Stop Saying Stupid Sh*t Out Loud.
Have you ever heard someone say, “Just think positive!”? In the personal development space — especially when we talk about athletes — there are many people who preach positive energy. There’s plenty of research that shows the effects of positive thinking versus negative thinking on your performance, whether in sports or business or anything else. But Trevor Moawad has an interesting perspective that can really help you improve your thinking, by utilizing a different strategy.
Who Is Trevor Moawad?
Before we dive in, I want to talk a little bit about Trevor, because this guy has a pretty fantastic list of credentials. To start, he is the son of the late Bob Moawad, a world-renowned peak performance educator. Bob was actually one of the original contributors to “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” and is a former president of the National Association for Self-Esteem. He definitely set a high bar for his son!
And Trevor had risen to that expectation. Trevor was an all-conference, two-sport athlete at Occidental College, which, by the way, is the same school attended by Jack Kemp, Barack Obama, and yours truly, Melissa Warner ;). Trevor was eventually inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame at the Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington, and in 2018 he was selected as the Distinguished Alumni of the Year. Our alma mater Occidental also presents the “Trevor Moawad Leadership Award” every year to the school’s top male and female athletes who show strong leadership on and off the field. Sadly, Trevor passed away in 2021, but his teachings are powerful and continue to gain traction.
Here’s how he introduces his concept of neutral, not positive, thinking:
“So let’s think of it as a car. I’m going backwards. I can’t go forward all at once. I got to go to the middle and … that middle ground is neutral. So the idea of being neutral, is ultimately the acceptance of the past as real." - Trevor Moawad
Sound interesting? I know it does.
But Trevor isn’t just an epic athlete. He is one of the top performance coaches in the world. He’s worked with 11 first-round draft picks in the NFL, just to start. He’s worked with over 700 athletes and eight national championship teams.
And he doesn’t just work with athletes! This guy is a coach to the coaches, too. He’s worked a lot with Nick Saban as well as Kirby Smart and Jimbo Fisher. In 2017, Sports Illustrated named him the “World’s Best Brain Trainer,” which is honestly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
The POWER of Negative Thinking
I want to talk about exactly how powerful negative thinking is. Let me hit you with some of the statistics Trevor shares in his research:
Your increase in errors can go up by over 30%
83% of illnesses are facilitated, exacerbated, or started from negative thinking
Consumption of negativity (news consumption) for 3 minutes is a 27% increase in the likelihood that we’ll say we had a terrible day
Those are staggering to me. Negative thinking — and even just the consumption of negative thinking — can have a dramatic effect on our mindset and our ability to succeed. But here are the statistics that really got my attention:
“[Negative thinking is] a multiple [of] four to seven times more powerful than its equivalent positivity. … And then what we started to learn was that if we say things out loud, they’re ten times more powerful than if we think [them]. … So if I’m saying negative things out loud, ‘I don’t want to be here. I hate … the heat. What’s going on in our world right now?’ … then I’m increasing the probability that what I don’t want to happen will happen by 40 to 70 times.” - Trevor Moawad
Let’s talk about that. Thinking negative thoughts increases the odds that what you don’t want to happen will happen by four to seven times, and saying your negative thoughts out loud multiplies those odds by ten. That means that just by saying negative things, we make them significantly more likely to happen.
That can absolutely be the determining factor between SUCCESS and FAILURE.
Do any of you guys remember Bill Buckner? Bill Buckner played for the Red Sox and lost the 1986 World Series for his team. It was the last inning, and everybody was packing up and going home with the assurance that the Red Sox had the game locked up. But then Buckner let a slow ground ball go right through his legs. He lost a sure game, and that was the cap on his career.
But here’s the interesting thing Trevor shared: Just a few years ago, they found an old recorded interview with Buckner where he says, “The dream would be to win the world series. But my real nightmare would be to let the game-winning run score on a ground ball through my legs to cost us the World Series.” He said his negative thoughts out loud.
“I’m a big believer in the power of language. … And this is what we know: saying it didn’t make it happen, but it increased the probability by 40 to 70 times that would happen.” - Trevor Moawad
Subconscious Plants
Trevor had a term for what happened to Bill Buckner. He called it a “subconscious plant.” Our negative thoughts work their way into our subconscious minds. That’s where they start to do the real damage.
