How do you develop the right attitude in business?

Grant Leboff: Pete, one of the things you talk about in your book is the importance of mindset, and developing the right attitude. How does one start to do that?

Pete Wilkinson: For me, having the right attitude starts with thinking about what you want to become, so having an idea of what your best version of you looks like, and then, I call it kind of remembering who you are, and then thinking about what they best version of you could look like, and then thinking about, okay, so this is what I can become, and have the right sort of desire, the right sort of motivation, the right sort of attitude to deliver that performance. For me, it comes from starting about thinking what the very best version of you could look like.

Grant Leboff: Let’s say you do that, you’ve got a good version of yourself and in your mind this is who I want to be. How do you stick to it as it were, because I think we all, you know, I can imagine you get up in the morning and you go through an exercise, and you’re quite invigorated by, “I’ve got some ambitions here,” and then of course you get kicked around during the course of the week at work and everything else, and by Friday…. you’re sort of on the floor. How do you stick to that sort of mindset, or that vision if you like, that you’ve got?

Pete Wilkinson: Well, you need to have a front-of-mind, so when I talk to people, quite often I’ll ask questions about what people want to do and it’s quite vague, so for me, if you can decide what you want to be and you have an idea if you like, this vision that we talked about, but then I think it’s really important for you to define that with some real detail. By having the detail, you then sort of know specifically what it looks like, or what it’s going to feel like, or what you’re going to achieve, then the actions to take to get there are quite easy in terms of you can find them out.

If you’ve only got a vague idea, you’re easily kind of pushed off track as you were saying, but I think if you’ve got a really tight idea, and it’s very clear, then you will understand the actions. Then, by having that written down in a very simple format, words, of a list of goals, or things like that, you can then stick to it, but you’ve got to get the clarity. That’s the missing thing.

Grant Leboff: I understand, and then where does the commitment come from? If you’ve got the clarity, where does that sort of inner-strength to commit and say this is what I’m going to do?

Pete Wilkinson: Yeah, I mean, discipline is really important, it absolutely is, and consistency is really important. You know, one of the reasons of Ironman Triathlon and events of that nature is that you have to absolutely practice being disciplined, so even if you don’t want to, if the plan or the training regime, say, is you have to get up on a morning and run eighteen miles at five o’clock to Newcastle and back, well then, that’s what the plan says and that’s what you’ve got to do. By having the actions clear, you can then practice being disciplined, but it really does come from understanding kind of the, it’s like not just willpower, it’s like the why-power.

If you get that real desire of what your life is going to be like and you connect to that, that’s often enough when it gets tough to kind of just find that extra little bit of desire, an extra little bit of gear to get you over that hurdle.

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