There is a major problem in the Internet Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Business Training arena.

In fact, I feel the problem is so endemic and pervasive that it singlehandedly is responsible for causing the failure of many new ventures.

It also separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

I’m not sure why trainers don’t go through this.

Is it oversight? Or a presumption that successful people will have this quantity?

There is a lot of emphasis on the hands-on skills, and the strategy and the planning.

But there is an abject failure in addressing the mental game.

Sports psychologists have been chiefly responsible for the teams like ACS (Independent)’s rugby team prevailing against larger, more powerful Australian opponents (I’m an ACS alumni). Andre Agassi’s successful comeback is in part due to Anthony Robbins’ coaching.

They say too that athletes have an edge in business endeavors.

Although I’m not an athlete (at least not one for an extended period of time!), I have a fix on what they mean.

Any idiot can be optimistic in a positive business environment (especially at the start).

However the true test of your business acumen and mettle is what happens when the chips are down.
What happens when your funds start to tick down.

Do you have a Fight response?
Flight?
Or Freeze?

It’s interesting how little we’ve progressed from our Neanderthal roots.
Almost all successful entrepreneurs are “Alpha Males”, type-A personality, fighters.
Especially when the odds are against you is the best time to fight.
You can encounter massive resistance, your chance of success might be one in a thousand, one in a million, but you still go on.

If you have the ‘need to succeed‘, success will eventually come.
Just hang in there.

Here’s where atheletes come in.
Have you ever been in intensive sports training?
After running fifty laps around the track, you come panting to the finish line.
The coach comes to you and says, ‘Man, that was below your best. Give me another 50!’

At that moment, you already feel a magnetic attraction to the locker room. You are probably staring at the coach, goggle-eyed (at least on the first occasion), but you realize the showers aren’t coming until you finish the task at hand.

So with thighs throbbing and swollen with lactic acid, you pound the track and your mind is pushing itself to the wall. Your lungs might feel like bursting, your arms feel numb, you’ve got sweat flowing down your forehead, mucus streaming out of your nose.

What do you do?

You run the first 5 laps.
Your mind counts each step. Each step made. Each step completed. Anticipating the next step. And the next. And the next.
You finish one lap.
You start on the second.
Your legs are wobbly, but you finish it.
You start on the third.
Your vision gets blurry for a moment, but you shake it off as you finish the third.
The fourth and fifth seem a little easier.
You never thought you’d made it, but you did.
It’s probably the first 5 laps you’ll ever do.

You run the next 5 laps, thinking to yourself, gee that wasn’t so bad.

And the next 10 laps feel like cake.
Soon you finish the 50 laps and think to yourself, gee, I CAN do it.

Pow! a mental barrier broken.

When they come into the business world, the barriers you encounter are cake, compared to the 50 laps.
You know that the first 5 are always the toughest.
Breaking through those means the rest although not quite ‘cake’ will be substantially easier.

And meanwhile your peers are wondering how come you’re a superman or superwoman.
Let them wonder.

Success is a mind game.