Bringing The Athletic Mindset To The Business World with Silvica Rosca

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Bringing The Athletic Mindset To The Business World with Silvica Rosca

I have a wonderful young lady joining me in the studio. Silvica Rosca is here to impart your wisdom with us now. She seeks to empower students and young professionals to become more impactful leaders by first learning to lead themselves. Her leadership experience spans multiple sectors including nonprofit, higher education and aerospace. For the past twelve years, she has worked at Raytheon across areas of finance, managing budgets up to $100 million. She is an active leader in various employee resource groups. She’s a certified extreme focus coach in mental performance training used by professional athletes, army rangers and Navy SEALS. She brings that athletic mental performance mindset to the business world. I noticed some inspiring athletes out there and maybe some retired athletes as well, but this is going to be a great show. I met Silvica at a CEO Space Event and I sat in one of her trainings. She’s a wealth of knowledge. Please sit back, relax and enjoy Silvica as she imparts her wisdom upon us.

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Silvica, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

We’re happy to have you here. This is the Game Changer Mentality Podcast and I know there are some readers that want to find out more about what it is that you do and how you help people with this athletic mindset. How do you impart that into the business world?

I played sports in high school. I was always the tomboy-ish kid growing up. One of the things that athletes have that sets them apart from people who’ve never done anything competitive is that competitive drive and spirit. It’s not just competitive of, “I want to be better than the person next to me.” It’s, “I want to be better than who I was yesterday. I want to go past my own personal record.” Athletes create certain mental processes that enable them to push past the pain or push past that discomfort to sacrifice hanging out with friends and family to go and do what needs to be done in order to achieve extraordinary results. In the business world, sometimes when you’re working, you have that negative self-talk that comes in, “Is this worth it? Why should I be doing this?”

If you approach the business world as a game or as sports because it is like sports. If there’s teamwork involved, there’s also your individual ability involved. If you take that mindset, understanding the importance of your thoughts and guarding your thoughts, if you understand the importance of which attitude you bring to work will impact your ability, your productivity, and your ability to complete tasks. If you bring that to work, then you work better with people and you complete things better. That’s what I bring to the workplace.

I’ve seen people that may not have that athletic mindset. They may not be athletic at all. They don’t work out and they don’t play sports or anything like that. However, they want to perform well at work. They want to perform well in their jobs or at their business. What would you say to that person who doesn’t have that athletic mindset or attitude about life? What would you say to that person?

Start doing three things that will help you automatically. First, take complete ownership of your performance at work. The athletes that take full ownership of their performance are the ones that get better. The ones who keep saying, “It’s the ref’s fault. The coach didn’t do this. This teammate didn’t see me,” those athletes don’t get any better. Make a list of, “What is my performance like?” If you don’t have a yearly performance review at work, give yourself a performance review and say, “What’s my performance like and where do I want to be? What do I actually want?” Realize that maybe what you want is different than what other people want, but first do that.

Second, realize that your brain, your subconscious or unconscious mind doesn’t know fact from fiction, right from wrong. It knows what you consistently feed it. Basically, take account of all your thoughts. Are you feeding yourself negative thoughts? “I can’t do this. Who am I to do this? I’ve never been good at this,” or are you feeding yourself positive thoughts? Keep track of the way you think about it. When you make a mistake at work, do you call yourself an idiot in your head? Do you say, “I made a mistake, how can I improve?”

Keep track of your mindset and also keep track of the fact that gratitude is such an important component of everything. One of the things that I do is I have a planner. Every day in my planner I write, “What am I grateful for now?” Some days it literally is, “I’m grateful for the blanket. It was so soft and warm when I woke up.” Other days it’s, “I’m grateful because I was able to help this person.” Keep track of that every single day because certain days will be tougher than others. Going through and seeing that like, “I’m grateful for this.” You can switch your energetic mindset, your emotional state of being throughout the day. Even when a big, tough project comes to you, you can switch that. A very practical example, one of the times we do quarterly what is called estimate at complete in the finance world. I was working on that and doing my monthly stuff, I thought I had everything completed and the last minute, people came and said, “I know the meeting is five hours from now, but we have new inputs and we need to rerun everything.” I had stayed until 10:00 the other night finishing everything, and so what attitude do I bring? I said, “Okay.”

