about in the Habit Mechanic approach, because learning is our secret superpower. But if we want to optimise how we do it, we’ve got to get our foundational habits and routines in place. Foundational habits and routines in place. So that’s one element.
04:27
And whether you’re a, you want to be an elite or high performing athlete, or you want to be nailing it in education, getting those, getting the most out of your studies and nailing your assignments and your exam results, or whether you want to be a high performer in business, whether it’s you want to create your own coaching business or you want to get your next promotion in your current job or you want to grow the business that you currently lead. It’s the same. The other factor the one factor is we’ve got to be good at consistently being at our best. The other factor is we also need to get good at performing under pressure. We need to get good at performing when it counts, and that’s why one of the reasons the Olympics is so insightful because we can just see that in every event we can see the people that can perform under pressure and those that can’t do it quite yet. And that also exists in education. They need to do that, and also business. So you know it might be sitting in an exam in education, you might know all the answers, but when the pressure comes on, you’re not able to retrieve what you know. Might be giving a presentation at work or to new clients or on a sales call. You know what you need to say, but you can’t get it out because you can’t do it under pressure. So if we want to be at our best, we’ve got to make sure that the practice we engage in is what we would call functionally equivalent for the skills and what will become habits that we develop or that we need to develop in order to perform to our potential, and we unpack, performing under pressure, in chapter 24 of the Habit Mechanic.
06:15
But I want to turn my attention to a particular group of gold medal winners. A particular group of gold medal winners. I mentioned at the start of the podcast that we now have a gold medal, olympic gold medalist in the family. It’s Georgina Brayshaw not Finn, I was going to say. Her mother is a Finn, but actually her mother, her let me explain the family relationship. So, um, georgina’s grandmother and my granddad are brothers and sisters. So Georgina’s um mum and um my dad are cousins.
06:59
I don’t particularly know georgina uh very well. She’s a bit younger than I am. I do remember going to her christening um, and I’ve heard about her success on an ongoing basis. But I actually want to I want to say um, before I go in to talk about lola anderson that actually, georgina has quite a fascinating story herself. When she was let me get these details right when she was 15, she was induced into a coma after a serious horse riding accident. She actually has no memory of the accident, but she spent a year being paralysed down her left side.
07:43
That isn’t someone that you expect to then go on win an Olympic gold medal, and I think they’re also the world champions. So we can look at people who are successful and think, well, it was easy for them. But I guarantee you, under every success story there is a struggle, there is, there is, there is a story, maybe not quite as dramatic as that, but to get to the top of the pile you really have to work hard and you have to overcome adversity and in fact you know adversity is key in getting to the top. So that’s Georgina, one of four of her crew. They won the gold medal earlier this week and another one of the crew members is Lola Anderson. Is Lola Anderson. Lola has another very interesting and, I’d say, special, very emotive story. This is more about the GB rowing team that I’m talking about and a bit more from Lola, and it’s a clip just after they won their gold medal, and then Lola speaks about her experience and it’s been given to Great Britain.
Speaker 2Host
09:09
They are the Olympic champions. It is gold. It is historic. For the first time in British history, they win the gold. It is sensational history. They win the gold. It is sensational Gold medalists and Olympic champions representing Great Britain An historic first Great Britain have never won gold in the women’s quadruple skulls. There were three silvers in a row 2000, 2004, 2008. It was seventh in Tokyo, and now they are top step of the podium.
09:49
So it just feels like there’s been ages working towards this and I think as a boat, we’re always very process driven and we’re always looking to what comes next. But when you kind of get to the end of a cycle like this and it doesn’t get bigger than this it’s really quite overwhelming to just experience this but be really grateful. How long ago did you write on a piece of paper that you wanted this moment to come? 13 years ago, I’d forgotten about it, obviously, but a couple of years ago my dad reminded me and I know that he’d be so, so proud. I’m just thinking a lot about him right now and it’s really lovely.
Dr Jon Finn Host
10:24
Yeah. So I mean, wow, Amazing. So to fill in some of the blanks there, very, very, very sadly, lola’s dad passed away with terminal cancer. He’d been a rower when he was at university and he encouraged his daughter to get into the sport. She says she was inspired by the London 2012 Games. But not long before he passed away, he presented Lola, actually, with a note that I think was a page from her diary that she’d written. I think she’d been embarrassed that she’d written this down and she’d put it in the bin, but she’d written down that that’s what she wanted to achieve. And not long before he passed away, her dad presented that note to her and she said she’d forgotten about this.
