In this episode Coach Jason shares the Beast principle, WOTAR, and two coaching strategies to shift out of negative thinking and into positive results. This show also includes a special Game Ready Visualization to further help you create the results you want in your Full Force Life.

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Shift out of Negative Thinking

This show is beginning to be more and more to me, as time goes by, have a place where I can not only share the lessons that I learned from a fifteen-year professional career, but also that transition out of the game as well and to be able to group all kinds of people and bring them in here; not just athletes, but people outside the athletic world as well. When it comes to living a full force life, what I mean by full force is when you’re at a place where you feel totally aligned, completely congruent. You have this vision, this picture of this movie in your mind that says, “This is where I want to be someday.” You’re not there yet, but you’re aiming towards this place. In order to get there, there are certain beliefs, there are certain values, there are certain skills and capabilities, there’s certain action that you must take to keep moving in that direction. A huge part of it is our thinking because the type of thoughts that we take on a consistent basis, those thoughts they determine the actions that we will or we won’t take.

<figure class="wp-caption alignleft" id="attachment_632" style="width: 300px;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">You are going to play into it. Whatever you’re saying about yourself, you’re going to eventually play into that.</figcaption></figure>

When I talk about negative thinking, when I talk about changing thoughts from negative to the positive and the importance of it all, is if you don’t have your thoughts supporting you, serving you, you’re not going to take the actions that you need to take in order to develop the skills and develop the beliefs and ultimately reach this beautiful vision that I know you have deep inside of you. For me that’s the full force life, getting it all aligned. One of the first things I’ll tell you about negative thinking is more times than not when I speak to athletes, “You are going to play into it. Whatever you’re saying about yourself, you’re going to eventually play into that.”

A more specific example, a little while ago, I was at Oklahoma City College, one of the top NAIA baseball programs in the country. I’m sitting behind the cage and watching one of their best hitters on the team. Guy is hitting 450 on the season. There are not even that many high school players who are going to end up hitting 450, let alone a guy at a university. He’s an incredible hitter, but he’s having one of those days. Every fourth or fifth swing that he takes, it’s not a very good swing. When it comes to swinging a bat, that’s a challenging enough skill, you’re not going to be perfect every time, so let’s get that out of the way. He tells himself after that fifth swing when he pops up at the top of the cage, “I suck. Lousy swing. I suck. I’m a terrible hitter.” He did this every fourth or fifth swing again and again for a couple of minutes. Eventually, it was every third swing. He kept saying it over and over again, “I suck. I suck.” He turned pretty much every swing and he pretty much suck at that point.

That’s what I mean by playing into it. Whether you’re an athlete whether you’re not, if you continue to think these thoughts, if you continue to say these things out loud especially, you’re going to live into them. At the end of the day most people don’t consider themselves liars. Are you a liar? If you don’t consider yourself a liar, every time you verbally speak this out loud, “I suck,” your brain goes, “I’m not a liar. He says I suck then I better start sucking.” It’s going to back up what you speak out loud.

Here comes one of the biggest problems when I talk about negative thinking. Changing that voice inside of our head, changing it from a negative to more of a positive voice, it’s almost nearly impossible to do by thinking alone. We have 65,000 thoughts a day, 65,000. If that number really seems absurd to you, the reason why is because most of them happen on an unconscious level. You’re not even aware of certain thoughts that are going through your mind. You’re not even really aware if your thoughts are positive or negative most parts of the day. The real scary part is that 95% of those thoughts are the same ones that you had yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Our thoughts, they’re a habit, they’re a pattern, they’re the sequence. Something happens in the course of our day and we move on to an automatic thought about it. If it’s a negative thought, then it leads to another negative thought, then it leads to another negative thought. It’s this pattern, this habitual pattern that keeps going on and on. That’s why when I say, “Try to change your thinking. Try to think more positively,” isn’t going to be enough. It’s not going to be enough to disrupt, to change this pattern going on in the future.

However, there are three great ways to change this pattern. Two of them I’m going to share with you today. The third one would need a much, much longer podcast. If you do these first two things, you’re not going to have any problem. It’s going to be more than enough to change your thinking and do a more positive light going on in the future. Before we can go to that, we need to know that one of the most important this is about this is developing the awareness because you might not even be aware that you’re thinking negatively at this moment. So many of those thoughts are going on without us even realizing that a lot of people aren’t even aware that they’re thinking negatively, that they need to make some type of change in this pattern to begin with. The first key is building the awareness.

<figure class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_634" style="width: 300px;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Build an awareness through the Be A Beast system, the principle of Wotar. Wotar is a wolf.</figcaption></figure>

One of the ways that I want to teach you about how to build an awareness is through the Be A Beast system, the principle of Wotar. Wotar is a wolf. The reason why we use the wolf is wolves are incredible communicators. Can you imagine ever seeing them on video, the pack of wolves going after their prey and got the lead wolf, the alpha, and he let’s out a yelp or a howl or a bark. As soon as he does that, all the other wolves, they change their course, they change their strategy. As soon as he lets them know that they need to do something different, boom, they go and they do something different. They take a new direction towards the prey; incredible communicators. That’s going to be our trigger because ultimately what it comes down to is the results that you get are going to come down to that type of communication that you put into it.

Let me break down Wotar for you. WO, it’s the words, the words that you speak, the words that you use ultimately determine the thoughts that you think. For the longest time, I thought it was the other way around. I thought if I sat there and tried to think positive, think positive, think positive, I will be a more positive person. Everyone knows about positive thinking, but do we see that many positive people? It doesn’t all add up. When we speak out loud, when we speak that positivity and we really truly put the energy, at least we act like the energy of positivity is behind it, it sets a new course. It sets a new pattern in our brains which triggers more positive thoughts. The more positive thoughts that are going on, the thoughts end up determining the actions that you take. The more positive thoughts, the more positive actions that you’re going to take. If you have a lot of negative thoughts, you’re probably not going to take negative actions. You’re probably just not going to take any action towards what you want. The more positive thoughts, the more positive actions we take and the more actions that you take produce greater and more positive results. You can abbreviate it by saying we achieve the results that we want through the positive communication, the way that we speak not only to others, but how we speak to ourselves as well.

Go back to that young ball player in the cages. He’s popping up at the top of the cage all the time. I know most players, and I actually did tried it in my career once or twice, but I know most players aren’t going to want to speak out loud and say, “That’s a great swing.” You roll over a ground ball, “That’s a great swing.” Pop up at the top of the cage, “That’s a great swing.” At the very least develop the awareness saying, “I suck,” is not serving you. Is it making you better or is it making you worse? It is making you worse every time. If you keep going down that road, you’re going to play into it.

I promised two ways to change your states. I’ve already gone way into one of them and that’s by speaking positively, getting the energy behind it too. I think of one of the softball programs that I worked for the last two years and how they know these principles, they know the Be A Beast system and they are a t