Either option works; both will start to shift perception, tilting the positivity ratio in a more optimal direction. And it doesn’t take long. The research shows that as little as three weeks of daily gratitude is enough to start the rewiring.
Finally, there also appears to be a strong link between gratitude and flow. In research conducted by the Flow Research Collective and USC neuroscientist Glenn Fox, we saw a direct link between a daily gratitude practice and a high-flow lifestyle. Why? It appears that the optimism and confidence produced by gratitude lower anxiety, which makes us less fearful of stretching to the edge of our abilities and more able to target the challenge-skills sweet spot, flow’s most important trigger.
MINDFULNESS
If you’re interested in developing the grit to control your thoughts, then you’re interested in the gap. There’s a little gap, no more than a millisecond, between the moment a thought arises and the moment our brain attaches an emotion to that thought. Once that feeling is attached, especially if it’s negative, there’s usually too much energy in the system to shut it down. But if you can get into that gap between thought and emotion, you can replace a bad thought with a better one, neutralizing the stress response in the short term and reprogramming the brain in the long term.
This is one of the great benefits of a mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is as advertised: the act of paying attention to one’s mind. This isn’t a spiritual practice; it’s a cognitive tool. By observing your thoughts as they arise, you’ll start to notice this gap between thought and feeling, and soon discover the simple act of noticing gives you freedom. Once there’s space to move, there’s freedom to choose, and you can become active rather than reactive.
Once again, you have two options.
Option one: single-point mindfulness. This is where you put all of your attention on one thing: your breath, a candle flame, a repeated word or phrase, the sound of wind in the distance, take your pick. But when you pick, at least in the beginning, choose something that resonates with how you typically like to receive information. If you’re moved by words, find a word that moves you. If you’re more kinesthetically oriented, then focus on sensations.
Once you’ve picked your point of focus, sit quietly and focus on that point. That’s the game. Start with five minutes a day. Pick a time when you need to be calm. Before you start your day, before a big meeting, to mellow out before coming home to your kids. Long, slow breaths. The research shows that when our inhales and exhales are of equal length, we’re balancing sympathetic responses (fight or flight) with parasympathetic responses (rest and relax).26 This calms us down quickly. And the calm helps us focus even harder.
If five minutes feels good, extend to six, or seven, or however long you want to keep going. Studies show that we get stress reduction and lowered anxiety from as little as five minutes of mindfulness a day,27 while the larger cognitive benefits—heightened focus, optimism, resilience, and emotional control—really start to kick in at twelve to twenty minutes a day.28
Obviously, especially in the beginning of each session, the mind will do what minds do: it will wander. Expect it, notice it, and simply return your focus to that single point. Don’t judge yourself for a lack of thought control; simply notice those thoughts you couldn’t control. Then move on. It’s called mindfulness because you’re learning to mind the mind. Iron-fisted thought control isn’t the point. The point is simply noticing that, “Wow, iron-fisted thought control is a fantasy.” Put differently, the best way to develop the grit to control your thoughts is to first start to notice how uncontrollable thought actually is.
Second option: an open-senses meditation. Here, simply pay attention to everything flooding into your brain. Watch the show; don’t engage. One thing to note, for creatives, single-point meditation heightens convergent thinking and dampens divergent thinking. Open-senses meditation does the opposite.29 So if you’re an architect working on a project that requires far-flung connections, go open-senses. If you’re a lawyer trying to bomb-proof a contract, single-point focus is your tool.
Both approaches retrain the brain, teaching it a simple lesson: we are most effective at dealing with life’s challenges when we’re aware, observant, nonreactive, and nonjudgmental. Personally, I take a cross-training approach. I blend a couple of single-point mindfulness sessions a week with a couple of open-senses yoga practices. My mindfulness preference is ten to twenty minutes of box breathing (see endnotes for explanation), followed by ten minutes of open-senses meditation.30 My yoga preference is Ashtanga, mainly because it’s sort of break dancing in slow motion and this holds my attention more than other forms. Also, because Ashtanga emphasizes breath and concentration, the instructors tend to talk less, which is important if you’re trying to use the practice to learn how to extend the gap between thought and feeling. That said, don’t assume that what works for me works for you.
Conduct your own experiment.
THE GRIT TO MASTER FEAR
The first time I met big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton was in the early 2000s. ESPN magazine had asked me to interview him as part of an article on aging action sport athletes, those over-thirty graybeards who were clearly, in that magazine’s opinion, nearing the end of their once-legendary careers.31
The problem was that Laird wasn’t near the end of anything.
At the time we met, he’d just invented tow-in surfing, had constructed his first hydrofoil, and was only beginning to think about paddle surfing—three activities that would soon reshape the future of action sports. Yet ESPN was so sure Laird was over-the-hill that they sent me to talk to him about the experience of being over-the-hill. Solid journalistic instincts.
At the time, Hamilton was the widely acknowledged king of action sports, considered the toughest of the tough, and with a reputation for being especially tough on journalists. I was terrified. Laird did not disappoint.
