7
SHIFTING TOXIC THINKING
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth,
so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.
To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over
the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
—Henry David Thoreau
Fear separates winners and losers at the negotiating table, as I observed for two decades as a sports agent. Fear arises from toxic thinking, so if you can shift those thoughts, you set yourself up for fearlessness.
Case in point: negotiating for salary. A salary.com survey of almost 2,000 workers found nearly one-fifth never negotiated after they were offered a job, and more than three-quarters of respondents said they regretted not doing so.1
They were held back by toxic thinking: too worried about losing the job offer, doubting their ability to ask, not feeling like it, and so on. Other answers participants provided included “I don’t want to come across as greedy” and “It never seems to make a difference anyway.”
And yet by not negotiating, they left money on the table. Their toxic thinking kept them from representing their value and seeking fair compensation. The cost of not negotiating can be more than $500,000 by the time an employee is age 60.2 That’s the price of this mistaken mentality.
Toxic thinking isn’t glass-half-empty pessimism. It’s subtler and can manifest in a fixed mindset, perfectionism, acceptance of mediocrity, worry, and magical thinking. Recognizing those negative patterns is the first step to replacing them with habits that lead to fearlessness.
Getting out of toxic thinking can be as simple as extending the benefit of the doubt. Think of the new patterns in this chapter as sharp garden tools for tackling the weeds in your head, those toxic thoughts. Some of them have pretty deep roots, and it will take time and work to nurture a healthier mental landscape.
Some people survive by operating against worst-case scenarios. But to thrive and become fearless, you must replace this kind of toxic thinking. With these trades, you will plant habits that drive your best outcomes.
Trade the Status Quo for Creativity
When I needed a car as a teenager, my parents bought me a big ugly beat-up station wagon. Most of my friends drove better cars by far. But my dad knew that heavy clunker would keep me safe driving in Michigan’s ice and snow (his theory was that the big front on the car would protect me if I ever slid into a tree or, God forbid, another car).
So what if it didn’t look great? It got me where I needed to go. It got the job done.
When cell phones and their car antennas became popular, our family budget couldn’t afford such a luxury. One day I came home to see a new addition to my station wagon: an antenna on the left back window. My heart leaped at the thought of a cell phone. I ran to the car to check it out.
Inside, under the stereo, was a cell phone! I picked it up, but something was very wrong. It was plastic. Totally fake. So was the antenna taped to the back window.
“Dad? Seriously?” I said when I walked into the house.
“I got you a cell phone,” he said, smiling. Yeah, the best decoy a few dollars could buy, I thought.
And yet it worked. Not long after, I was at a stoplight, and I looked over at a guy staring at me, but I didn’t freak out. I just picked up my plastic cell phone.
The whole setup was Dad’s sense of humor coming through. It was also his creativity. Creativity was his way of addressing his instinctive fear for my safety. That’s such a vulnerable point, isn’t it? Our default setting is programmed to do everything we can to give our children and our significant others every chance to stay healthy and thrive. But we can’t control what happens to them—no one can!
My dad was always bucking the status quo, which keeps everyone in place and erases doubt about doing the right thing. If you’re keeping up with the Joneses, you don’t have to think for yourself. Whenever there is doubt, the natural tendency is toward the status quo. We give up our power to think creatively for the illusion of fearing less, and that default setting needs to change.
That’s why I’m so drawn to creativity and a growth mindset. Creativity is rooted in a desire to learn.3 It embraces challenges, persists despite obstacles, thinks of effort as a means to mastery, and welcomes the chance to learn from criticism.
Trading the status quo depends on tapping creativity. As an agent, I worked in various fields, such as baseball, golf, basketball, and broadcasting, with athletes and coaches. I tapped my creativity to see new ways to expand traditional deals so my clients and their sponsors would benefit. For instance, a golfer who wins on the PGA Tour traditionally gets bonuses from the manufacturers that sponsor that player because their logos are displayed prominently in victory coverage. That doesn’t take into account the wall-to-wall coverage of athletes who are playing well, even if they don’t win. A player who is leading alone at the end of the first day will own that day’s coverage, and certain media platforms are particularly coveted by sponsors. I began to structure sponsorships to include bonuses for appearances on the USAToday.com, Sports Illustrated (SI.com), and pgatour.com home pages.
That creative thinking resulted in better contracts for my clients. And my dad’s creative thinking helped keep me safe. He showed me the power of bucking the status quo and thinking for myself. I didn’t have to solve problems the way other people did. I could try my own way and maybe find it was a better way. He modeled new approaches to problem solving, and that’s the mindset I took into my work as a sports agent. That freedom from fear of failure was one of the greatest gifts he’s ever given me.