11:27
And it’s really interesting that there’s another similar story that we talk about in the Habit Mechanic book in chapter 25. And we talk about Richard McCaw, the captain of the double-winning World Cup All Blacks Rugby Union team. And Richard McCaw had done something similar. He’d mapped out this journey on the back of a napkin. It was actually a McDonald’s napkin. There are other fast food chains available and he’d found this years and years later behind the wardrobe in his bedroom when his parents were moving out of the farm they lived in and he had to go clear his room out. He’d forgotten, he’d written it down and he’d planned this journey from where he was to getting into playing first team rugby to getting into the New Zealand squad and then you know great all-black, as he called it.
12:38
If you’ve read Chapter 16 of the Habit Mechanic book or you’ve used the associated tools in the Habit Mechanic University app, or you’ve been coached by us or you are a certified Habit Mechanic coach and you’ve learned how to use these tools to help others, you will know that these types of well, you will know that stories are key to our approach, because this is how our brain remembers information. We have episodic memories, so we remember um, maybe an easier way to explain that is we have autobiographical memories. We remember in episodes. So our reality is a story that we’re telling ourselves. Often that story is not very helpful, so sometimes we want to reprogram the story. That’s why we have the fam story in chapter 16 of the Habit Mechanic. That’s why we have the willpower story in chapter 25 and also in the app, and it’s it’s to make it easier for us to create better stories for ourselves. It’s why we have our our focus reflection tools in chapter 22 and also the stress management sections of the app, so we can reprogram the stories that are worrying us, that are not helpful for us.
14:06
And as I record this, it’s August the 1st this is a great time to revisit your fam story. As I record this, it’s August the 1st. This is a great time to revisit your FAM story or, if you haven’t written one before and FAM stands for Future, ambitious, meaningful Story if you haven’t written one before, to start writing one, just to get it down on paper. This is when people sign up to our coaching programmes, whether that’s a one-month programme or they want to become a certified habit mechanic, so they do a three-month program. This is the first thing we get people to do. We get them to start mapping out their fam stories. So, you know, the start of the month, the end of one month into the start of the next, is a great time to step back, reflect. I know many people are on leave at this time of year, you know, know. So getting that headspace to be able to this is so, so key.
14:59
And I think another, another thing that I want to point out and the power of doing these exercises. I think we are now seeing the fall of the dominance of talking therapies. I don’t know that’s distressing for some people because they’ve spent a lot of money training how to do talk therapy. I saw an article in the Guardian this week with a very high-profile professor of experimental psychology from Oxford just talking about the limitations of CBT and the reason that talk therapies are limited is because if we want to change our behavior, we have to practice doing things differently. I know that sounds really obvious, but talk therapy isn’t designed to do that. It’s designed to do exactly what it says on the tin. It’s talk about things and that’s fine. It’s a great starting point, but we need to take action and that’s why I’m saying write down the story in the way that we suggest you structure it, because we haven’t just randomly made that up. We’ve developed that over the last 20 years and write down your stresses and worries, for example, in the way that we recommend you do that when you’re using some of our focus reflection tools.
16:19
Write down the story of today using our willpower story, because why our approach is different is yeah, we speak to people and we help them to get things off their chest, but that’s just the starting point for us. Our goal is to help people to practice doing things differently. Us, our goal is to help people to practice doing things differently. Um, so you can do that immediately if you have a copy of the habit mechanic book or you have access to the app just by going to chapter 16 in the book, or you can work with the motivation ai coach in the app and don’t just think about it. You need to start by thinking about it, but write something down. And write it down in a structured way where you can revisit it and you can notice the progress that you’ve made or you haven’t made and you can tweak and refine your goals. So, yeah, I hope that’s been insightful.
17:13
If you need help, you think I like to let us cut most of the motivation. Then you can work one-to-one with us. You can start by booking a free coaching session. Or you may have already spoken to us and you want to bite the bullet and, um, you know, do the training, do the coach, get coached? Or you might be thinking, oh, I would like to actually help others to do this. So you can. If you want, you can become a certified habit mechanic coach. We can help you to do that as well. If you’re thinking this is would be helpful for people in my business. You want to reset in september. Then we can come in and do this with your team team or just do a keynote for everybody.
17:53
So, yeah, you can’t fake winning an olympic medal.
18:00
I’m delighted that, um, my granddad would have been so, so amazed by that he’s such a big sports fan.
18:11
But I’m delighted that we now have a member of the Finn clan who’s stood up on the podium and got that gold medal, and I hope you’re finding the Olympics as inspiring as I am, and I hope you can take heart from, maybe, the situation you find yourself in right now, which might not be optimal, that if you do step back, reflect and you start to work on the right habits and the right routines, then you can achieve you can achieve enormous things. You know your potential is immense, but it’s all about getting the right habits and you never know which new habit you’re going to build. That just unlocks so many things for you. Um, you know, for me, just going out in the morning workday mornings, and just going for that, that run is so, so, but it saves me hours and hours. Um, every single week probably, probably, saves me hours every day and that’s why. That’s why we say you only have a one habit away from being at your best.
