Christo: Hey there and welcome back. In today‘s tip, I want to share some lessons learned from professional surfing.

Back in the glory days, I competed internationally for 7 years. That was kind of my role in life and a couple of years, obviously, well lots of years domestically prior to that as I was growing up. There‘s lots of mental challenges in competition as there is in business. So in business, it‘s like a competition every single day. A lot of the times it keeps yourself motivated.

What becomes very clear from the professional surfing, look even in the office here I got a surf board here. It‘s a bit of a prop to say as it is lying around. But what happens in professional surfing and in competitive sports like that is it amplifies everything into a really condensed period of time. So If I had an event coming up, you might train and train for this one event and it‘s suddenly that one day and it‘s all depends on this you know go, go, go. And then you do that in the event, and there‘s the next one and you have this really amplified moments. Whereas in business, these moments are a lot more subtle but it‘s like every single day, you have all these multiple little moments. Where It‘s like you‘ve got these little competitions on your hands.

One of the things that would come up for me quite regularly, is the little voice inside our head. We might all be a little bit crazy, or whatever it is, but there‘s this little voice in there that sometimes, I like to say it‘s like a little bit of a insert swear word here that messes with us. It‘s a little voice inside that‘s like a “*%/#”.

What happened just recently, I was at a surfing competition a couple of months ago, and I‘ve competed all my life, like I should be the most extremely experienced, or one of the most people that should be completely comfortable competing and I‘m very confident to go into this kind of, it was a team‘s event. I go just the moment about to go into the heat, probably for the 20 minutes, right before the minute I‘m about to go in, and this little voice pops inside my head saying, you know, don‘t slip off or don‘t be embarrassing or don‘t put yourself out there too much.

Recognizing that we all have, I believe that all levels of business because we work with hundreds of different business owners – some that do amazing figures in their business, some have a small kind of micro businesses where they‘re entire business might just be themselves. At all levels, everybody deals with it. Everybody has this little voice come up. It‘s the same little voice that tries to protect you from maybe putting yourself out there and embarrassing yourself or if you‘re about to go and exercise, you‘re about to go for a run and it says, “no, no, stay in bed. It‘s nice and warm here. Let‘s just keep ourselves comfortable” It‘s the same little voice trying to protect us. How would you know you‘ll feel better when you go and do it and if we get out of our own ways? Good question to ask yourself is, “what‘s the worst that‘s going to happen if you go and do it, you know?” If you go for a run, well you‘re probably going to feel good. Or if you‘re about to do something in business like call someone who could be an important call for you to get yourself out there or make a sale, what‘s the worst that could happen and they might say no? Well, then obviously, it‘s best to proceed and go ahead.

A lot of the time a good process and what I do if I speak to surfers that I‘ve helped in recent years with competitions and things, I‘d say, you know, “is it a real fear that‘s being brought up by the little voice or is it something that‘s just being made up?” So ask yourself that. If it‘s just an imaginary kind of fear or something that could go wrong it‘s not going to really hurt me, then proceed anyway.

So that‘s our little tip for today. I would love to hear any thoughts or comments or insights or anything. For future tips you‘d like to hear from us, feel free to send through any questions and we‘ll, of course, look after you. Bye for now.