Think of a basic task such as trying to connect with people who are important to your work. Is the best way to contact them in person? Text? LinkedIn? A handwritten note? An assistant or third party? Is there a better time of day? When you see all of these avenues as solutions, you begin to see that every challenge has multiple creative approaches.
A mindset is like software: it runs on a script. If you want to change your performance, you have to change the script running inside your head. You need to replace the words that say, “You either have it or you don’t.” The creativity script says, “You have the ability to make yourself into anything you want. Your inborn talent is important, but how much you work is even more important. If you can imagine it, you can do it.”
By replacing the status quo that holds you back, your creativity will clear a new path apart from others’ expectations or your old ones. You effectively are issuing a challenge to yourself to do the work only you can do—using your unique talents, one small decision at a time.
Trade Perfection for Advancement
As kids, we learn to color within the lines. We learn standards and grades. We measure ourselves by statistics, especially if we play sports. We learn to strive for the 100 percent.
Where would we be if we didn’t set perfection as a standard for our performance?
Answer: more fearless.
For starters, we often fear less when we let go of perfection. It takes off a ton of pressure when we stop trying to hit such a small mark. And strategically, it makes sense.
Listen to successful people who recognize the shackles that perfection puts on us: “The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism … is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly—indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection,” said Huffington Post and Thrive Global founder Arianna Huffington.
Her quote points to the importance of paying attention to the small moments of perfectionism that can effectively sabotage career advancement and happiness. Striving for perfection can get in the way of long-term fulfillment and recognition because we use the expectation of perfection against ourselves. When we disqualify ourselves because we are not perfect, we pass up opportunities for growth and advancement.
Consider a research study published in Harvard Business Review that found different outcomes for a diverse group of job seekers.4 Men are more likely to feel confident about their chances when they meet 60 percent of the criteria for a job, whereas women feel confident only if they can meet all the criteria. Take gender out of it, and this much is true: when we insist on coloring completely within the lines, we take ourselves out of the running for jobs that end up going to less qualified competitors. We fear being seen as less than 100 percent ready for a job. In truth, if you are 100 percent equipped for a job, you are really qualified for an even better one. So you can see the multiplier effect of this thinking over time and a significant reason why trading away perfection can help you rise higher more quickly.
Trading perfection for advancement requires a profound shift in thinking. It involves reconsidering the small moments in which perfectionism pulls you into thinking that you are not good enough, that you have to do more, that you exist in an either/or world. You don’t.
This trade means giving up what you think you know and acknowledging the unwritten possibilities that exist. When you begin to admit, “I don’t know what I don’t know,” you open yourself to curiosity. Instead of, “I can’t,” you begin to say, “What if?”
This shift is powerful, and I see men and women who don’t do it miss out on chances to stretch and prove themselves, to sharpen their fearlessness. The researchers described the women who shied away from jobs in which they lacked 100 percent of the written requirements this way:
[They] didn’t see the hiring process as one where advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job qualifications. What held them back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process. This is critical because it suggests that … women don’t need to try and find that elusive quality “confidence.” They just need better information about how hiring processes really work.
When I became president of client representation, I had maybe 25 percent of the qualifications I needed. I had started recruiting talent and building our roster of clients. I had negotiated $50,000 deals, not $50 million deals—yet. I had started to pave the way, but there was still a heck of a gap in my skill set. But there was no gap in my mindset and determination. I felt confident that I could build on the skills I had to meet the great need that I had observed in our company’s services. My confidence persuaded the company owner to give me the job.
If I had held on to perfectionism, my career as a sports agent could not have happened. I had to accept that I was far from the perfect candidate, and I had to work my butt off to earn my position. To become president of the firm, I had to let go of perfectionism. This is a key step to fearlessness.
When you see biographies with unusual jumps in positions or career switches, those people are likely to have traded perfection for advancement. They are less worried about what people think than they are worried about how to plug in where they can best flourish.
When you trade perfection for advancement, you become more aggressive about seeing what else is possible. As you do this in the small moments, you are taking on the hard work of changing your default setting to fearing less. You are freeing up the mental space that was on lock down from your perfectionism. Get ready for a big outcome!
Trade Mediocrity for Possibility
What are you OK with?
And is that truly OK with you?
I remember walking into the house where I grew up, excited about the A minus I had scored in a tough class. It was the second-highest score in the class. Most everyone else got Bs and Cs. I was jacked.