I went and took a couple of minutes to breathe and said, “I’m going to choose to be grateful that first of all, they believed I can do this. I’m going to choose to be grateful that I have a job, that the money I’m getting from this, what is it providing me?” I got into them and then went and started doing the task. It was the same task. It was monotonous. It wasn’t pleasant, but because of the attitude that I brought to it, I was able to complete it in a manner that gave plenty of time to review for the meeting. It’s little things like that make a big difference.

Think and Grow Rich: or Men and Woman who Resent Poverty

I was reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I can’t remember what chapter it’s in, but he talks about taking inventory of yourself every single year and it’s an annual thing. A lot of people leave that to the corporation or they leave that to their job. I can’t agree with you more that doing an assessment of yourself maybe on a regular basis to track your progress and see where you are, when you do that, you recognize opportunities to do better. You recognize opportunities to perform at a higher level to become better than you were before.

I never can say enough about gratitude because I think of gratitude as a sense of grounding. It’s grounding yourself, bringing things back into perspective. Even if you make mistakes, there’s still something to be grateful for. Even if it’s just the fact that you have a life to fix that mistake. Some mistakes can cost your life. Some mistakes are horrible mistakes. If you’re still breathing even though you made a mistake, you still have the opportunity to fix that. Since we’re talking about mistakes, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you’ve made in your life and how did you overcome them?

One of the biggest mistakes I have made was when I first started on my entrepreneurship journey. I made the assumption that my family members wouldn’t be able to understand what I was going through because they were working full-time. I had this assumption that I can’t share my journey with them or if I have these ups and downs, I can’t share it with them because they won’t understand. Maybe because if they see my struggles, they’ll say, “You should go back to a job. Stop this.” I was afraid that they would discourage me from my entrepreneurial journey. I closed off from them, from that emotional connection when it came to my work stuff, my job or in my business. I know it was a very big mistake because they were my primary source. They were the people that I was closest with. My sisters are my best friends. I struggled emotionally. Entrepreneurship is a major roller coaster of a journey in and of itself. I was robbing myself of their support because after some time I started talking with them. They told me, “We were there with you all the side and we just wanted to be a voice of reason, but we were there supporting you this entire time.” I had cut myself off from that and we do that a lot to people, whether entrepreneurs or people within the workforce.

Sometimes if you’re leading a team and the team is going through a tough time or you received input from your bosses about needing to do something, your team can tell you’re frustrated but you’re not sharing with them, “I’m frustrated. I’m overloaded. Can someone come help me with this?” Share the burden because there are people out there willing to support you or willing to step up to the plate whether it’s at work or in your personal relationships. It’s this need for this drive for, “I’m going to do this by myself.” It’s like, “You don’t have to do it by yourself. You are responsible for it, but you don’t have to do it by yourself. You can enlist the help of others.” That was the biggest mistake.

How did the athletic mindset play? Did that play a part in you correcting that mistake or going forward?

Extreme Focus is a training session and Dave Austin trains professional athletes. One of the tools that we get, each principle that we teach is linked to an animal. One of the principles is about the otters. They have an entire system. If you look at otters, they help each other when they’re swimming. For example, they had a video of two otters chilling, laying back on a river. One of them fell asleep and started veering off the path. Then the other otter is watching his back, grabbed him and pulled him on the path. I remember while I was reviewing the material to teach it to someone and the thought hit me in a team. I’m here training people about the importance of having a support work and teamwork. In teams, in the athletic mindset, when your teammate is going through something, the other team members are going to go try to figure out, help them out because you want or her out. You want their mindset to be fully there so they can be a focus on the task at hand. I said, “Who is on my team? Who are my board of directors?” My family members are part of my team. They’re my fans. They’re cheering for me. Why not allow them to cheer for me? When I read that principle, it reminded me, “I’ve got to fix this. I need to enlist their support as well.”

A lot of people avoid getting into entrepreneurship-type of positions, taking the plans to start their own business and become leaders because of that. They feel like, “I’ll be alone. It’s going to be about all the responsibility that I have to take.” What I love about teams is there’s no I in the team. My mentor always tells me, “Om Namaha,” and that means it’s not about you, it’s about the team. When we can have that mindset, have that level of mentality towards being a leader, being an entrepreneur, it takes a little bit of the fear out of it.

