An Interview on Mindset and Agency
GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker
I began my career interviewing thought leaders, futurists, innovators, and visionaries as a Los Angeles-based journalist. For the May 1982, edition of PSA Magazine, I interviewed renowned speaker and behavioral psychologist Dr. Denis Waitley, whose “Psychology of Winning” cassette learning system was riding high on bestseller lists, and Waitley’s calendar was full of speaking engagements.
Waitley’s ideas were pivotal in fueling my own career trajectory and belief system, for he and other human potential leaders opened my eyes to how far you can go if you work to control your thoughts and self beliefs. Waitley and I eventually wrote a book together called Winning the Innovation Game, and sadly, we have lost touch.
Nevertheless, when I came across this interview the other day, I thought about Waitley’s ideas on not blaming others (“the government,” “racism,” “the other party,” “the Deep State,” “growing up in poverty,” etc.), I couldn’t help notice how the pendulum has swung even more towards victimization. These days, we seem to be moving away from our own sense of agency (“If it’s going to be, it’s up to me”) and towards nursing grievances and blaming others for our lack of results, rather than taking responsibility for our lives and making it happen every day by the way we control our thoughts.
TUCKER: Of all the characteristics of high-achieving individuals that you’ve had a chance to observe, which one seems to define them best?
WAITLEY: It’s their understanding of the degree of control that their thoughts have over the actions that follow in their lives. Whether they happen to be astronauts or parents or prisoners of war, these people have taken responsibility for their own achievements. They’re self-managers.
TUCKER: What does that mean?
WAITLEY: Self-management is declaring that life is a do-it-to-myself project. Instead of just letting life happen, I’m going to make it happen for me, and I’m going to exercise the greatest freedom I have, which is the freedom of choice. The deepest, most significant choice we make is in the way we choose to think.
TUCKER: Isn’t controlling one’s thoughts one of the hardest things to do?
WAITLEY: No, but I think one of the hardest things to believe is that it can have any effect on your life. Almost all people believe that they are victims of environmental circumstances, the government, the weather, their horoscopes, certainly the economy. They feel they must wait for luck or fate or karma to change before they can have some effect on their lives. What’s hardest to understand is that we’re doing it every day, using our self-talk either for or against ourselves.
TUCKER: What do you mean by self-talk?
WAITLEY: We’re talking to ourselves every moment of our waking lives. It comes automatically. We’re seldom even aware that we’re doing it. We all have a running commentary going on in our heads on events and our reactions to them. By changing what you’re saying, you can change your behavior.
TUCKER: Should we consciously try to stop thinking negative thoughts by repressing doubts and fears?
WAITLEY: No. Those are natural emotions.
TUCKER: If you’re giving a speech, for instance, and you’re nervous, should you go ahead and admit it to the audience?
WAITLEY: No, because that is self-fulfilling and becomes a habit. It’s much better to go on and do it anyway and listen for positive responses from the audience and try to reward yourself for a successful speech. It’s not so much the performance that counts, because on any given day your performance will be good or not so good—a lot of factors affect your performance. But your response to it is what’s most important of all.
TUCKER: But people do have fears. Businesspeople worry constantly about a slump in their businesses, and salespeople worry about blowing a sale. Are you suggesting we shouldn’t verbalize those fears?
WAITLEY: I see the expression of fear as fine, but most fears and phobias are imaginary. A Michigan study found that 60 percent of our fears are totally unwarranted; 20 percent have already passed and are out of our control entirely; and another 10 percent are so petty that they don’t make any difference. Of the remaining 10 percent, only 4 or 5 percent are real and justifiable fears, And even of those, we couldn’t do anything about half of them! The other half we could easily solve by seeking out further information. Fear is not an effective emotion. It’s an emotion you should feel under physical danger.
TUCKER: How do you control your interior dialogue? What instructions can you offer?