My parents wanted all of their children to succeed, of course. So as I showed them my grade and how proud I was, my parents asked me, “Did anyone get an A?”
“Adam did,” I said, naming a super smart classmate.
“Hmm. Why did he get the A?”
I felt deflated. That wasn’t the response I wanted or expected. But I came to expect that, because part of my parents’ approach to encouraging success was reframing my default settings about what my best was.
Perfection wasn’t what they were after. It was my potential. It wasn’t that I should get an A but that it’s worth asking if I could.
They knew I had been comparing down, where all but one of my classmates were. When I bounded into my house, I was happy with that view.
My parents always compared up, never down. They were saying, in two simple questions: How about looking at this small moment differently?
We have the opportunity to help reprogram the way that our team members think. Simply ask: “Are we settling for less than we can achieve?”
Be aware of how you are measuring what is possible, and be careful to stay anchored to your values.
As I was building my career, I remember telling Mom how amazing Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo was because he was always on. Izzo seemed to be everywhere, in front of high-powered people, the epitome of success in our community. I admired him.
Mom didn’t miss a beat. “Molly, you may be right. But Tom Izzo doesn’t pack his kid’s lunch or schedule teacher conferences. He isn’t making dinner. In fact, he probably isn’t home for dinner much.”
A small moment when I said to myself, “Don’t compare yourself to him.”
And she was right. Comparing yourself to the wrong people is not good, no matter how wonderful they are. Mom was reminding me of the small moments that grounded me as a kid that I wanted to give my kids as well.
When we chase what is possible simply because someone else has it, we are allowing someone else to define success for us. We are chasing an illusion, a mediocre version of our own potential. We are confusing achievement with fulfillment.5
In this scenario, we can’t help but open the door to fear. It’s scary thinking of trying to live up to someone else’s ideals.
Trading mediocrity for possibility highlights the delicate line we walk as individuals, especially as leaders or parents whose responses can carry so much weight. We want to celebrate and, at the same time, point out untapped potential. It’s not OK to settle for less because there is almost always more in us that can be applied to our greatest purpose.
On that day of the A minus, I wasn’t sensing any fear. I knew my parents had my back and wanted the best for me. As I became independent, I began to see how easy it is for fear to keep us from comparing up.
We can be afraid of taking the lead because it’s more comfortable out of the spotlight. We can fear the work that is needed to be number one.
We can fear success because we are used to our current state. It’s familiar. No wonder people say, “Be careful what you wish for.” Getting what you really want in life can be scary.
When we trade mediocrity for possibility, we aren’t deleting our fear. We are facing it and saying we’re going to try for our best. When we make that choice of possibility over and over in the small moments, we fear less and set ourselves up for big outcomes. These are possible only when we give up the comfort of mediocrity.
Trade Worry for Compassion
Fear often takes the form of worry. It’s the constant drip in your head that distracts us from what we need to focus on. It bleeds energy a millisecond at a time, especially when the object of worry is nothing that we can affect. Worry steals our small moments, and the big outcome of that is lost time and progress.
There’s got to be a way to rethink worry, right? Yes, and when we claim it, we can access courage that we didn’t think we had. We can get through those moments when we are not in control.
One great antidote for worry is compassion, and here’s a family story that helped me understand how powerful this trade can be.
My twin brothers are both pilots. Johnny was a Navy pilot who went through Top Gun school. One of the most dangerous and most important tests of the training is when a pilot has to land the fighter jet on an aircraft carrier.6 Because the carrier is so big and moves forward, side to side, and up and down, landing the jet has been compared to landing on top of a five-story building during an earthquake.
When the plane lands on the carrier, it goes from about 150 miles per hour to zero in seconds, stopping by catching a hook on a steel wire connected to motors underneath the flight deck. The margin for error can be as little as one foot. They call this “catching the hook.”
“It’s like trying to land a bulldozer on a postage stamp that’s moving around,” Johnny told us.
Talk about worried. That was my mom. As Johnny’s attempt to catch the hook came closer and Mom’s worrying increased, she tapped into her big heart. A giving person who had poured herself into all kinds of community boards, she had seen small moments of generosity lead to big outcomes.
Payday had come, so she had money to go grocery shopping, with Johnny on her mind.
“I knew he had prepared well and that I didn’t need to worry, but it was still hard because I knew this was going to be his first time landing on the carrier,” Mom told me later. “At the grocery store, I saw a woman and her children with a cart full of groceries, and I could tell she might need help. So I bought them for her.”