I feel there are people out there that will support you whenever you are wanting to start a business. It could be that your environment currently just doesn’t support you as a business owner or a leader. I’m a big proponent of changing your environment. Not only doing an assessment of yourself but doing an assessment of your environment and the people that you are around. Perhaps, there are some other people that you need to be around that can support you as you go forth in entrepreneurship. Quite frankly, that makes the difference.

If you look at athletes, you’ll find that most athletes hang around other athletes because you’re talking about eating properly, getting the right amount of sleep, things they do and don’t do and it’s difficult. Let’s face it. It’s difficult when you’re trying to stick to a regimen or workout schedule, a diet, a certain way of eating, sleeping. If other people don’t understand that, it can be challenging to stick with that because you’re being pulled in certain directions that may not be conducive to your growth, to you benefiting from the schedule that you have because you keep getting thrown off. I love the fact that with this mindset, it can apply everywhere. I feel like we want to practice that in every area of life, not just business, not just body and diet but in friendships, relationships, marriages, and in everything that we do. What are your thoughts about that? 

That’s one of the things that I feel having that athletic mind, understanding mindset enables you to have deeper and stronger relationships. Sometimes people think that those around them aren’t being supportive. What happens is our perceptions, our expectations of what other people think of us, our expectations, that affects our interpretation of their behavior. Someone who’s completely supporting us, but we believe that they are going to come with an antagonistic attitude towards us and we’re having a conversation with them. They will be saying things and our brain will automatically interpret or try to figure out, “How is this antagonistic? How is this showing that they’re not supporting me?” We assume that they have that bias against us or against the thing that we’re doing.

Our brain plays tricks on us like that. One thing that I have found that is important, this especially helps in relationships and personal and romantic relationships too, is don’t assume that the other person is going to have something to say against you. Don’t assume that the other person doesn’t have their defenses up already or doesn’t get ready to play offense automatically. They say, “Let’s have this conversation and let me not put any of my emotional filters on it. Let me listen to what they’re saying and not making any assumptions of what they mean. Listen to what they’re saying and say, “I think this is what you mean,” instead of finding reasons to have our guards up and that helps too.

Do you find that that causes people to sabotage themselves, that level of thinking?

It does. There are cases, for example, in the entrepreneurial world. The way I’ve seen it, someone who feels a bit insecure about the service that they provide. They’ll be talking with a potential client, the client will bring up questions, and the client just wants to know. The client has no idea who this person is or the potential client. Then the entrepreneur will automatically be speaking, “This person doesn’t trust me. This person doesn’t think I can do the job. This person doesn’t think this, this person doesn’t think that.” Then it psyches them out of that sale.

Another way that that happens is in the workplace. That happens where if you’re talking with a team member and you think that team member doesn’t think you’re the right person for the job. When they’re asking you questions, they might literally want to know something. Then the person will interpret it as, “They’re trying to find a way to undermine me.” In personal relationships, the way it shows up, if someone’s asking a question, everyone’s thinking, “What are they trying to say? It’s not just a question there. They’re trying to prove a point. Where are they leading to?” Instead of facing what is currently there.

What do you say to someone like that that sees themselves in what you’re describing? This is a very common issue and you can’t see it. You don’t know if a person is doing that or not. They know when they look at themselves in the mirror or they’re at sleep when they lay in bed at night, they know that they do this, and they have these thoughts. It may be a poor self-image or a lack of confidence or maybe something that has happened in the past. What do you say to someone like that? How do we correct this issue?

Athletic Mindset: The athletic mindset enables you to have deeper and stronger relationships.

The way I’ve addressed it for myself, for example, I’m pretty confident and yet I struggled with confidence especially. I would stop and say, “Why am I feeling this? What am I feeling and why am I feeling it? Is this true?” What I would do as well, for example, for an entrepreneur or for someone who is working in a career, go out and network. One of the things I found is as I’m interacting with other people, I’m getting this positive feedback from them that goes against what the new voice in my head is saying about me. As I go out to do when I get customer reviews, whenever the voices or whenever my negative self-talk wanted to come up, I would remind myself, “This person saw something in me,” it’s not just me, other people see it too, where it’s verifiable. I would read if anyone sent me a note saying, “You helped me,” I’d save all of those. I would read those and say, “Okay,” to encourage myself.