WAITLEY: The self-talk of winners is affirmative and directed toward the results they want: after a poor performance, a winner would say, “That’s not like me, I can do better than that. I need more information about the target because I didn’t hit it. Therefore, I’ve either set the target too far off for right now, or I don’t have enough to go on.” The immediate self-talk of that performance should be, “target correction necessary.” After a good performance, on the other hand, the immediate feedback would be, “Now we’re getting somewhere. This is the way I see myself performing.” Non-high-performance individuals will have a good day or do something exceptional, but they’ll totally defeat themselves because they’ll have convinced themselves that it was a fluke.
TUCKER: So you believe in coaxing the mind toward the goal, almost talking to yourself?
WAITLEY: Absolutely. I believe in talking to myself in words, pictures, and emotions for a long time before a performance and just afterward. It’s even more important after a successful performance to assimilate it.
TUCKER: You recommend using simulation also as a way of improving performance. How does the system work?
Waitley: The neat thing about the brain is that it is a mimic of what we put into it in advance. Airline pilots have been using simulation for years. But it’s also a technique that businesspeople and everybody can practice, just by creating each experience that we want in our imagination first, before the event. The other day on a flight to Chicago, I was sitting next to a fellow who was making a weird, high-pitched humming noise, with his eyes closed. I turned the overhead air nozzle on his face and asked him if he wanted me to call the stewardess to come to his aid. It turned out that he was an oboist for the Chicago Symphony and he was practicing for that night’s performance. I met a world-champion Russian figure skater who told me that she rarely falls because she practices each sequence in her imagination at night with her eyes closed. She could probably perform her entire routine blindfolded with no hesitation. Simulation is the ability to do within when you’re without.
TUCKER: What is your primary message to those you teach?
WAITLEY: That the period of time we’re living in is no worse than any other period in history, and probably better. Because problems are normal and inherent with change. And since society is changing rapidly, it’s up to the individual to view change as normal and to see many of the changes taking place as positive rather than negative. But we’re not historians by nature. So we’re not apt to say, let’s look at what happened in the past for guidance. There’s such an incredible focus in society on deviant behavior, bad news, and things going wrong that most people take it all on their shoulders. They feel that things were better before and will probably be better at some unpredictable point in the future called “someday.”
TUCKER: Do you consider yourself a psychologist first or a motivator?
WAITLEY: I’m a motivational trainer first. I teach people how to view the world, how to view themselves in the world, and how to establish some rules of conduct toward their personal and professional lives. So in effect, I’m a performance enhancer. I consider myself a psychologist second, although I’m constantly trying to make sure that the techniques, I’m applying have some basis in fact and have been researched.
TUCKER: What do your audiences want from you?
WAITLEY: They think what motivation is is a pump up, let’s-go-out-there-and-kill-’em mentality. Motivation has been one of the most misunderstood, oversold words I’ve ever come across. What researchers have found is that the old locker-room psych-up causes you to peak too early. The adrenaline athletes have pumped up in the locker room tends to make them overanxious, and they make mistakes. They go out there, and instead of being relaxed and knowing exactly what they’re going to do, they’re actually too aroused to think. The new way is to have quiet time in the locker room —this applies to both Olympic and Super Bowl athletes- when athletes sit and listen to soft music and rehearse in their imaginations the game they know they are capable of playing because they’re prepared. And it’s really the same situation in life if you think about it.
TUCKER: Why is it more important to replay a successful performance than to analyze a bad one?
WAITLEY: Because most of us don’t spend enough time preparing for or simulating success in advance, and we aren’t prepared for it when we achieve it. We haven’t spent enough time thinking about how good it is going to feel to be successful. For whatever reason we become successful, we don’t completely understand it. And because of this, we don’t feel deserving of it; it comes upon us like instant stardom or winning the sweepstakes. Right away, our self-talk begins to tear down the success, and we get back to where we were before or we go back to being our “practiced selves.”
TUCKER: Of the high-achieving people you’ve observed, do they seem to be
goal-oriented?