“It might seem crazy,” Mom said. “But I really hoped that by doing that for her, I was sending good fortune to Johnny.”
Her logic may not make sense to you, but the point I’m making is that the small moment in the grocery store reflected my mom’s mindset. She grasped an opportunity to trade her worry for something bigger.
Many people call this “karma” or “fate.” Maybe it’s the universe responding to acts of compassion. What Mom did in the grocery store came out of her understanding that wherever you are in life, life gives you many small ways to make a difference.
Johnny’s diligence over so many small high-adrenaline moments in his fighter jet paid off. He graduated number one in his class at Miramar (the Navy’s Top Gun school), and on that first aircraft carrier landing, he nailed it. Mom lived through it too.
As an agent, I tried to provide a safe space for my clients to move from worry to compassion. When Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz was going through a divorce, he often came by my office to sit and talk it through. I understood the pressure he was under as his next pitching appearance loomed. During these times I saw how important vulnerability is to moving away from worry, which so often keeps your heart locked.
I kept an open door for my clients, and I listened and encouraged them to move away from worry because there was nothing good that would come of staying in that place.
Small things can inspire others. You don’t have to be Bill Gates writing a big check or taking a big action to change the world. Reinventing your perspective from one of worry to one of compassion happens over time and builds a powerful mindset.
Trade Magical Thinking for Sensible Advice
Someday I will …
When I am …
If I ever …
Do you begin sentences like that? You might be a magical thinker, and if you are, you have a lot of company!
Magical thinking is the perspective that something outside yourself will one day swoop in and create your better life. Someone or an event, even sheer luck, will transform your circumstances. Just like the fairy tale about Jack and the magic beanstalk, magical thinkers are counting on some modern fairy dust to make their dreams into reality.
Fear keeps people thinking this way. It’s much, much easier to fantasize about winning the lottery or getting a phone call out of the blue from a recruiter who wants to hand you a dream job on a silver platter.
Even though the magical thinker knows deep down that the mystical ship is not coming in, the fantasizing helps keep the mind busy. This perspective hides fear by dreaming the moments away. Do it enough and you might even fool yourself that you’re actively pursuing your personal mission.
But you’re not getting anywhere with magical thinking. When fear takes hold, magical thinking leaves you with no grounding. It creates a vacuum.
A small moment early in my career as a sports agent taught me the power of trading magical thinking for sensible advice.
As you can tell by now, I have no problem asking for advice. But when I was starting out, on some level I feared that if I didn’t look hard enough and push myself to keep asking, I might not reach the wise person who could change my world view and show me the right way.
I did find him. His name was David Falk. You might have heard of him. He was Michael Jordan’s agent. His stable of stars was a who’s who of the NBA.
The respect in my eyes worked in my favor with Falk. Ego is almost everything in this world, along with the ability to read people.
I felt confident asking him, and I was aggressive. I was sure I was going to kill it in this field. However, ambition like this is nothing more than magical thinking if it’s not grounded in facts and action. That’s why I sought Falk’s insight.
“You are a legend,” I said. “Give me some tips!”
Falk didn’t miss a beat.
“Never sign anyone you think will fire you,” he replied.
Huh? I scratched my head. I hadn’t even considered the end of a business relationship because I was so focused on the start.
Falk’s sensible advice spoke to the fear that we often accept without thinking. As we move toward our true purpose, our positive momentum will attract partners and offers. Some are so attractive that magical thinking can take over, making us blind to what else we are accepting.
We see the stars and ignore the sensible advice, and before long we are working with a major client and the fear of getting fired is hanging over our head.
Falk’s advice became abundantly clear to me as my career took off and I had the chance to sign and work with great talent. His words helped me get clear on why I was working with someone and what I could see unfolding.
His sensible advice took my head out of the clouds and put my feet on the ground. I recalled his advice in many small moments when I needed courage to trust myself and live with a decision that was right for me. When you decide not to sign someone who will fire you, you’re practicing trusting yourself. And that trust drives out fear.
Later, I learned that Falk grew up working in his dad’s butcher shop. His dad took his business earnings and chased the magical pot of gold promised by gambling. “My dad was a compulsive gambler who lost everything he had,” Falk says. “My dad was a fun guy. But he was irresponsible. He didn’t do the things a man should do to take care of his family.”7
It makes sense that Falk built his success on loyalty. It’s one reason he crafted long-term contracts for Jordan. “He’s incredibly loyal, and he’ll fight to the death for his clients,” Jordan has said.8
In the small moments, when we practice trading magical thinking for practical advice, we make ourselves fearless.