Work On Your Game: Discipline, Confidence & Mental Toughness For Personal & Professional Development

#3125: The Power Of Negative Thinking

Today’s class is about the power of negative thinking. You might not think negative thoughts have any value, but they do—if used the right way. It’s not about letting negativity take over, but about using it strategically when the time calls for it. I’ll explain how to use negative thinking to your advantage, when it’s helpful, and why it’s just as important as positive thinking. Let’s get into it! Show Notes: [03:10]#1 Negative energy is still energy, and it can be transmuted into action that produces positive results. [10:55]#2 Considering where things could possibly fail or not go according to plan is a good strategy. [17:03]#3 Some people are more wired to respond to negative words or thoughts than they are wired to respond to positive material. [21:28]Recap Episodes Mentioned: 2704: The Positive Power Of Negative Thinking 1068: Why You Need To Play More "Road Games" In Life 362: How To Win The "Road Games" Of Life Next Steps: Text Dre Baldwin: Text Dre at 1.305.384.6894 (or go to http://www.DreAllDay.com/Text) Work On Your Game University: http://www.WorkOnYourGameUniversity.com Sponsor: AG1 by Athletic Greens: http://drinkAG1.com/WORKONYOURGAME Get Dre’s Emails FREE: Http://WorkOnMyGame.com Free Audiobooks: The Third Day: http://www.ThirdDayBook.com/audible The Mirror Of Motivation: http://www.MirrorOfMotivation.com/audible Get The Free Books: The Third Day: http://ThirdDayBook.com The Mirror Of Motivation: http://MirrorOfMotivation.com The Overseas Basketball Blueprint: http://BallOverseas.com Basketball: How To Play As Well As You Practice: http://HoopHandbook.com/Free Donate: CashApp: http://Cash.app/$DreBaldwin PayPal: http://PayPal.me/DreAllDay Be sure to Subscribe to have each new episode sent directly to you daily! If you're enjoying Work On Your Game, please Review the show and let us know! Dre on social media: Instagram [http://instagram.com/DreBaldwin] Facebook [http://Facebook.com/WorkOnYourGameUniversity] Twitter / X [http://X.com/DreAllDay] YouTube [http://youtube.com/dreupt] Facebook Business Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6figuresandgrowing/ All Episodes + FULL Work On Your Game Podcast archive at: http://WorkOnYourGamePodcast.com

Duration:: 25m
Broadcast on:: 03 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

"Key way to know what you're doing with a professional is that they are free-paired." "Great old bro, are you doing it?" "Stay all day dot com." "Freeze exceptional." "Work on your game." "I like the approach." "Work on your fucking game." "Everybody has, relates to what Dre says in a different way." "Work in your game." "I like the way he thinks." "Work on your fucking game." "I like the frameworks that he's put together." "Work on your game." "And I would highly recommend it to anybody that's trying to work on their game." "Work on your fucking game." "They get a good approach, it's a different approach, too." "Hey, you, work on your game." "Gave me something really good." "What can you get, Dreol day dot com?" "It's velocity, makes a lot of sense." "Not only work on your game, perfect your craft." "Work on your game." "He knows how to communicate in such a fabulous way." "I can't say it enough." "Work on your game." "You're now tuned into the show where you learn the discipline show up. Day after day to do the work, the confidence, put yourself out there, bow in authentically, and the mental toughness to continue showing up. Doing the work, putting yourself out there, even when the success you expected to achieve as you had to be achieved. And on top of all this, you get to use those to personal initiative. "Drei, what is that?" "That is to go get an energy that moves anyone of us, including yourself to go and make things happen instead of waiting things to happen." And then we put all this together into a series of frameworks and process insights, strategies and techniques underneath the umbrella, a one unifying philosophy that is called "Work on your game." "My name is Dre Baldwin, also known as Dreol day." And welcome to the show. And today's topic is "The power of negative thinking." Oh, you didn't know there was power in negative thinking? Yeah, there is power in negative thinking. I'm going to tell you exactly what that power is. And I'm going to tell you how to use it if you don't mind me over delivering here and telling you how to put all this stuff to good use. That's exactly what's going to happen here today. Now, Norman Vincent Peele is famous for writing a book that you should be familiar with. If you haven't read it, you should read it. It is called "The power of positive thinking." And even though I'm about to go against the power of positive thinking today and tell you the power of negative thinking, it is not that positive thinking is not a good thing. All right, positive thinking is a good thing as well as negative thinking. There is power in both of these. I remember folks, there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is knowing things. Wisdom is knowing when and how to use certain things at certain times. So what I'm telling you here today is something that you can use at times. And there are things that you may not want to use at other times. And here I'm going to tell you the power and the times when negative thinking actually matters. So positive thinking always is and always will be a great thing. Okay, so they were going to talk about the value of thinking negatively in a strategic way. So you're not just thinking negative, just think negative. So it's not about just, again, letting negative thinking run rampant in your mind or taking control of your thought processes because that's a bad thing you should avoid. So we talked about positive negative thinking and the negative preparation. And episode number 2704 or the power of negative thinking, size negative preparation, episode 2704 is you should cross reference