This story about a client who won a million dollars is a great example of the importance of setting targets not just in one area of your life, but in all of them. Targets set in isolation may be incongruent, and the way to avoid this trap is to just be yourself.
In other words as an extreme example you are unlikely to be a great athlete if you are a lousy friend, partner or parent. Some people can get away with this, but sooner or later there will be a price to pay.
World Number 1 online poker player Chris Moorman is a balanced humble and grounded person, and talks about positive thinking and our work together in his recent Blog. He discovered that his goals in poker were very different to his personal goals in other areas of his life, and that this mismatch, or incongruity, were seriously inhibiting his performance. He decided to do something about this.
‘A friend of mine suggested a guy called Stephen Simpson* who is an elite performance coach from the UK and he agreed to have a couple of sessions with me in which we discussed a ton of stuff that I had never told anyone about before.
In these sessions we did some basic meditation and breathing exercises and I talked about what I wanted to achieve in life both in and outside of poker.
He mentioned that I needed to find ‘the zone’ while playing and if I could do that then good things would happen for me.
The key to finding ‘the zone’ was to be solely focused on poker whilst playing but equally important was also to be working on myself as a person outside of poker and to set myself targets consistently.
It is worth noting that I went on to win my first ever live major at the WPT just weeks after my final meeting with Stephen.’
