Category: The Competitor Mindset

Former NFL and Super Bowl Champion quarterback Trent Dilfer shared his story recently on a podcast. During the interview, he was asked how he handled the period of his career in Tampa where he was being openly booed in public by fans for the team’s poor performance. Dilfer laughed and replied that to be a winner in the league, you have to believe you’re a legend in your own mind.

He wasn’t making the case for blind arrogance, or an unwillingness to learn and get better, but instead, reinforcing the fact that you must be self-confident in order to be successful in life.

Here’s why.

“Compete every day? No, that’s not me. I don’t like to compete.”

Does that response sound like something you’d say? I used to hear it quite often at tradeshows with the Compete Every Day team. Visitors would be walking the expo floor, stop in the booth to shop the apparel and then see the brand name and give me that line.

They believed that if they didn’t join a fitness competition or play competitive sports that they, in fact, weren’t ever competing.

It’s not that they weren’t competing against something, it’s just that they didn’t realize they were. 

“Excuses are lies we tell ourselves so that it doesn’t have to be our fault.” – Chris Creed

There are a million excuses that I can whip out of thin air instantaneously. We all can.

Because using excuses is easier than doing what we need to get done.

But as you’ve heard me say all month, excuses don’t get the job done. Excuses don’t add an extra “0” to your bank account and they won’t help you reach your goals. Excuses don’t create champions – and Champions don’t create excuses.

So how did I break up – and then kill – the excuses my inner critic was trying to create?

Here are the four actions I took to curb, and then bury, the excuses I caught myself going back to time and time again.

We’ve all had that moment. You know which one I’m referring to, right? The one where we quit. It’s that moment when we stopped pushing ourselves because it got really hard. Or it hurt. Or we didn’t think we could handle failure again. That moment. We’ve all got at least one of them. We quit […]

The 2017 CrossFit Games Open is officially over. And for 99% of you, the season has ended. Out of 354,966 adults, (not including teen or masters divisions) athletes who registered up for the RX division of the Open, only 2,2100 advance to Regionals as an individual or team member. That’s 0.6% of the total population. You actually had […]

It’s funny how our mind works. When many of us face obstacles, we tend to believe we’re the only ones facing that obstacle. So we don’t talk about it. We internalize everything. And because of that, we feel alone in a battle with a Goliath we can never beat. In all reality, there’s hundreds – […]

“Be realistic.” Those two words are the most damaging to your dreams. “Being realistic” is accepting things as they are and lowering your goals. “Being realistic” means changing your dreams to fit inside their expectations of what you’re capable. “Being realistic” means living by their rules. Not your own. “Be realistic” is the phrase people tell you […]