that one against this one. Today, I'm going to talk about more of the negative thinking that happens in your own head, as opposed to negative preparation as I did back in that episode. So let's get right to it point number one. Top it once again is the power of negative thinking point number one. Negative energy is still negative energy and it can be transmuted into action that produces positive results. Negative thinking is still energy. Okay, remember what energy is? 85% of the job in life, which means you can take that energy of negative thinking and transmute that energy into action that produces outcomes that you actually want. So it doesn't matter where energy comes from as long as you have it. Remember the law of conservation of energy says energy is neither created nor destroyed. Mary changes forms and it transfers from one object to another. But you can't just make energy. You just need to get it. So negative thinking is a form of energy. Again, regardless of why you're thinking negative, there's energy in that. You just have to learn to identify it, harness it, and use it instead of letting it harness and use you, which is what most people do with negative energy. So negative energy, as I said, still energy. As long as you know how to change the form of that energy into action that leads to a positive outcome. So don't just take negative energy and turn it into action that destroys things or at least not destroys you or anything destructive that would hurt your chances of success. You want to transmute that energy into something that you can use that produces a positive result. That's a good thing. So for males, for example, we tend to be good at taking negative energy in the form of things like anger, stress, fear, disappointment, or otherwise. And when we are at our most resourceful states, we can transmute that energy into actions that we need to take that lead to good outcomes for us. So a man could be angry about the fact that his sports team lost the game. I mean, the team he plays on, not the team he watches. They lost the game this week. So he goes to the gym and works on his game. He takes the anger and the frustration of that loss. Transmutes it into energy that activates him to go to the gym and work on his game so that the next game they play, he performs better. And maybe his teammates do the same thing and now the whole team has risen up levels. And now they play a lot better next game and they win. All right, that's a form of transmuting energy. And again, men are good with taking these negative energies like anger, stress, fear, disappointment, frustration, and transmuting them into things that we can actually use in a positive way. And it's not that we need to do this all the time and all day. And actually we could depending on what the energy is and how we learn to manage it. But if the energy tends to overrun you or burn you out, then that means you're not harnessing the energy in a proper way. So you could be angry and use it as a long-term burn, a long-term slow burn to move you to do something because you could get angry about something that happened last year. But you don't get until a year from now or six months from now to redeem that situation. So you could take that anger and kind of spread it out over the course of six months or over the course of a year to continue doing whatever you need to do to prepare yourself for your next opportunity to use that anger. So it doesn't have to be this short burst thing. It's not like someone says something to you that you don't like at 10 o'clock in the morning and then at four o'clock in the afternoon you're ready to beat them up. Maybe it can turn over that quickly. But often you need to take time and using that energy and spreading it out over an extended period before you get to do the positive actions or do the action period. It's going to lead to the positive result that you want. So again, you can probably think of situations where people have done this. I'll give you one. You take someone like Michael Jordan who I've used as an example many times on the show. When he came back from his first retirement, he was playing baseball and he played a shortened amount of games, maybe things about 17 games in 1995, NBA season that ended in 1995. And his team got eliminated in the playoffs. Michael was still pretty damn good, but he wasn't quite peak Michael Jordan. He's maybe 95% of Michael Jordan. He spent the following off season getting himself in a much better shape, basketball shaping in. Chicago Bulls regoted and added some quality players to their team. And then the next three seasons Michael Jordan and his team wanted a championship. I will tell you that then Michael Jordan has said this himself that he took the anger, the frustration, the disappointment, all those negative energies that came with losing. And then people subsequently saying, well, Michael Jordan is not the guy anymore. He's not the best player anymore. The game is passed them by. His time in the NBA is over or his time as the best player is over. People saying that he took all the negative energy that came from hearing that stuff. Well, he decided to transmit that into negative energy. They were just statements, but he turned into negative energy. Used that to train himself for a whole off season to get in shape and then use that energy to go have a great next season, broke the NBA record for wins in a regular season and then won the championship a year after these people were saying that he was done. So it was a whole year that he had to wait before he had a chance to vindicate himself based on what had happened to him. So transmuting any energy that you get into actions that will help you achieve what you want to achieve. Now one thing that's necessary here is you know what you want to achieve. If you to transmute any energy into another energy that will lead to actions that lead to an outcome need to be clear on the outcome. What am I trying to do here? And again, you may not need to do this