Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

It’s not cliché to say that you are your toughest competition. It’s a fact that it’s harder to keep a promise you make to yourself than to someone else who can hold you accountable. If you have a bad habit, you don’t break it by just promising to yourself that you won’t do it again. Bad habits don’t form overnight, and they don’t end overnight either.

These are the things that make you your toughest competition. Subsequently, having self-awareness of these internal battles is how you compete with yourself. In other words, you can’t compete with yourself if you don’t know how to win. Moreover, the only way to know how to win is through self-awareness.

• If you lack confidence? Why? What negative thoughts do you have a bad habit of repeating to yourself?
• Do you overeat? why? What bad habit is food compensating for when you are not hungry?
• Are you a chronic procrastinator with your goals? Why? What do you have a bad habit of telling yourself about time and opportunity in the moments you don’t act?
• Is mental toughness stopping you from breaking through to the next level? Why? What is it about the pain of discipline, repetition, fatigue, boredom, and fear that you’re allowing to hold you back?

Self-awareness requires honesty. If you can’t be honest with yourself, you can’t compete with yourself, and you must be able to compete with yourself to become the best version of you. As Proverbs 27:17 states, iron sharpens iron. So, when you are your own iron, you can constantly be in the process of sharpening.

Compete with Yourself Using Personal Record Goals and Routine Streaks

To this end, there is only one way to compete with yourself and win. To compete with yourself and win you must have a process to set, track, and consistently pursue personal record goals that you can break. It’s really that simple.

Goals give you a mission, which then gives you purpose, which then gives you motivation, which then gives you guard rails to self-regulate your behavior. This chain of benefits makes goal setting the critical ingredient for competing with yourself. Moreover, when you set the type of goals that allow you to track and consistently pursue personal records, you will slowly start to transform into the best version of yourself.

To do this, it only takes 7 steps:

1. Become self-aware about the #1 bad habit holding you back from being the best version of yourself. You may have more than one bad habit, but only attack one at a time.
2. Define a goal to establish a good habit to replace that bad habit
3. Create a daily routine for establishing that habit, tracking your consistency (streaks), and measuring your improvement.
4. Persist as long as possible until you have one or more bad days that causes you to fail at keeping your routine.
5. Mark how long you were able to maintain your routine streak. If you set a new personal record for how long you maintained your routine streak, track it, and celebrate your victory.
6. Reflect on what caused the bad day(s), but don’t let it discourage you from starting a new streak immediately.
7. Make adjustments and start doing it every day again and then repeat from step 4.