He liked to do “activities” with journalists. Three “activities” were the minimum requirement. Our first was a surf session, our second, a jet ski lesson. The surf session went okay because the waves were mostly small. Then, the surf turned soupy and Laird decided to teach me how to jump a jet ski off waves. It didn’t seem to matter that I had never ridden a jet ski before. As an introduction, Laird put me on the back of his and took off. We went flying across the ocean. I was not, shall we say, emotionally prepared for the speed.
When I was twelve years old, a friend’s older brother put me on the back of a dirt bike and gunned it, attempting to ride as fast as possible through a forest. He missed a turn and I got flung from the bike and into a tree. I was bruised but not broken, except for my nerves. Ever since, especially when I’m not driving, being on the back of any machine takes a tremendous act of will. In the case of that jet ski, after about five minutes of terror I couldn’t take it anymore—but that wasn’t all that unusual.
By the time I met Laird, terror was a familiar experience—maybe my most familiar experience. I felt like I was always afraid. It was a near constant in my life. And I hated that fear. I hated myself for feeling afraid. I felt like a coward and a failure. In fact, I hated the feeling of fear so much that I had started to do anything that terrified me. It was easier to do the thing that scared me than to live with the shame of that fear. And that explains my next decision.
Laird had promised that if I got bounced from the jet ski, the worst that could happen was I’d get the wind knocked out of me. At around fifty miles per hour, I decided to test his theory.
I jumped. I crashed. The wind was, in fact, knocked out of me. Other things as well. Then Laird swung the jet ski around to pick me up and, when he was helping me back aboard, said two words that changed my entire relationship to fear.
“You, too,” is what he said.32
What he meant was that, just like me, he, the widely acknowledged king of action sports, toughest of the tough, also felt fear. And he also hated himself for feeling that fear. And just like me, he had also learned to go right at his fear as
a way of relieving his fear. This was news to me. I thought bravery meant not being afraid. I thought that was how “men” were supposed to feel, or, more specifically, not to feel. I had no idea that fear was okay.
Back on the beach, Laird explained further: “Fear is the most common emotion in my life. I’ve been afraid for so long—well, honestly, I can’t ever remember not being afraid. It’s what you do with that fear that makes all the difference.”
Laird is absolutely correct. If you’re interested in impossible, then you’re interested in challenge, and if you’re interested in challenge, you’re going to be scared.
The emotion is fundamental. We all feel it. It’s what we do with it that makes the difference.
Every successful person I’ve met is running from something just as fast as they’re running toward something. Why? Simple. Fear is a fantastic motivator. Which is why learning to treat fear as a challenge to rise toward rather than a threat to be avoided can make such a profound difference in our lives. This approach takes our most primal drive, the need for safety and security, and gets it to work for our benefit.
As a result, focus comes for free. We naturally pay attention to the stuff that scares us. Hell, when something really scares us, the hard part is not paying attention to it. Fear drives attention. This is huge. Something that normally requires a ton of energy now happens automatically.
Along similar lines, all powerful emotions heighten mnemonic retention, and fear perhaps most of all. Studies show that we remember bad experiences far more easily than good experiences, which means using fear as a motivator provides focus for free while also enhancing learning.
The big point is this—fear is a constant in peak performance. If you don’t learn to work with this emotion, it’s certainly going to learn to work with you. But if you can take all of that energy and use it to drive focus and concentration in the short term, and as a directional arrow in the long term (more on this in a moment), then you’ve added an extremely potent force to your stack of grit skills.
A FEAR PRACTICE
Kristen Ulmer is one of the best athletes in history, and one of the bravest—a big mountain skier, ski mountaineer, ice climber, rock climber, and paraglider with a long history of the impossible.33 During the 1990s and early 2000s, Ulmer was voted the “best female extreme skier in the world” twelve years in a row—which is a level of dominance rarely seen in sport.
Then she left that career to pursue another, becoming one of the world’s leading experts on fear and coaching over ten thousand individuals along the way. Ulmer believes that the first step to transforming one’s relationship to fear involves developing a regular fear practice. “Everyone has the same problem,” she explains. “Not only does the amygdala filter all incoming information, most of those filters are set up in early childhood, by experiences we can barely remember. The result: we often don’t even recognize that the emotion we’re feeling is fear. Instead, it gets misinterpreted and redirected, showing up as blame, anger, sadness, or in irrational thoughts and behavior.”
To overcome this, you have to develop an awareness of your fear. “You have to start by noticing fear in the body,” she says, “the actual kinesthetic sensation. Any form of emotional or even physical discomfort is where you’ll find it. Then, spend some time not focusing on it with your mind but feeling it in your body—which is very different. Embrace it, treat it like a friend, ask it what it’s trying to tell you. If you do this, you’ll find fear is not nearly as unpleasant as we thought. It’s our attempt to avoid the fear that’s so uncomfortable. But once you actually put your full attention on the sensation of fear, it dissipates. It’s counterintuitive, but this kind of direct attention to bodily sensation actually dissolves the sensation.”