all the time and all day that may lead to some type of heart disease, but we should get good at being able to use it when you need to. So being able to flick the switch and use this when you want to. Every man listening to me can recall a time in your life when again anger or disappointment or frustration about a situation came to you. You utilized that energy. You turned it into activity and then something that you wanted ended up happening because of the activity you took. Now some women you may have these experiences as well, but being not speaking from man's perspective, I also know that these tend to be more consistent in men. We tend to be able to take negative energy and transmute into action. Whereas women they can use other negative images as well such as disappointment, stress, anxiety, fear, or otherwise to achieve similar results. The whole point here is that energy is the only created nor destroyed. Okay, just transfer from one object to another and it changes forms. Your job is to facilitate the transfer, the peaceful transfer of energy from one place to another. Despite all the YouTube, basketball, even this show, I started as a writer and I am still a prolific writer. As a matter of fact, I send out emails damn near every day. I call this the daily game email. I want you to get this every day to your inbox. Completely for free. So simply go to workonmygame.com. That's workonmygame.com. You get my emails directly to your inbox every day free of charge. Again, that's workonmygame.com. Have you ever wondered why so many people have big goals and big dreams for themselves and they work hard every single day yet they never reach their goals? You ever wondered about that? I have and I found out the reason why this happens is because most people never ask themselves a key third question which is who do I need to be while I'm doing what I'm doing so that I can have what I want to have. You see, if you never fix your mindset and the way that you're thinking about a situation and the way you think about yourself and the way you see yourself in the mirror, then it doesn't matter what you do and it doesn't matter what you want. You will never get there because you simply have an inaccurate formula. I wrote the book called The Mirror of Motivation which addresses this first question. Who do I need to be? Now when you answer that question, then when you do what you need to do, it will produce the outcomes that you have and what you want to have. If that sounds like it might be the missing link in your process and let me let you know, it is the missing link in your process. Go to mirrorofmotivation.com. All you do is cover the shipping and I'm going to give you a free copy of that book physically mailed to your doorstep. Again, mirrorofmotivation.com. So you can be who you need to be, then do what you need to do, and then you're going to have what you want to have in your life. Mirrorofmotivation.com. Point number two. Today's topic, once again, is the power of negative thinking. Number two, consider where things could possibly fail or not go according to plan and this is a good strategy. Just taking the time to think about where could this thing fail, not work, not go the way I wanted it to go. You may consider that thinking negatively about a situation when your hope is that everything works out perfectly. That doesn't mean you should ignore the fact that things probably won't work out perfectly simply because human beings are involved and I've yet to meet a perfect human being. I don't think you've met one either. Therefore, any plan made by a human must be by definition an imperfect plan, which means things are not going to go the way you expect them to go, which means you should probably consider what will I do if and when this part of the plan does not work. And the more of that you have planned out and thought about what will I do if this doesn't work, the better you'll be prepared when something doesn't work. Maybe 80% of your plan goes exactly as you thought, but 20% does not. But since you've considered every permutation of everything not possibly working, the 20% doesn't work, you've already thought about it and now you have already have ideas and plan B, C, D, and E for what to do if plan A doesn't happen. That's the reason why I tell you that plans are generally useless, but planning is priceless. Why? Because planning is the time that you spend thinking about what will I do if it doesn't go the way I thought it was going to go. That's part of your planning. Part of your planning should always include what will I do if things don't go the way I think they're going to go. So as they say, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. So just in case our plans don't go perfectly, we can still achieve our outcomes. So what if someone you're working with doesn't show up or they're otherwise proven incapable of doing a job? What are you going to do? Can you still get the job though? What if your car doesn't have a full tank? Yes. What if you are selling food and people don't like the food? What if your kid wakes up sick tomorrow morning? Of course, we don't want these things to happen, but we should be ready just in case they do. Again, plans are useless, planning is priceless. Remember what the hallmark of a professional is, ladies and gentlemen, it is preparation. Key way to know you're dealing with a professional is that they are prepared. All right, preparation. The professional is already prepared for anything that could possibly occur. So no matter what occurs, the professional knows what to do. And they already mentally know ahead of time that they will be able to deal with it, even if they don't know what the occurrence will be. Something might happen here. I'm ready for it no matter what it is. That's the professional's frame. Sometimes this means making tangible plans for certain contingencies. For some people, it's just a mentality and a way of thinking and a way of being. For others, it's a combination of both. Also