1: While playing college soccer in the 1980s, Kim Butler learned something that changed her life.
“Given that Principia College was a small college, and that women’s college soccer was a fairly new concept, the team was made up of several girls who had never even played soccer before,” Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy write in The Gap and The Gain: The High Achiever’s Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success.
The season got off to a slow start. “For the first several games, this ragtag team got crushed by their opponents,” Dan and Ben write.
There typically weren’t any locker rooms. So after the games, the muddy and sweaty players and coaches would get on the bus and drive the hour or two back to Principia.
With each loss, the team members felt discouraged and disheartened.
“Listen up,” their coach would say. “Okay, you’ve got 5 minutes to sulk.”
With that, he would start a timer.
“The bus would be dead silent for those 5 minutes as the players were devastated and depressed about getting destroyed in their game,” Dan and Ben write.
When the timer went off, the coach would stand back up.
“All right, then,” he would say. “For the next 10 minutes we are going to talk about specific good things that happened during the game.”
Once again, he would set a timer. Different players would share something positive that had happened that day.
After the 10-minute timer sounded, the coach set a 20-minute timer. He had every player point out a specific good thing another player did during that game.
“After the 20-minute timer went off, the coach didn’t allow them to talk about that game again,” Dan and Ben write.
The coach used this same tactic during practices. If one of the players was feeling down or in a funk, he would send them away, give them 5 minutes, and let them return when there was evidence they were ready to move forward.
Around the season’s halfway point, something surprising happened.
“During the first half of the year, they lost all their games,” the authors write. “During the second half of the year, they won all their games.”
In fact, Principia won the NCAA Division II Championship that year!
2: The coach’s methods are an example of what is known in performance psychology as implementation intentions, a strategy to plan for the worst—so we can perform at our best.
“With an implementation intention, we specifically plan for when things will fall apart or go wrong,” Dan and Ben write.
We prepare for obstacles and setbacks by strategizing how we will respond when they occur.
The soccer coach understood that his players would be discouraged after a loss. Rather than deny this reality, he planned for it by implementing his “5-minute rule.”
“Rather than planning for ideal future scenarios, the coach had a pre-planned response for when things fell apart,” Dan and Ben note.
He trained his team so that they knew how they would deal with the inevitable disappointments and setbacks. Doing so allowed them to be intentional. It increased their feelings of self-control. They knew what they were going to do. They weren’t tempted to sabotage their goals.
“We have a simple plan in place if presented with an option that conflicts with our goals,” Dan and Ben recommend. The goal is not to deny or ignore negative events. It is to get ourselves out of them as quickly as we can.
Let’s say we are trying to limit the amount of sugar in our diet. We create “a pre-planned response for every time we even think about sugar,” they write. “Maybe the pre-plan is that the moment we think about sugar or get triggered to have sugar, we drop and do ten push-ups.
Over time, this pre-planned response becomes a new habit to combat old triggers.
3: After graduation, Kim Butler became an entrepreneur running a financial advisory firm. Working with her clients, she applies the lessons from her days as a collegiate athlete.
Each quarter, she has her clients answer two questions: “Over the past 90 days, how much money have you saved? And “Over the past 90 days, how much income have you earned from your investments.”
They begin by taking stock of what has happened. Now, they are ready to move forward and plan for the future.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How might I apply “implementation intentions” in my life? Consider a personal and a professional goal. What obstacles or setbacks might occur? How will I handle these obstacles? Write down my answers.
Action: Do it today.
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