Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

It’s easy to blame others when something bad happens. However, you should never, ever do this unless you want to be an underachiever.

During this weekend’s slate of NFL and College Football games, I saw numerous examples where players and coaches blamed a bad call by a referee as the reason for losing. In each case, the referee did make a bad call and the bad call did impact the outcome of the game.

Even still, a football game is made up of more than one or two plays. As such, you would need two hands to count the numerous other mistakes and missed opportunities made by the team on the losing end of a bad call. If those mistakes weren’t made, then the referee’s bad call wouldn’t have mattered.

These mistakes and missed opportunities are the real reason for the loss. Why give that power to the referee when you can’t control the referee?

Our day to day lives are very similar to this. It’s human nature to try to blame something we can’t control when things don’t go our way. This, however, is a recipe for underachievers.

That’s right, underachievers are the ones who give control of their successes and failures to uncontrollable factors.

On the other hand, high achievers always take responsibility for their fate. High achievers focus on the factors they can control, and logically figure out how to work around the factors they cannot.

If you are not achieving your goals, take full responsibility for this. It’s okay to identify the uncontrollable factors, but don’t give them any power over you. Treat the uncontrollable just like an obstacle on an obstacle course and figure out the work around. Then, spend the majority of your time optimizing the factors under your direct control.

I started this daily blog 31 days ago on October 31st.  So far I’ve been able to continuously meet my goal of writing one blog post a day, everyday. My initial goal is to surpass my personal best of 45 blog post in a row.

I am doing this in order to build my blogging muscle.  My first hypothesis is that it’s easier to blog everyday than it is to blog once a week or once a month because of how strong your blogging muscle gets when doing a daily blog.

My other hypothesis is that a daily blog can change your life.

After one month of blogging, I’m confident that my first hypothesis is right. Doing a daily blog is much easier than blogging weekly or monthly. However, the jury is still out on the whole changing your life thing.

One month is clearly not enough time to judge this particular outcome. My thought is that if I continue to show up everyday, I will eventually figure out how to write a handfull of epic post that resonate deeply with people.  This will then lead to me finding my true voice, and in turn help me become a great writer.

At this point I haven’t been able to find that voice, although I do feel I’m getting closer.

Two of the post that people have found particularly inspiring and insightful include the post I wrote about the day I quit my job and the post I wrote about my son’s painful experience starting wrestling season 0-4.

The positive feedback from those two extremely personal stories suggest that people connect more with you when you share real life experiences.

Over the next month, I plan to do more of this.