Goal Mapping- How do you prepare mind and body?

Grant Leboff: One of the things you talk about in the book in terms of Goal Mapping, is this mental and physical preparation. I think often, certainly in business – I think in sports people know about physical preparation and mental preparation, that makes sense – but when you’re behind a desk all day long, or these days behind a computer all day long… physical and mental preparation? I just get on with it, I boot up, do my emails, do things on the go… So how does that manifests itself, what do people need to be thinking about to get themselves into the right zone, as it were?

Brian Mayne Basically, they need to be picturing themselves succeeding rather than failing. I notice it a lot with salespeople. Sometimes they fall into the rut of thinking about all the things that could go wrong, either in the deal or on the phone call or they have a bad meeting or a bad call and they are carrying that with them into the next call, or the next meeting. So it’s really important to shake that off and to picture the result you want before you step into action.

Professional sports people spend as much as 50% of their time visualising themselves crossing the line, clearing the bar, winning the race… they don’t do it for no reason, they do it because it works. Top sales people do it for the same thing, they picture themselves succeeding. Now the physical element is important because the mind, the emotions and the physiology of the body are all joined. When you are feeling high, when you are feeling really good; you stand high, you stand very upright. When you are feeling down and depressed, you literally hunch.

Now your nervous system, of course, is hard wired throughout your body into your brain stem, so if you’re feeling a bit down, one of the best things you can do is to change your body posture, whether you’re sitting or walking, because as you change your body posture it helps you lift yourself, both in emotion and in mind. You start to think more clearly and you feel more positive and all of that becomes an escalating cycle that helps you hold the consciousness in your mind that is the winning edge, if you like.

Customers buy the attitude. If you’re talking with a level of conviction and positivity about what it is you’re doing, what you have or what you supply, the customer buys that, they buy your belief. It’s the same in whatever area of business you’re in and I think it’s fundamentally important.

Grant Leboff: In a business context, how do people do that and what I mean by that is, is it planning their day so they taking time out of their day? Sales is slightly different in as much as it’s very performance focused in a way that sport is, so I can imagine a sales person sitting in a car before they going to see a customer and start to think about the outcome. But if you’re a managing director or an operations director of the company, it matters just as much – because of what you’re saying – but is it taking time out of your day? How do you get that discipline to make sure you are fulfilling that?

Brian Mayne I’ve got lots of ops directors, and people who work within process and engineering that use my system and they use the simple techniques of visualisation. They’ll have a goal map for themselves about their project, they’ll look at that at the start of the day, that helps them to picture success. By picturing the success, they are overriding any self-doubt that may have crept into their minds the day before and then, every so often, perhaps they’ve taken five minutes just to, again, raise their awareness and check themselves.

The more you know yourself the more effective you can be. The change in their physiology, telling themselves that they can and that they are picturing success and they are thinking about their purpose, all of which helps give them a lift. None of this is rocket science. When you’re feeling good, when you’re being your best, you automatically do your best in whatever your skills or actions are and that leads you to achieve your best results. It’s not chance, it’s science.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.