Another thing that I would do is help someone else. I used to work with someone who automatically assumes that anytime anyone did something, it was negative, that they were trying to find a way to get at them. I have conversations with that person saying, “Okay.” It could be that person is out to get you. Are there any other reasons, any other motivations behind that action? I’d have him go through and list all the other possible motivations. I didn’t tell him he was wrong. I consistently over time kept asking him, “What about the other possible motivation?” Eventually, he stopped assuming, “They’re out to get me,” was the primary motivation. He started thinking, “It could be this one,” and the interaction changed over time.

There are two things I want to say about that. The first thing is you talked about remembering what people have said about you and that’s that feedback. Feedback is so important, and I don’t think we get enough of that. We’re silent about certain things. We don’t ask that type of question because we are afraid of what the answer may be. Whether it’s negative or positive, it’s good to know. In that way, you’re not wondering because the second thing is we make up stuff. We’re always making up stuff about what someone thinks or how they feel about our performance, about the way we look. The list goes on and on and on. I know that that’s a human thing that we do is we make up stuff. Getting that feedback baselines everything because now you know. Then if there is something, perhaps there is, you know what it is and you can work on it.

It’s the worst thing to feel that there’s some negativity towards your performance or something that you’re doing in a relationship or whatever it is and you don’t even know what that is. A lot of times, we don’t build strong enough relationships with the people close enough to us to tell us that or we have a sour attitude whenever we do hear negative information about us. Those are some quick little fixes right there, little changes that we can make to allow that feedback to happen and we can stop making up stuff. I’ve seen people all their lives, they drive themselves crazy or they live less than happy lives because they believe that someone feels a certain way. They believe something negative about themselves and it’s never been validated. No one has ever told them that and they come up with that all on their own and then they believed it. If you believe something long enough it becomes your reality.

You’ll start seeing the science because your brain will find ways to prove you right. I do want to add on to the feedback thing. I’m glad you brought it up a second time, it showed up in the conversation again because Routledge and Cohen Global Shape Leader did a study where they analyzed seven years’ worth of 360 performance reviews. 360 performance reviews for anyone who’s not familiar is, if I was a manager, I’m going to have a 360-performance review that means the people who’ll report to me are going to review me. My peers, my other managers are going to rate me or do a review of me and also my bosses. They did seven years’ worth of 360 performance reviews on both men and women and there was one thing that they found across the board. Both men and women, as when the managers reported themselves, they rated themselves lower than what everybody else did.

Women on average 25% lower, men 15% lower. It’s something to keep in mind. The importance of getting that feedback is we tend to be more critical on average of each other, of our own selves than other people are of us. It’s important to get that feedback. If you want to get feedback for personal life, one of the things that I did do is I asked twenty of my closest family members or friends to do a personal assessment of me. What I did is I set it up on Google Docs, so it will be anonymous. That way they could be as honest as they wanted to. Sometimes giving feedback face-to-face is tough because you don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings or maybe I’m going to take it. That’s what I did as well. That way I could get an honesty of the people who interact with me the most. What do they think my strengths are? What do they think my weaknesses are? That’s one way of getting that feedback.

How did that support you going forward?

It was very helpful because there were certain aspects of who I am or what I do that I thought were no big deal. I’m a very cheerful person. I always smile whenever I walk into a room. I want people to feel good and that’s part of me. Consistently in the responses, what I’d get is, “I can count on you to cheer me up. I can count on you to brighten my day.” If my day is going horrible, I know for sure at least that I can be grateful for one thing that I cheered up someone’s day. Then certain other things that they had listed in there that reinforce that, “These are strengths and I didn’t realize how important these strengths were.”

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, “Every man is a genius.” It’s up to me to figure out what their genius is. We all have an area of genius. We have certain strengths that other people see, but because we’re so accustomed to them, we don’t think of them as strengths. We don’t think of them as something out of the ordinary. Having that review for me helped me realize, “These are certain areas that are my strengths and I overlook them because they’re my strengths.”