remember, especially when you're in a competitive situation, you cannot always predict what the other side is going to do. Anytime you're dealing with humans, you can't predict what's going to happen. Sometimes dealing with machines, you can't always predict what's going to happen, depending on how many machines are involved. When you're working with people other than yourself, you should plan accordingly knowing that sometimes people will do unpredictable things or unexpected things or completely go against the grain of what you plan for them to do, or what you want them to do, or what you are hoping for them to do, or even what they told you they were going to do. They might do the exact opposite of that. You need to be ready for that, because again, as a professional, you consider every possible angle. That's what a professional does. What makes someone an expert of what they do is that they've seen everything that could possibly be seen in a particular space and they know how to handle it, and what makes someone, and usually experts and professionals, usually every expert is a professional. Another professional is an expert, but every expert is a professional, and one of the hallmarks of being a professional is that you are always prepared. Meaning, as an expert and a professional, you've seen everything already, so you've already mentally considered what would happen if this occurs, and you're already ready to handle it because you probably handled it in the best. You probably had the same unexpected thing happen to you in the past, so you expect the unexpected, and then whatever it is, you know how to handle it because you've seen that before. Since you've seen something before, it doesn't mean you can't still be unexpected. I've seen somebody throw a punch at me before in the boxing ring that doesn't mean it wouldn't be unexpected if I'm taking a walk with my son's evening, someone throws a punch at me, that's a different situation. I've experienced someone throwing a punch, but not in that circumstance, so the more that you've seen a certain thing, the better you'll be able to respond to it. So even though I may not have seen it coming with someone does it in the street, I know how to respond because I know how to respond. I've trained myself to respond to something like that, because I've done it in a different setting, the point being I've seen it. That's the whole point. The point of being an expert and being a professional is that you have seen, at least in your own mind, everything that could happen, so you're ready to respond with your own abilities to whatever it does happen. Okay, so for some of you, again, it's a way of thinking, a way of being. For others, it's tangible plans that you need to make for certain contingencies, and for some of you, it's both of those. Also remember, when you're in again, a situation that involves other humans, you do not know what another person is going to do, and do not rest on your worlds and get complacent, assuming that another person is going to deliver in a certain way, unless you have already built a certain amount of trust with this person, they built some cache with you to where you already know what they're going to do. You also know what they're not going to do, but if you're not that sure on them, then be prepared for them, maybe not doing what you thought they were going to do. Do you know what the number one key is for you to advance and get to a higher level from where you are right now? It is not for you to work harder, wake up earlier, or go to sleep later. No, it is for you to get the right insight. In other words, to ask yourself the right questions. These questions are usually questions that you don't have the answer to, but dealing with those questions opens the door for you getting to that next level that you want to reach. How do you get help with this by getting coaching, by getting around other people who can see things that you don't see, who have perceptions and insights that you don't have? This is why coaching is as valuable as it is, and this is why higher level performers always invest in coaching. The best way you can do that from here is to go to work on your game university.com. That is the only place I offer coaching, the only place I work with anyone directly. If you just go to work on your game university.com, you can see all your options for getting involved with us and engaging and having someone coaching you. So you can take yourself to that next level again through insight, not just through effort. Again, it's work on your game university.com. Point number three. Today's topic, once again, is the power of negative thinking. Number three, some people are more wired to respond to negative energy than they are wired to respond to positive energy. This is just the thing. Any person in a specific area of life may respond to better to negative thinking than to positive thinking. They may respond to positive in 99 areas of life, but in one area, they like the negative energy that simply just works for them. As an athlete, for example, I always liked playing games on the road and other people's venues or other people's parks or other people's gyms. Why? Because I like the energy, the negative energy that will come from the crowd, whether they're ridiculing, whether they're actively tearing against me and my team, or they were just completely indifferent and they were more focused on tearing for the home team to paint any attention to the road team. I like playing the road games better. And I found, in my experience, also my teammates because I played a team sport. My teammates tended to be more focused when we played road games than home games. Home games, there's a lot of complacency because people knew they were in a comfortable environment and there was a bunch of people tearing for them. But on a road game, you're not in a comfortable environment. No one is tearing for you. How do you perform then? I intended to like those better. Even when I watch basketball