WAITLEY: It’s definitely a common denominator of successful people. I find that the most common problem with people who never reach their goals is that they never set them. It isn’t that goals are unreachable; it’s that most people never take the time to write them down. They spend more time planning Christmas or a vacation than they do their lives. I’ll ask people what they are going to do in 1983 and they’ll say, “Who can tell? It depends on whether Reaganomics works.” Then I’ll ask, “What are you going to be doing by 1985?” they’ll reply, “Well, it will probably be worse, with the interest rates and all. We don’t have any idea.”
TUCKER: What’s your method for setting goals?
WAITLEY: I believe it’s best to write out your life goals first, the things you want to do in the long range. Then, break down your goals into intermediate ones: What do you want to accomplish in the next three years? What do you intend to accomplish in the next six months? And then, after you’ve done this, how are you going to achieve them? It’s very important to be specific; not just that you want to be happy. You want to be happy in what way? Do you want to be happy with your children at night when you come home? To answer these questions, you’ll have to put down certain affirmative statements that will project you toward your goals.
TUCKER: What do you say to people who reach their goals and find that they still aren’t happy?
WAITLEY: If your goals are symbols of success—a mansion, a yacht, a certain position in business or in the university—those I call shallow and superficial targets. If your goal was to make a million dollars and you made it, you’d find it shallow, because no one really cares. It isn’t the achievement of the million dollars that’s important; it was the process you went through in achieving it. So, goal setters have to be careful. They must understand that life itself is a process and that there is a big picture, that they fit into the big universe and that the most successful people look beyond themselves and their own goals for meaning and purpose in life.
These people are the ones who are busy planting shade trees under which they know they’ll never sit. The biggest fools are the ones who look at the destination as the answer and not the process of the journey as being important. But it’s equally foolish to go out there and just journey without having a destination.
TUCKER: What role does ambition play in your psychology of winning?
WAITLEY: A great one. Ambition is the role of imagination. It’s simply a desire for change or a dissatisfaction with the status quo. A desire for change means that I can see something out there that is better than what I have.
TUCKER: You mentioned earlier that we Americans may be working so hard that we may not be taking enough time to relax and reflect. What do you recommend as ways to keep from becoming too narrowly focused in one’s work?
WAITLEY: I think reading the best-selling nonfiction books is important. And if you don’t have time to read those, then definitely read the digests of them. They even have digests of medical breakthroughs, and they’re starting to put these digests on tape, so that what we used to think of as downtime in rush-hour traffic can be come in your auto-classroom. Attending seminars and lectures of all kinds, is important. Even more important is talking to people who have different views from yours.
TUCKER: Do you advocate having a specific daily routine?
WAITLEY: I’m a big believer in a success routine if the things you are doing are really beneficial. That might include getting up half an hour earlier, to ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I can do today that’s going to benefit me and those close to me?” Unfortunately, routines often end up stifling growth; we start resting on our laurels, becoming complacent, thinking about retirement. And then some young Turk comes along who’s not in a routine and can knock you right off your perch.
TUCKER: The direct opposite of resting on one’s laurels would be continually innovating, and continually undertaking new projects. What are your thoughts on that?
WAITLEY: I have a rule for that. If you’re just starting to succeed, keep repeating the success, and don’t innovate at the beginning of a successful pattern, but continue until you have succeeded for some time. Once you’re successful in your own eyes and in the eyes of the audience, then diversify, because people will help you do anything you want to after you are successful in each field.
TUCKER: In your book, The Psychology of Winning, you talk about creating a model for yourself. Could you explain the idea?
WAITLEY: Throughout the first half of most people’s lives they operate under a system of trial and error. Finally, we get smart through our failures and begin to repeat a success. It’s a heck of a way to live, yet everyone says you must go through it. But you really don’t. What is important is for a person to find a role model or a success model of someone who seems similar in intelligence and maybe even background, and maybe in a similar field. The only difference is that this model has had a great deal more success. Modeling is looking at other people’s lives, how they do what they do, interviewing them, reading about them, listening to them, really studying them, and finding out how they do it.
This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pexels
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