Stop Saying Stupid Sh*t Out Loud

Last month we talked about helping your team feel like they belong through the Māori term Whakapapa.

For many of you it resonated but led to the question, it feels great to belong, now how do we win?

Belonging and winning….now that is like peanut butter and chocolate!

Mental Strength Coach Trevor Mowad worked with the football teams at Georgia and Alabama and job #1 was getting the players to “SSSSO!”

This may sound simple enough, but when you are going to build the best college football team in some of the hottest parts of the country during the summer, putting a lid on the complaining and negative self-talk is no small task. In this three minute video the recently deceased Mowad discussed how they convinced a very young and diverse group of players to “SSSSO!”

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If you don’t have time for the video here are the cliff notes.

1.      What you say galvanizes what you and others think by 10X.

2.      Negative communication is 4 to 7x more impactful than positive communication.

3.      Instead of worrying about always being up, just don’t verbalize the down.

4.      These claims are supported by research from Georgetown professor Christine Porath.

The cumulative work of Mowad has been outlined in two books, “It Takes What it Takes” and “Getting to Neutral.”

The new idea is to not fight negative with positive but to focus on a neutral framework that allows the real awful to be dealt with efficiently and to not worry about having to always spin things to a positive. At the same time it keeps a lid on the negativity taking over and controlling the vibe.

We don’t think you should waste a single crisis to build a team that has a mental framework to:
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• Get to the brutal truth.
• Identify the next most important tasks.
• Establish a cadence of action and iteration.

You may not get a degree or certification to show what you have accomplished in the last three years, but you have been building the mental muscle to deal with the increased severity and frequency of a globally connected world that is grumpy.

Thank you for your readership, next month we will be writing on how to help your team handle hard conversations and how to organize and prioritize their tasks.