6 Tips To Get A Winneing Attitude

6 Tips To Get A Winning Attitude

We all are winners, but some of us are defeated after a while.

Too often, we take life for granted, but as we all know, our very first victory was before we were even born. Among millions of competitors, you were the one who got the victory.

In a moment, you will get a toolbox of how to re-take the winning attitude you were equipped with to win your very first race – the Life Race (which also is the name of this blog.

On August 30th, I ran the Mexico City International Marathon. Besides concentrating on the race and doing my very best to fulfill the pre-established plan for the event, there was plenty of time during the race to think about different things.

While competing with 30,000 other runners, it just popped into my mind that this is nothing compared to the race I did 64 years ago, with 300,000,000 (or something in that range) competitors.

That race was my first victory.

…and the trophy was My Life.

During the race last Sunday, I started to compare a marathon run with the initial race for life, and the metaphor comparison between the two different races started to show an incredible and sometimes scary similarity.

Life Is A Marathon Race

Choosing to run a marathon, even if on a purely amateur level, is the first important step towards the goal. Your winning attitude will be tested.

Regular workouts to keep your body in good shape are a great way to look after your most important assets—your body and your life.

Anyone can do workouts if they just make the decision to do them, and nothing visible will happen if they don’t do them on a regular basis. Well, maybe the belly fat you would like to get rid of doesn’t disappear at your desired speed, but you can live with it.

The difference between an ordinary workout program and the decision to run a marathon or any other endurance activity of the same magnitude,

It all starts with a serious decision.

A serious decision means that you take the decision to make it, fully aware of the effort needed from your side.

Before I ran my first marathon, I had one year of a well-executed training program for that particular race. I was in fairly good physical condition before starting off with the training program, but I knew that I had to undergo a completely different treatment, both physically and mentally.

The training program contains everything you need to make the forthcoming first marathon race a pleasant experience and not a nightmare you would rather avoid.

The same goes for your life. You need to have balanced content to achieve your goal, whatever it may be. And there it all starts. You need to,

Define the purpose of your goal setting.

The goal set for my first marathon race was to finish the race at a time below 4 hours and 30 minutes. I had the idea that it was a finish time that would force me to take proper action and to get confirmation that my training program worked in reality. The program was set to a finish time of 4:30:00. I did it at 4:21:15.

Goal achieved!

If you, for example, decide to start your own business, defining a goal purpose, like becoming a millionaire, is a very dangerous and vague purpose, as money itself does not bring anything to your life or your business more than monetary richness.

But if your business’s purpose and goal is to train other people to become successful entrepreneurs, the measurable goal could be something like 100 new subscribers to your training program.

What would have happened if the goal had been to win the race in my category? I would have failed, for sure, because I didn’t have the time and the necessary experience to reach such a goal. Thus, the second step towards a winning attitude also involves goal setting.

Set a challenging but realistic goal.

There is a famous quote saying:

“Challenging goals have to be like mountains, high but visible”

As you can notice from the previous,

The goals and the results must be measurable.

Whatever you would like to do in life, you must be able to measure the results. Otherwise, you are just blindly strolling around without any defined destiny. Maybe you will have good initial results based on pure passion and, in some cases, good luck, but it will not work in the long run.

With my own eyes, I have seen young people, apparently in good physical shape, lining up in the starting blocks for a marathon, overloaded with emotions and positivism but without any organized marathon training.

Normally, I see these people somewhere around kilometers 25-30 (16-19 miles) being attended by the medical staff, or they just throw in the towel, often with knee injuries or other severe problems.

You can’t run a marathon without proper training.

It can even be dangerous to do it.

The same goes for your business.

You must have a plan

A Business Plan Made With a Winning Attitude – Your Best Excuse Fighter

Why is it so important to have a business plan?

When training for a marathon race, your motivation levels vary greatly throughout the training period. Sometimes, when you feel less motivated and it is raining, the first thing your unconscious behavior will do is search for excuses to cancel the training that particular day. And I promise you that we are all champions in finding excuses.

