Fight Your Fear and Win 7 Skills for Performing Your Best Under Pressure--At Work, in Sports,on Stage

CHAPTER ONE Determination: How to Set Goals and Go After Them Desire is the key to motivation, but it's the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal--a commitment to excellence--that will enable you to attain the success you seek. --MARIO ANDRETTI One Sunday morning Ed McMahon, a client of mine who works on Wall Street, attended the 8:00 a.m. mass at his church without his wife and kids because he wanted to make the 10:00 a.m. tee-off time he'd set up with his golf buddies. He sat in the back, letting the priest's words wash over him, thinking about some of the reading he'd been doing from books I'd given him. And suddenly, he was envisioning his funeral mass. He could see his casket at the front of the church. It was as though he were suspended above it. Who is sitting in the pews? he wondered. Who will deliver the eulogy? What will be said about me? "It caught me off-guard, I can tell you," he said. "I didn't go to mass to think that deep! It's programmed into me to just sit there and say thank you." But in the month Ed and I had been working together, he'd been doing, in fact, quite a bit of deep thinking. At forty-six he was at the top of the pyramid, the senior guy on the equity trading desk at Merrill Lynch. He had a nice home and nice things. He was happily married, with four kids--two of them out of college plus ten- and seven-year-olds. On every front, he was doing enviably well. And yet he couldn't help but feel something was missing. He'd been the guy from Brooklyn without a college education who'd fought his way to the center of the ring. Now that he'd won, he was almost sorry the fight was over. The challenges he handled day-to-day felt predictable. More and more, it felt to him like he was just going through the motions, fast and furious but not really accomplishing anything. He didn't know what he'd rather be doing, though. That was the problem. He knew he was in a rut but couldn't jump-start himself out of it. Sure enough, when Ed took the survey, his Determination score came up short. He was low on motivation. His commitment was flagging. And despite having achieved so much, without a new goal with real meaning, he lacked the will to succeed. What Is Determination? Determination is drive. It's the mind-set that impels you to make things happen. It's the strength, the power, of your intent. And it's the mental foundation on which the other six skills are built. No performance can go well without your having true grit--the determination to perform at the outermost edge of your capabilities. Success cannot be achieved without it. People who lack determination usually do so for three reasons. One, they lack intrinsic motivation. Or to put it differently, they're missing the drive from within--the passion, the fire. That fire is ignited by a goal or desire. Those short on motivation have nothing driving them forward--no dream, no well-defined goal, no unmet desire or need. Two, they're short on commitment. They're unable to vest themselves in the pursuit of any one thing. Commitment to a goal is rarely 100 percent--most of us have multiple priorities, after all, such as work, family, and a social/leisure life. But those lacking commitment can't even prioritize. They're immobilized by their options: They have so many, they can't pick one to start on. They're unable to decide which route to take because they can't decide which is the best one. Or they want to keep all their options open. Either way, they're stuck at the crossroads, incapable of taking action. Finally, those who lack determination lack what I call will to succeed. This differs from intrinsic motivation in that it's more a function of the external pressures pulling us rather than our innermost dreams driving us. Perhaps we're seduced by our culture or socioeconomic group to make money or to gain status. Perhaps weGreene, Don is the author of 'Fight Your Fear and Win 7 Skills for Performing Your Best Under Pressure--At Work, in Sports,on Stage' with ISBN 9780767906265 and ISBN 0767906268.