games or players who I like from back in the days, like Michael Jordan or Brian James playing today or Kobe Bryant, something like that. I like watching them play games on the road. More than I like watching them play games at home. Why? Because the focus tends to be sharper on the road. It's more fun for me as a spectator to see a player dominate the home team as a road player and silencing the crowd than it is to see a player dominating the road team as a home player and a crowd going crazy every time they score. What's it's cool too? But I'd rather see a player do that on the road because it's harder for everybody. Most players tend to play worse outside of the friendly confines of their comfortable environment than when they go into an uncomfortable environment. I always liked the uncomfortable environments or again quote unquote uncomfortable. Simply because it was a change of pace and it was different than what everybody was used to and you got to find out who was a real pro, who was really mentally tough when you go into a road game environment. Now talk about road games. This is one of my favorite topics. It was episode number 1068. Road games and also episode 362. How to win the road games of life. So 1068 362 where we talk about that. So in playing sports for example, there were some players who I played with who were spotted really well when the coach would yell at them and berate them in front of everybody. So they responded really well to negative reinforcements in front of everybody and done publicly. There are other players though. If the coach did that same thing that player would shrink and become a shell of themselves. If the coach tried to call them out publicly or basically trash them, bash them publicly. Now some of those same people on the other hand may do really well with being taught too negatively in another aspect of life, just not this one. So it didn't work so well in one area but it does work well in another area and you can flip this around the other way. All right. Some of you listen to this. You can motivate and move yourself to action with negative thinking and negative talk about yourself. Like, man, I'm not doing shit. This is garbage. I'm not performing at all. And that motivates you to action whereas others of you, if you taught yourself like that, you would actually do worse than you would do less than not doing anything because you can't accept that kind of talk coming from another person. You can't even accept it coming from yourself. And the whole point here is you didn't know yourself. One job is to know yourself, what works best for you. And then when you know what works best for you, what your best trigger points are, the better you can trigger yourself to the necessary action and position yourself to where that action can actually be activated, activated most easily and most consistently and most efficiently. And more often you do that, usually that means the more action you're taking, the more action you're taking with the right energy, the more things you get done. And that gives you space to accomplish more and space to live more life. That's the reason why all we're talking about all this. How do you get more life squeezed out of your life while you are still here and you still have the opportunity to do so? The way that you do that is to know what triggers you to your best actions and your most effective energies. And then start doing it on purpose. As simple as that. And the more often you can do this on purpose and move yourself to action on call, the more stuff you get done every day, week, month, year, and the more stuff you will have achieved in your life so that you literally get to live more life before your time expires. All that said, let's recap, today's class is the power of negative thinking. Again, norm of this appeal wrote the power of positive thinking. You should read that book today. We're flipping it around. Number one, negative energy is still energy and it can be transmuted in action that produces positive results. Remember, energy is 85% of the job. So any energy you come across, you should find a way to use it. Number two, considering where things could possibly fail or not go according to plan is good strategy. A professional is always prepared ahead of time for anything that occurs even if they don't know what is going to occur, they're prepared to deal with whatever it happens to be. Number three, some people are more wired to respond to negative words or thoughts than they are wired to respond to positive material. So you need to know yourself, what works for you, and what aspects of life. There are some aspects where you want positive and some aspects where you work better with negative, maybe coming from you or coming from someone else. Your job is to know yourself, the better you know yourself, the better you can trigger yourself, move yourself to action on call and the more you move yourself to action on call, the more stuff you do, the more life you get to live. Work on your game, university.com to have me as your direct coach to access all of our trainings, all our courses, all our programs, and you get started on hitting your goals as quickly as possible and as short a time as possible and as efficiently and effectively as possible with me helping you all along the way. That's work on your game, university.com. Work on your game, great all day. While you are here, don't forget to text me so you can be part of my texting community where you can ask me questions, you can share challenges with me, you are messaging me directly you can get a direct response from me because I do read and reply to my messages, my number again, 305-384-6894, one more time, 305-384-6894, make sure you text me because you never know when I'm going to send a message that can be the one thing you need to hear, the one thing you need to do, the one insight you need to get that can change your life. Make sure you message me, 305-384-6894. 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