How Resilience is Your Greatest Asset to Achieve Success from Professor Damian Hughes

WEBVTT

00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:01.566
<v Speaker 1>The brain is teleological.

00:00:01.840 --> 00:00:04.488
<v Speaker 2>Damien Hughes, the high-performance guy.

00:00:04.780 --> 00:00:12.489
<v Speaker 1>Your resilience to be able to keep going, to persevere and to stay in the fight improves, on average, by around 32%.

00:00:12.640 --> 00:00:17.733
<v Speaker 2>The guy has formulas beyond formulas of how success happens.

00:00:17.839 --> 00:00:19.286
<v Speaker 1>I use four questions.

00:00:19.286 --> 00:00:29.047
<v Speaker 1>When we ask those questions, that allows us to move somewhere closer to identifying what our sense of purpose is and what our definition of success really is.

00:00:29.047 --> 00:00:30.350
<v Speaker 1>Take notes.

00:00:30.429 --> 00:00:33.323
<v Speaker 2>You give so many formulas you're going to want to write them down.

00:00:33.323 --> 00:00:36.171
<v Speaker 2>What's your model for how success happens?

00:00:36.171 --> 00:00:38.569
<v Speaker 2>How do you find that success works?

00:00:38.969 --> 00:00:44.328
<v Speaker 1>I was really intrigued, years later, to discover that Sigmund Freud described that as the golden seed moment.

00:00:44.328 --> 00:00:50.954
<v Speaker 1>He says for everybody that goes on to achieve success against their own parameters.

00:00:50.954 --> 00:01:00.283
<v Speaker 1>They always have a moment where somebody, somewhere, believes in them and sows that seed of what they think they're capable of, and that was certainly the case for me.

00:01:00.283 --> 00:01:00.564
<v Speaker 1>How?

00:01:00.604 --> 00:01:03.781
<v Speaker 2>do we learn success from our mistakes or from our failures?

00:01:04.063 --> 00:01:12.778
<v Speaker 1>That, to me, is married up with a word that I think gets misused an awful lot in our modern world, which is humility.

00:01:12.778 --> 00:01:22.030
<v Speaker 1>Humility isn't saying you're humble, it's a mindset, and it's a mindset that I see you would develop in three stages, and it's those three stages that then allow us to learn from mistakes.

00:01:22.030 --> 00:01:30.560
<v Speaker 1>So the first stage I often talk about when we refer to humility is peak, idiot stage, where you have high levels of confidence but low levels of knowledge.

00:01:30.620 --> 00:01:32.164
<v Speaker 1>So you have an opinion.

00:01:32.164 --> 00:01:33.587
<v Speaker 1>You've always got a judgment.

00:01:33.587 --> 00:01:35.531
<v Speaker 1>There's nothing that you don't know.

00:01:35.531 --> 00:01:42.743
<v Speaker 1>So it's like when you go to sports games and you see somebody sat in the stand declaring that they did a better job than the athletes out there.

00:01:42.743 --> 00:01:49.644
<v Speaker 1>Or you watch the talent programs on TV where somebody says I want to sing like Mariah Carey, then they sound like a cat being strangled.

00:01:49.644 --> 00:01:51.349
<v Speaker 1>It's peak idiot.

00:01:51.349 --> 00:01:56.751
<v Speaker 1>They're almost they're deluded to the point they don't know where they are and what the capabilities are.

00:01:56.751 --> 00:02:12.774
<v Speaker 1>So the quicker you can get over yourself in that regard, you enter what I describe as the valley of humility, and this is just characterized by being curious, like what you demonstrate on this podcast, you know, asking questions, listening to answers, and like.

00:02:12.973 --> 00:02:17.140
<v Speaker 1>We interviewed a guy once called Nims Purja, who's incredible.

00:02:17.140 --> 00:02:29.650
<v Speaker 1>He grew up in Nepal and he joined the Gurkha's soldiers regiment, then became a member of the British Special Forces the first Gurkha to ever do it and then he decided that he wanted to climb mountains.

