In Triathlon sports there is an “in joke” which goes –
“Triathlon is 80% mentality and 20% mental”
I guess you have to be hitting the wall to really appreciate the humor.
Life and business are all affected by your mentality or mindset. How you think has a profund influence on what you do and how you do it whether that’s in your personal life and related to health, relationships or career, or in your business life related to planning, marketing and operations.
When it comes to making changes most people focus on strategies and tactics; if you think of strategies as the “what you do” and tactics as the “how you do it” you can see why these seem the obvious things to look at.
“It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it
And that's what gets results
You can try hard (aah-ahh-ah)
Don't mean a thing (aah-ahh-ah)
Take it easy (aah-ahh-ah)
And then your jive will swing (aah-ahh-ah”
But take a step back from strategies and tactics and you can see that the thinking behind them is crucial, mindset is the who is doing the “what” and “how.”
The 80 / 20 rule is one of the most helpful concepts for making changes whether for your personal or professional life. Also called the “Pareto Principle.” This rule suggests that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results.
It was named after it’s founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, back in 1895. He noticed that people in society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the “vital few,” or the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the “trivial many,” or the bottom 80 percent.
Later, he discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle, in that 80 percent of the wealth of Italy during that time was controlled by 20 percent of the population. We can take Pareto’s 80 20 rule and apply it to almost any situation.
In nearly 20 years of coaching having worked with over 4000 individuals I am convinced that most transformative change work relates to addressing mindset and not strategies or tactics. Whether this is 80% of the time I haven’t measured but it sure seems like it.
Even with the best strategies and tactics in place if the individual mindset is wrong be that someone is hesitant, doubtful, lacks self-belief etc they are unlikely to get the same results as someone with a more resourceful mindset.
Investing time in self-awareness and self-management and learning about your own unique mindset is invaluable; it makes the difference between those who struggle and strive and those who flourish and thrive.
“Transform your mindset and you transform your behaviours and you transform your results.”
Something to think about!