We all know what it means to have a loser's mindset:
Taking a victim mentality to life, believing your hard work won't amount to anything, that others are better than you, and that you can find a shortcut to success that skips the effort and time.
But what does it mean to embrace a winner's mindset?
This issue was inspired by a conversation with my friend Ricky, a successful serial entrepreneur. We both share a love for entrepreneurship and sports (he's been a weekend basketball hooper for years).
Both world-class athletes and entrepreneurs emphasize the importance of mental strength alongside raw physical ability or business resources. A competitor's ability to channel their mental focus and attention often separates the winners from the runner-ups.
In athletes, this ability is colloquially called "mental toughness." A 2007 study in The Sports Psychologist conducted in-depth interviews with world and Olympic champions, along with coaches and sports psychologists, to break down this fuzzy concept into specific skills and attitudes.
You can probably guess several of them: pushing yourself to the limit, staying focused on and motivated by long-term goals, and handling and learning from failure.
But there's a particular group of them that I would say encompass this idea of having a winner's mindset:
- Having an unshakable self-belief as a result of your deep dedication and commitment to their sport
- Having an inner arrogance that makes you believe that you can achieve anything you set your mind to
- Having the belief that you can punch through any obstacle people put in your way
- Loving the pressure of competition
- Total commitment to your performance goal until every possible opportunity of success has passed
- Adapting to and coping with any change/distraction/threat under pressure
- Not being fazed by making mistakes and then coming back from them
As a former elite gymnast, this concept of mental toughness resonates for me, especially I'd argue there's a special kind of "winner's mindset" where you enter a situation believing you have what it takes to deliver a superior performance.
How to Develop a Winner's Mindset
Most of us want to feel more confident and competent in certain areas of our lives. We have doubts about our abilities, our qualities, and we would rather focus on being in the moment and pursuing our goals instead of agonizing over a decision or worrying about how others will judge your performance.
But how do we actually engage in that feeling of being a winner?
This is especially hard when our rational mind knows that success is not guaranteed and in fact our competition may be more qualified on paper than we are?
Sometimes being too rational is bad for you. Being what the kids today would call a little delulu (optimistically delusional) can be valuable for removing second-guessing and anxiety. This in turn allows you to reach your highest level of performance.
So here are two strategies for developing a winner's mindset that can help you transform your self-perception and performance.
Expand your confidence zone
We all have areas in our lives where we feel confident and competent.
For me this is how I feel at the Crossfit gym on a good day, right before the start of a WOD (workout of the day). I'm warmed up and pumped to take on the day's challenge. I have no doubt I can earn a competitive score—not number one, but in the top quartile. More importantly, I will feel no shame if I do poorly, because I know at the end of the day I'm a fit person.
For my founder friend Ricky, it's when heads into an investor meeting. He engages a side of himself that truly believes his company is the best investment opportunity on the market today. He's able to instantly let go of any rejections from the VC and move onto the next meeting.
(Side note: This is a powerful skill because because rearch by business professor and author Laura Huang has found that an entrepreneur's perceived passion, another way to describe conviction, is one of the most important factors in determining funding.)
Where do you feel most confident? Where do you have that winner's mindset?
For you it might be grabbing the mic before your go-to karaoke song, putting together the world's greatest discounted cash flow spreadsheet, or ripping into a gnarly discrepancy inside your database.
Now, when faced with a new challenge in a different arena, try to connect to that deep feeling of certainty and confidence that you have in your area of competence.
Adjust your demeanor, your posture, your way of communicating to match how you would feel in the situation where you know you're capable.
Adapting this belief makes sense intuitively—think about what Luke Skywalker does in Star Wars when trying to hit an impossibly small exhaust port on the Death Star. He doesn't focus on the technical difficulty or astronomical odds against him. Instead, he draws confidence from a familiar skill: "It's not impossible. I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home." He connects this new challenge to an area where he already feels competent and confident.
This technique works well if you're an intuitive or emotionally connected person. Luke's quote brings us to the second strategy for adopting a winner's mindset, which may work better for cognitively oriented people: changing your internal dialogue.
Improve your self talk
Writer and distance runner Alex Hutchinson has studied the "curiously elastic of limits human performance" in his book Endure. His conclusion? After everything he's learned studying sports performance, he wishes he had taken positive self-talk more seriously in his own competitive running career instead of writing it off as spiritual woo-woo.
Again, it's easy to understand that saying "I can't do it" or "it's too hard" or "I suck at this" is not going to help your performance.
But you need to replace those negative ideas with positive ones. In one study reported by Hutchinson, 13 out of 16 participants were able to record faster 10k cycling time trials and reported lower rate of perceived effort after capturing and reworking their internal self-talk.
One important change was going from "I" statements to "you" statements. Saying "you can do it" versus "I can do it" engages what lead researcher James Hardy called "the supportive onlooker" voice. This makes perfect sense, because it sounds much more like encouragement from someone else. Once you hear those words in your head, your brain can easily interpret them as external support, even though you're the one who spoke them.
Other techniques included going from countering difficulty "You can deal with the pain" or making demands "Keep grinding" to emphasizing ability "You can keep going". Because of the effort of the trial, the phrases were also kept short and phonetically simple.
The part I'd add: make the phrases true or at least unfalsifiable.
Saying - "You've got this" or "You're doing great is" is more motivating than "You're better than everyone else on the field" which can cause your brain to jump in and insert doubt.
The Takeaway
My conversation with Ricky sparked this exploration because we realized the most successful people we know combine both strategies—expanding their confidence zone while engaging in positive self-talk.
In your professional life, you might channel how you feel when you're confidently explaining a technical concept to a junior developer before stepping into a team engineering sync where you need to defend your architectural decisions. Then layer on the self-talk: instead of "They're going to tear apart my approach," try "I've thought this through and can handle their questions."
Whether you're an athlete, entrepreneur, or professional tackling a stretch assignment, you already have areas where you feel unstoppable. The winner's mindset is about being just a tiny bit delusional— choosing the mental approach that gives you the best shot at performing to your potential.
The question isn't whether you're capable of greatness. The question is whether you'll give yourself permission to believe it when it matters most.