00:02:29.650 --> 00:02:37.371
<v Speaker 1>Now there's a documentary on Netflix on this guy called 14 peaks, where he scaled the 14 highest mountain peaks in the world in a record time.

00:02:37.371 --> 00:02:46.212
<v Speaker 1>Now, for context, the previous record was seven and a half years and Nims Purgey does it in six months, and he had this great line that he was talking about.

00:02:46.212 --> 00:02:46.753
<v Speaker 1>That he says.

00:02:46.753 --> 00:02:56.668
<v Speaker 1>He says your ability to be world-class at anything depends on how long and comfortable you are at being shit at it for and that, to me, was such a great line.

00:02:56.668 --> 00:02:57.800
<v Speaker 1>Cause it was always like cause.

00:02:57.800 --> 00:03:00.368
<v Speaker 1>That's where the learning is, that's where the failure is.

00:03:00.640 --> 00:03:04.491
<v Speaker 2>But as a professor of this subject, it's quite.

00:03:04.491 --> 00:03:07.689
<v Speaker 2>I'm very intrigued to get your thoughts.

00:03:07.689 --> 00:03:10.269
<v Speaker 2>How do you succeed at high performance?

00:03:10.348 --> 00:03:21.843
<v Speaker 1>I think the first definition of that, brad, is to define what high performance is for you, and what I'd like to help people do is to answer that question of well, what is success for you?

00:03:21.843 --> 00:03:26.413
<v Speaker 1>I use four questions that come from the work of a guy called Dan Bootler.

00:03:26.413 --> 00:03:28.687
<v Speaker 1>The first one is what do we love doing?

00:03:28.687 --> 00:03:30.967
<v Speaker 1>The second one is what are we really good at?

00:03:30.967 --> 00:03:34.149
<v Speaker 1>The third one is what does the world really need from us?

00:03:34.149 --> 00:03:37.590
<v Speaker 1>And the fourth one is how can we use this to generate wealth?

00:03:37.590 --> 00:04:01.137
<v Speaker 1>When we ask those questions, that allows us to move somewhere closer to identifying what our sense of purpose is and what our definition of purpose is and what our definition of success really is, and I think it's a really great way in to then help people ask the question then are you structuring the rest of your life to be able to facilitate you getting closer to your definition of it?

00:04:01.665 --> 00:04:05.415
<v Speaker 2>What are some of the key factors to sustaining success?

00:04:05.705 --> 00:04:12.155
<v Speaker 1>What I found is I thought there was three things that Ferguson did that often gets overlooked in terms of sustaining it.

00:04:12.155 --> 00:04:34.069
<v Speaker 1>The first one was that he saw things in four-year cycles, so he viewed this whole the trajectory of his team as a four year cycle and, whereas most people were being in that reactive or responsive six to 12 month cycle, so, what he would do is he would view that over that longer term period so he would recognize that he could.

00:04:34.089 --> 00:04:41.665
<v Speaker 1>He needed to get rid of somebody, say in the second year of that four year cycle, rather than wait to the fourth year so he could start to recruit.

00:04:41.665 --> 00:04:46.177
<v Speaker 1>So he was just thinking far longer term than I think most other people do.

00:04:46.177 --> 00:04:50.173
<v Speaker 1>I think the second thing he did was he managed upwards brilliantly.

00:04:50.173 --> 00:05:00.274
<v Speaker 1>And then the third thing that I think he did really well was he refreshed his own coaching and support staff on a regular basis what's the difference between good and great or good and amazing?

00:05:00.574 --> 00:05:08.009
<v Speaker 1>I think, if it was to sum it up in one word, I think it's consistency not just showing up on your good days, it's showing up on your bad days as well.

00:05:08.670 --> 00:05:19.178
<v Speaker 2>What's your perspective on the difference between someone who sets, you know, the million goal versus the billion goal or the be local champ versus world champ?

00:05:19.178 --> 00:05:22.454
<v Speaker 2>What's your mindset on how that goal is different?

00:05:22.454 --> 00:05:24.629
<v Speaker 2>How does a person go to that level?