It baffles me that when we do look at ourselves, we tend to focus on what’s not so good or the weaknesses and we stay there ignoring all of the good things about us, the positive about us. We do that. Every time there’s an opportunity to criticize ourselves or assess ourselves, we tend to criticize. We tend to look at the negative, it’s destructive feedback. We don’t look at our positives. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, why we revert to that way of thinking by default. I feel that as human beings, we don’t have enough self-compassion for ourselves. If that were something that I would offer up to human beings, in life in general, in all walks of life, marriage, business, on the court, on the field, it’s giving yourself self-compassion. A lot of times where you are, you’ve had to overcome something to get where you are. There are challenges that we all face. I know we may be facing a big challenge and that challenge may be kicking our butts. However, we have to remember the challenges that we’ve overcome.

We have to remember the good things about ourselves and that gives us fuel to correct those negative things, to correct those weaknesses because we’ve done it before. It’s not new. One thing I’m passionate about is I like showing people that they can accomplish major things in life, be their best selves. A lot of people may see the athletes that are successful, the movie stars, or the people that are rich, that are in the limelight. They look at them and they say, “That’s amazing. Look at what that person has done.” Then when they look at themselves in the mirror where they think about living a life like that, there’s not that excitement.

Athletic Mindset: We have certain strengths that other people see, but because we’re so accustomed to them, we don’t think of them as strengths.

There’s not that celebration. There’s not even that feeling of that being an opportunity. It’s more so, “That will never happen for me,” and I want to correct it. I want to change that because I believe everyone has a genius in them. For the movie star and the athlete, we live in a culture where we celebrate that stuff widely. It’s displayed and advertised in our face and so we’re attracted to that. We see it all the time. There are other people who are doing amazing things in life that we never hear about. If we can look at ourselves, find our genius and bring that forward, because I believe that that’s what we’re here for, we can have that same level of fulfillment in life.

One of the things that have happened is we compare ourselves to other people and it’s a false comparison. Before you compare yourself to, “Why am I not as successful as that other person?” Think, “What does success mean to me? What do I value in life?” I’ll take for example my parents. For my parents, what success meant for them was that their kids would have the opportunity to get an education and have a stable job. We came from Romania. Romania was a communist country. Under communism, my parents as they were Christian, they were persecuted. The Christians technically, officially, we’re allowed to go to college and university, but in practice what would happen is the teachers would lower the student’s grades. That way, as much as possible, if you’re a Christian, they would not allow you to have the opportunity to go to university or to college. My dad had wanted to be a History professor and he couldn’t. He went to trade school, he’s a machinist. For him, his success in life wasn’t, “How much money can I make?” but he’s like, “Can I provide a good life to my family?” That was his measure of success.

When we moved to the States at that time, my dad was 40 and my mom was 39. They moved halfway across the world into a country where they didn’t know the language. They had nine children. All we had was one suitcase each and they were able to overcome the challenges of learning a new culture, learning a new language, and making ends meet with all those kids. Now my dad, whenever he talks about any of us, kids, he starts choking up. He goes, “That’s my child. My child graduated high school. My child graduated college. My child works here. My children started their own company.” He doesn’t even compare himself to everyone else because he knows what his values are. He put his life on the line for those values. For each person and for all our readers, what are your values? When you look at someone, a celebrity or an athlete leading a kind of life and you like that part of their life, think, “What is the rest of their life like? Do I want the other aspects of their life? If I don’t, then why should I be jealous? Why should I allow to not be jealous? Why should I allow myself to feel less than because my life doesn’t mirror theirs?” Know what your values are and then compare yourself to that. That is the measure of success.

What I think about that as you say that as if that person is a movie star or not just but they value sending up the kids to college, a basketball player, athlete, business owner or CEO, that’s what they bring to the table. That’s where their genius is. I’ll talk to you about my dad. I’m very proud of my dad. My dad loves cutting meat. He’s been a butcher all his life and to this day, he works at a grocery store. He’s been the manager of the department and the leader. I asked him, “Why don’t you go and start your own business? Have you decided or thought about doing something else than cut meat?” He said, “No,” and I said, “Why?” He said, “I love cutting meat,” and I said, “What do you like about cutting meat?” He said, “I don’t know. I just know that I love it and I’m good at it. Every day I’m excited to go and cut meat because that’s what I do, and I love it.” I backed off and I was like, “Okay.” We need people like that in the world, who are the best meat cutters out there.