“We have a conscious mind, you know, which is right now. And then we have a subconscious mind, which is operating in our self-talk, you know, … at hundreds of words a minute … and it goes to our memory. … And so it’s one of those things that we’ve said something … a handful of times or over and over again, we’ve created part of an identity.” - Trevor Moawad
When you repeat negative words to yourself, they become part of your identity, and then you manifest that identity into existence. That’s what happened to Buckner. He repeated his fear of letting a ground ball roll by him and losing the World Series for the Red Sox so many times it became his expectation for himself, and so it happened. That fear became a subconscious plant in his mind, and that plant caused him to fail when the moment came.
But the good news is that subconscious plants work in reverse too. Trevor tells an awesome story he heard from his dad back in the day. Now back in the ’80s, the SAT had two parts — math and verbal — each scored out of 800 points so that a total perfect score would be 1600. Now there was this guy who was a pretty low-performing student who promised his mom he’d take the test even though nobody expected him to do well. He took the test in May, and in June got back a 1480. That’s an incredible score!
And this created what Trevor refers to as “cognitive dissonance.” That is, this guy’s expectations didn’t line up with what actually happened. But in the face of that dissonance, what does he do?
And so this guy says, ‘People think the 1480 is what changed my life, but what, in truth, really changed my life is when I started acting like a 1480. And what does a 1480 do? He goes to class.’
So this guy starts going to class and trying hard in school, and his teachers see the difference and start to treat him differently as a result. Fast forward a few years, and this guy has graduated with an MBA and become this incredibly successful magazine entrepreneur.
What a success story! But here’s the thing: That guy didn’t really get a 1480 on his SAT. The SAT board reached out to him later and apologized, saying he was one of 13 people who were actually sent the wrong score, and he actually made a 740.
This guy didn’t succeed in his life and career because he magically became smarter overnight. He succeeded because he started acting like he was smart.
Bottom line: Don’t say stupid things. And don’t say stupid things out loud! When you do that, you create these subconscious plants in your brain that cause you to fail and manifest your negative thoughts.
Neutral Thinking
Here’s where we really get into it. “Neutral thinking” is central to Trevor’s simple method, but what is it exactly, and how can it help you succeed?
Let’s go back to that quote I mentioned earlier:
“So let’s think of it as a car. I’m going backwards. I can’t go forward all at once. I got to go to the middle and … that middle ground is neutral. So the idea of being neutral, it is ultimately the acceptance of the past as real.” - Trevor Moawad
Okay, so we have to accept that the past is real. Our failures and setbacks really happened. But Trevor continues:
“But while the past is real, it’s not predictive. … What you do next is what determines your future.” - Trevor Moawad
Here’s what we implement with our athletes on the fields at Warner Athletics: So the past is real, but it doesn’t predict the future. Once you’ve accepted that the past happened, you have to stop focusing on why you failed and start thinking about what you can do next to get a different outcome for your next opportunity. But you can’t do that all at once.
By making neutral statements by acknowledging that the past is real and then immediately choosing to see what you can do next, you can avoid letting negative thinking create those subconscious plants I mentioned earlier. That way, you don’t create a negative identity for yourself. Instead, you CONQUER your negative thoughts and WIN!
What are some strategies to use this information in real life?
We create our own successes and failures. When we think negative thoughts, we create negative identities. That’s how we manifest failures and setbacks and adversity both on and off the field.
But when we think neutral thoughts, we allow ourselves to think creatively. When we stop forcing ourselves in this negative mindset and instead approach problems and setbacks from the standpoint of, “Okay, this happened. What do I do next?” we can actually manifest success. We can win.
I think the easiest way to overcome saying negative things is to focus on ELIMINATION of those thoughts and behaviors that aren’t producing effective results for us. Don’t try to become positive overnight, just stop saying negative stuff out loud!
Reinforce the progress you’ll make by eliminating negative thoughts and identities by measuring your successes by looking backwards. We often measure our progress by looking forward. We set goals. We plan milestones for our progress. Basically, we try to predict the future to some degree. By looking at where we started and comparing where we are at the moment, we can measure success easier. This reinforcement through looking backwards will allow you to stop seeing how far away your goals are and start measuring your successes and wins based on where you started.
Melissa Warner, Warner Athletics. Warner offers weekly Mindset Meetings to encourage their athletes to learn how to use their minds to achieve their goals! Easily register throgh UpperHand