Simultaneously, Ulmer also recommends changing your language around fear. Instead of saying “Do it despite the fear,” say, “Do it because of the fear.” Look at fear as excitement, or as an emotion designed to help you focus. “Treat fear like a playmate,” suggests Ulmer. “This transforms the emotion from a problem to be solved into a resource to be savored.”
Once you’ve started to befriend fear, you need to build upon this foundation. Laird Hamilton believes the best way forward is to practice regular risk taking. “Once you start confronting your fears,” he explains, “you quickly realize that imagination is greater than reality. But fear is an expensive emotion that requires a lot of energy to produce. Once you realize that imagination is greater than reality, why waste all that energy on something that’s not that scary? By confronting your fears, this forces the body to recalibrate, and the next time you confront something similar it evokes a smaller response.”
But how to actually confront our fears?
Science shows there are only two options. Either build up a tolerance slowly, what psychologists call “systematic desensitization,” or go all in at once, what’s appropriately called “flooding.” Either way, the process is the same.
First, as Ulmer suggested, learn to identify fear in your system, either as a tightness in your body or a tightness in your thought pattern. Then, think about other situations where you’ve encountered something similar, felt something similar, and have successfully overcome it. How’d you do that? What psychological skills did you use that first time around? Once you’re clear on those skills, practice them again and again.
For example, say public speaking fills you with dread. First, identify the location and expression of that dread in your system. Is it a queasiness in your gut? Are your thoughts racing? Maybe both?
Now, think about other times in your life when you felt these same sensations yet managed to rise to the occasion. A time when your head spun and gut churned before you had a difficult conversation with a friend, yet the act of having that difficult conversation—of pushing past those bad feelings—actually strengthened your relationship.
Finally, what skills helped you the first time around? Did you take ten deep breaths before talking to your friend? Cool, now practice deep breathing techniques. Did self-awareness and emotional intelligence play a role? Great, now practice those skills as well.
Also, as psychologist Michael Gervais reminds us: “Know how to judge progress. You want to measure how well you used those skills, and did they create more psychological space. Learning to create space is how you learn to play in hostile, rugged, and stressful environments.”34
Even better, since risk is a flow trigger—flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention—this kind of regular fear practice will automatically increase time spent in the zone. When we take a risk, dopamine is released into our system, which is the brain’s way of rewarding exploratory behavior.
And any kind of risk will produce dopamine.35 So take physical risks, for sure, but also try emotional risks, intellectual risks, or creative risks. Social risks work especially well. The brain processes social risk and physical risk with the exact same structures, which explains why fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world and not something that seems to make more evolutionary sense, like the fear of getting eaten by a grizzly bear.
Yet, everyone is different. Laird Hamilton might need to surf fifty-foot waves to pull this trigger; for me a five-footer is more than enough. And that’s me. For anyone on the even shyer, meeker side, you can pull this trigger—and practice taking risks—merely by trying a new activity or speaking up at a meeting or asking a stranger for the time. Then, a few days later, ask two strangers. And so forth. The goal is to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. The unpleasant sensation remains, but our relationship to that sensation has been permanently recalibrated. And that’s what we’re really after.
FEAR AS A COMPASS
If you can learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, you can begin to take the final step in this process, which is learning how to use fear as a compass. For peak performers, fear becomes a directional arrow. Unless the thing in front of them is a dire and immediate threat to be avoided, the best
of the best will often head in the direction that scares them most.
Why?
Once again: focus and flow. Going in the direction that scares you most amplifies attention and this translates into flow. The boost in performance the state provides then helps us push through our fears and rise to these bigger challenges. But the even larger lift comes afterward, with the discovery that our real potential lies on the other side of our greatest fears. By confronting fear we are expanding capacity, teaching ourselves to remain psychologically stable and in control even in situations that feel unstable and uncontrollable.
THE GRIT TO BE YOUR BEST WHEN YOU’RE AT YOUR WORST
Josh Waitzkin is a peak-performance polymath. He started out as the real-life version of the child chess prodigy portrayed in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, winning the US junior chess nationals in both 1993 and 1994 and earning the title of “international chess master” before the age of sixteen. Next, he ventured into martial arts, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi push hands and then, turning his attention to Brazilian jiujitsu, earning a black belt under legendary fighter Marcelo Garcia. Afterward, he became a writer, publishing The Art of Learning, which has since become a high-performance classic. Lately, he’s taken all that expertise into coaching, where he works with top athletes, investors, and the like. But the point of this long introduction is that Josh Waitzkin has a slightly different take on grit.36
While Waitzkin believes that perseverance, thought control, and fear mastery are critical for long-term performance, he believes there’s an even more important differentiator. “The grit that matters most,” he says, “is learning to be your best when you’re at your worst. This is really the difference between elite-level performers and everyone else. And you have to train this kind of grit on its own, as a separate skill. But, if you can do this, what you discover is real power. There’s real power there—and it’s power you probably didn’t know you had.”
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