Renowned performance coach Jim Murphy has written a must-read book, Inner Excellence – Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life.  While Murphy’s book focuses on elite athletes from many different sports, the lessons he writes about apply to everyone who wants to live the best possible life.

The mindset for Inner Excellence is “I compete to raise the level of excellence in my life, to learn and grow, in order to raise it in others.” Murphy starts his book by referring to three elements of the quality of your life:

  1. Your inner world of thoughts and feelings, beliefs and desires.
  2. Your frame of reference (mindset) from which you see the world.
  3. Your relationships.

Furthermore, the quality of your performance is based on three elements:

  1. Your belief about who you are and what’s possible for you.
  2. Your ability to focus and be fully engaged in the moment: heart, mind and body.
  3. Your freedom to play like a kid, curiously exploring possibilities, excited for challenges that may arise.

Here are some other gems from Inner Excellence:

Murphy writes about ten “new empowering presuppositions that will form the basis of the mindset you’ll develop as you read this book:

  1. Every circumstance and every person you encounter is here to teach you and help you – it’s all working for your good.
  2. Your life is a reflection about your beliefs.
  3. Self-centeredness is the root cause of fear.
  4. We all have the same deep needs and the same deep desires.
  5. Everyone does the best they can with what they have (in their hearts).
  6. The map is not the territory – the world you see and interact with isn’t reality; it’s the one your mind created.
  7. You are not your mind. Your mind is a part of you that you need to train.
  8. The problem is not the problem, the problem is the way you’re thinking about it.
  9. There’s no failure, only feedback.
  10. The person with the most control of their inner world has the most power.”

The author describes the following five world’s mindsets (how the world sees competition and performance) and how Inner Excellence views them:

  • Winning is everything – The Inner Excellence mindset is “Developing inner strength, fully experiencing the moment and continually growing are far more lasting and empowering.”
  • You are your results – The Inner Excellence mindset is “Results are an inconsistent measure of success and failure – you can perform poorly and win, just as you can perform well and lose.”
  • The opponent is the enemy – The Inner Excellence mindset is “The opponent is our partner in the dance.”
  • Failure is not an option – The Inner Excellence mindset is “Failure is the key component to growth. There is no real “failure”, only feedback.”
  • Fierce competitors get mad when they lose – The Inner Excellence mindset is “The best competitors develop emotional control and use mistakes to get better.”

 Murphy also recommends “focusing on the process of daily improvement. At the end of the day ask yourself how you did with these four process goals:

  • Give my best (100% of what I have today).
  • Be present.
  • Be grateful.
  • Focus on my routines and only what I can control.”

“In the pursuit of mastery, these eight attachments, in no particular order, affect you the most:

  • How others see you
  • Your money and possessions
  • What you want (goals)
  • Comfort
  • Your past
  • How things are (status quo)
  • Expectations
  • Your self (and all the parts you associate with “you.”)”

The key to achieving an Inner Excellence mindset is to get rid of these attachments and assessments.

Finally, Murphy’s recommendations to remove your mental blocks are:

  1. “Take the emotion out of it.
  2. Find the smallest change that would have made a difference (if possible) in the situation.
  3. Insert a positive, high-energy feeling – as well as the small change – into the context of the mental block.
  4. Anchor that positive feeling into the original painful context, creating a new empowering association (and belief) with it.”

Murphy writes that training your mind to achieve remarkable performance and the best possible life means that “you’ll gain confidence to take more risks, to face your fears and fully experience sacred moments in both your career and daily life…It can be a scary path as you learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable and lose your attachment to the superficial.”