00:05:24.889 --> 00:05:26.452
<v Speaker 1>The brain is teleological.

00:05:26.452 --> 00:05:28.317
<v Speaker 1>We need to have a target to go for.

00:05:28.925 --> 00:05:30.829
<v Speaker 2>Teleological explain that word to me.

00:05:31.291 --> 00:05:37.053
<v Speaker 1>Teleological means that, as humans, the frontal cortex of our brain needs to know the pathway that we're doing.

00:05:37.053 --> 00:05:39.266
<v Speaker 1>So you can set a million pound goal.

00:05:39.266 --> 00:05:40.588
<v Speaker 1>You can set a billion pound pound goal.

00:05:40.588 --> 00:05:44.315
<v Speaker 1>The brain still likes the fact that you've got a target to go after.

00:05:45.076 --> 00:06:02.678
<v Speaker 1>One of the nicest ways that I've seen that this has been adopted, brad, is there's a really nice technique of setting goals called the zander letter, and one of the things that used to frustrate him when he taught appreciation of music was that his students were more focused on the grade that they would get rather than the craft that they were supposed to be learning.

00:06:02.678 --> 00:06:11.257
<v Speaker 1>So one of his ideas was he used to say to them write a letter to me dated 12 months into the future as a retrospective of what the year's just been like.

00:06:11.257 --> 00:06:18.569
<v Speaker 1>So write down everything you've achieved, all your successes, what you're proud of, and write it as if you've already lived that experience.

00:06:18.569 --> 00:06:29.610
<v Speaker 1>Now what that does is that opens your brain up to the possibilities rather than the probabilities, the opportunities rather than the threats, gives you the chance of focusing on where you want to go rather than where you don't want to.

00:06:29.610 --> 00:06:35.612
<v Speaker 1>So a Zander letter can be a really effective way of setting these goals, whether that's for a million or a billion.

00:06:35.964 --> 00:06:40.920
<v Speaker 1>What seems to take it to that next level, which great performers do, is they then conduct.

00:06:40.920 --> 00:06:47.889
<v Speaker 1>Once they know where they're heading off to, they conduct what's known as a pre-mortem, and this is a phrase from a guy I mentioned earlier, gary Klein.

00:06:47.889 --> 00:07:06.406
<v Speaker 1>A pre-mortem says now I know what the year ahead is going to be like, what could stop all that happening, what are all the things that could kill me along the way, and you work out what are the five things that are likely to derail me or trip me up, or that are or take me off course, and then you work out, should they happen, how am I going to handle them.

00:07:06.406 --> 00:07:22.786
<v Speaker 1>Once you've done these two factors of setting a goal, and then you've worked out what can kill you, your resilience to be able to keep going, to persevere and to stay in the fight improves on average by around 32% because you know where you're going.

00:07:22.786 --> 00:07:29.170
<v Speaker 1>But you've also know you've got the confidence that you've got the resources to be able to handle the setbacks that are going to occur.

00:07:29.391 --> 00:07:31.197
<v Speaker 2>And that's a big success podcast for today.

00:07:31.197 --> 00:07:38.190
<v Speaker 2>Hopefully, you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch and, if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today.

00:07:38.190 --> 00:07:47.351
<v Speaker 2>Big success is what it's all about and, by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button, so you're here with us every single week on the big success podcast.

00:07:47.351 --> 00:07:48.093
<v Speaker 2>I'm Brad sugars.

00:07:48.093 --> 00:07:48.735
<v Speaker 2>That's BS.

00:07:48.735 --> 00:07:50.766
<v Speaker 2>Big success is what we're shooting for.

00:07:50.766 --> 00:07:53.454
<v Speaker 2>Check the show notes for all the links.

00:07:53.454 --> 00:07:56.269
<v Speaker 2>Make sure you follow through, keep learning, keep coming back.

00:07:56.269 --> 00:08:16.641
<v Speaker 2>Oh, and, by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success.

00:08:16.641 --> 00:08:19.925
<v Speaker 2>I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast.