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

0:00The brain is teleological. Damien Hughes, the high performance guy. Your resilience to be able to keep going, to persevere and sustain the fight improves on average by around 32%. The guy has formulas beyond formulas of how success happens. I use four questions. 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. take notes he gives so many formulas you're going to want to write them down what's your model for how success happens how do you find that success works i was really intrigued years later to discover that sigmund freud described that as the golden seed moment yeah he says for everybody that goes on to achieve success against their own parameters 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 how do we learn success from our mistakes or from our failures that to me is married up with a word that i think gets uh misused an awful lot in our modern world which is the humility humility isn't saying you're humble it's a mindset and it's a mindset that i see you we develop in three stages and it's those three stages that then allow us to learn from mistakes 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 so you have an opinion you've always got a judgment there's nothing that you don't know 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 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 it's peak idiot they're almost they're deluded to the point they don't know uh where they are and what the capabilities are so the quick 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 like you demonstrate on this podcast you know asking questions listening to answers and like we interviewed a guy once called nims purger who's incredible he's um he grew up in nepal and he joined the gurkhas 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 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 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 that he says 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 because it was always like because that's where the learning is that's where the failure is but as a professor of this subject it's quite i'm very intrigued to get your thoughts how do you succeed at high performance i think the first definition of that is to define what high performance is for you.

3:15And what I like to help people do is to answer that question of, well, what is success for you? I use four questions that come from the work of a guy called Dan Bootler. The first one is, what do we love doing? The second one is, what are we really good at? The third one is, what does the world really need from us? And the fourth one is, how can we use this to generate wealth? When we ask those questions, that allows us to move somewhere closer to identifying what our sense of purpose is and what our 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 you getting closer to your definition of it what are some of the key factors to sustaining success what i found is i i thought there was three things that ferguson did that often gets overlooked in terms of sustaining it the first one was that he saw things in four-year cycles so he viewed his whole the the trajectory of his team as a four-year cycle and whereas most people were being in that reactive or responsive six to twelve month cycle so what he would do is he would view that over that longer term period so he would recognize that 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.

4:41So he was just thinking far longer term than I think most other people do. I think the second thing he did was he managed upwards brilliantly. 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? 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. 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?

5:19What's your mindset on how that goal is different or how does a person go to that level? The brain is teleological. We need to have a target to go for. Yeah, teleological. Explain that word to me. Teleological means that as humans, the frontal cortex of our brain needs to know the pathway that we're doing. So you can set a million pound goal. You can set a billion pound goal. The brain still likes the fact that you've got a target to go after. 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.

6:03So 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. 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. 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. So a Zander letter can be a really effective way of setting these goals, whether that's for a million or a billion.

6:35What seems to take it to that next level, which great performers do is they then conduct, 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. A premortem 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 take me off course. And then you work out, should they happen? How am I going to handle them? 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%.

7:21Because you know where you're going, 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. And that's the Big Success Podcast for today. 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. 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. I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for.

7:51Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.