Famous and successful entrepreneurs, no matter what business they are into, they all have in common that they follow their plan. They can fail hundreds of times, but they never give up.

Reason: The foundation of their business plan is like a solid rock, and nothing can stop them from moving forward.

Strategies and tactics can be modified during the journey based on new experiences, best practices, or coaching, but the essence of the final goal will never change.

Even if you do not run marathons, you might imagine how stupid it is to train for a marathon and end up running a 100-meter race.

During a marathon race, at a certain point, normally after 30 kilometers (19 miles), you will hit the famous “wall.” This is the end, and it is a first-time sensation, but after a couple of races, you know that the wall is there and will always be there, and your task is to combat it and not surrender when it appears.

Proper training, a lot of experience, and trying out the best carbohydrate, energy, and liquid intake for you will make the “wall” easier to overcome over time.

Exactly the same is valid for any business. A business without obstacles doesn’t exist, and the first thing you must do is to be aware that the “wall” exists when running marathons.

And in business, you must,

Be aware that obstacles are normal ingredients for the final goal

In the same way that real entrepreneurs take advantage of their failures by testing new paths, it is important to not be stuck in appearing obstacles on the way towards your goal. Analyze the reason it happened and modify something. Maybe you fail again, but then it is not the same failure. Continue until you find the way out from the obstacle.

The famous quote by Thomas Edison, when trying out the best material for his electrical bulb and got the question why he continued after 1,000 failures, shows how to think and how to behave when a rock-solid plan is in place:

“ I have not failed. I´ve just found 1,000 ways that won´t work.” – Thomas A. Edison

Scale up Your Success With a Winning Attitude

After analyzing my first marathon race in depth, I set a new goal.

Life is a continued development.

Since we were children, we have constantly learned new skills, and when we become good at something, we normally get that little extra motivational kick to become experts.

Growing up with this typical child behavior, which, in fact, is a genetic heritage from the moment you achieved your first victory (do you remember the entrance of this post?), unfortunately, has a tendency to fade out. The reasons can be many, but here I’ll give a few:

Childhood

It all starts with our childhood and the education we get from our parents. Like all parents, they always want the best for their children, but maybe their convictions have focused on the incorrect things, and they end up giving an education that could influence their children in a non-entrepreneurial way of thinking.
School education is the second most important influencer. In a way, the school represents an authority for a child that can easily be a denominator for the development of life.
People in our environment are turning us down based on negative impulses, and they can even be jealous that you are going to achieve something they do not have the guts to try out.

First job

When getting your first job in the corporate world, you normally appreciate the achievement (which you should do, as you really achieved to “win a race” against others), but the risks are high that you grab the corporate world as your career ladder and continue for years to trade time and knowledge for money.
When we start to approach our 60s, pensions and the step-down mindset become more frequent in our lives. Instead of gearing up, we feel that we have all the right to slow down and start a less hectic life. In some cases, it does work well, but how many times haven’t you seen people hit the reality that the money they earn as retirees will be far from enough to live the life they dreamt about during earlier phases of their lives?

When I successfully completed my first marathon race according to plan, I was immediately looking for the next challenge.

What could it be?

Boston Marathon!

This classic among all the races has a particular rule. You must qualify to get even the right to apply for your participation. The minimum qualification time for my category was 3 hours and 55 minutes.

Let’s go for it!

The training program was immediately changed to a plan scheduled for a finish time of 3:45. I trained hard, disciplined, and always with the goal in mind. I reached the qualification time in a race in December 2011 by doing 3:49:47, and I had the pleasure of participating in the Boston Marathon 2013.

Line up in the starting blocks for this prestigious race gave me a feeling of pride and self-confidence, which I repeated several times to myself throughout the race.

I did it!

Unfortunately, this race, which was supposed to be a party full of pride and fun, was turned down by the famous and sad bomb blast, which also showed us all how vulnerable we were.

The learning from this story is:

Never stop to set new and challenging goals

And this goes for any activity in life, for any age and for any circumstance.