If you’re taking out the trash, whatever it is, we put measures on these things and we shouldn’t. As human beings, we’re biased towards a certain job. We’re biased towards certain things. We’ve been programmed by television, commercials, and advertisements. We’ve been programmed to think that if you’re not making a million dollars, if you’re not a superstar, if you’re not an athlete, then you’re at the bottom. Fulfillment comes at finding out who you are and giving that to the best extent possible, to the maximum extent possible to as many people as you can. If you can find fulfillment in that and if that makes you feel good every single day and you feel good getting up, going to work to do that every single day, then you found success. Perhaps that’s what you were here to do. I feel people get discouraged about things because they compare themselves or they’re not doing what the Joneses are doing, the Johnsons are doing. It is ludicrous. The Law of Relativity says that nothing is big or small. It’s just it.

If we can come to that mindset where, “It’s this. This is who I am. This is what I like. This is what I bring to the table. I know who I am. I know the number of people that I can serve, and I do it with love. I would do it even if they weren’t paying me because I get so much fulfillment out of it.” We put so much measure on weight, on money and finances and we forget the emotional side of being human and living. There are a lot of people, I’m sure you know some people too that have a lot of money but they’re unhappy. They’re unfulfilled. What kind of life is that? It’s written somewhere, “What good is it to gain the whole world and lose yourself?”

I love poetry and if there’s a stanza that describes my life, it would be this stanza. The poem is titled I Would Like To Be. The last stanza says, “I would like to be one more thing, a brilliant ray of sunlight. While traveling through this cool, dark world to warm up someone’s heart, to light up someone’s life, and then return to the sun,” and that’s me. I have it on my vision board. That is my life. I’m a very driven person, that’s me internally. If I’m going to do something I want to be the best at it, that’s me. Especially as I was building up my business, I’d like, “This person started their business a year ago, they’re further ahead of me. What’s wrong with me?” and all those thoughts in your head. I’d have to stop myself. What’s my life purpose? What is it that I value? Did I accomplish that now? If I did and I made some progress towards my goals on my business, awesome. That’s good. Stop comparing. Be happy. Tomorrow will be better than what I was now. It’s constant. The thing is what if all of us as a society, it’s easy sometimes because we’ve seen all this social media, we’re so connected, we can compare ourselves. That’s there but we are the ones who make the decision to compare ourselves.

Athletic Mindset: Fulfillment comes at finding out who you are.

That’s why the self-ownership, the self-leadership, I heavily focus on that because ultimately somewhere, I made that decision of saying, “That person has that, I don’t, therefore I must be bad.” I’m the one who made that value call. It’s a matter of every single day choosing, “I’m not going to compare myself. Here are my values. Here is what success means to me. Here’s how I’m accomplishing that now, and not choosing to beat myself down.” Having that self-compassion, self-love for myself, the way we feel about ourselves, that reflects in the way we treat others as well.

To balance life, there are two things that I need, and you’ve touched on both of them. It’s the spirit of excellence to do your best. Not to be better than someone, but to give your best for life, to give your best self, to give your best service, to give your best talent, your best genius, the best of you to life. A lot of people will give their best if there is a certain amount of money attached to it. Life in itself is a gift. You’ve already received the most priceless, invaluable gift that you can ever receive. No one can pay you the amount of money that is equivalent to having life. For that reason, to give up yourself, you can’t give yourself enough to repay that. The best thing to do is whenever you die to be empty. The first thing is to practice excellence and the giving of yourself.

The second thing is the self-compassion. Those two balance each other out because if you’re giving as much as you can and then you have self-compassion for yourself, when you fall short, when things don’t go quite the way you want them to, when you make mistakes, you make perhaps the wrong decision. Your excellence isn’t up to your standards. If you can have that self-compassion, you can put everything back into perspective. Having that balance, this is the checks and balances of life in being successful, that makes you unstoppable. You can’t be stopped with that mindset. A lot of athletes are like that.

Think about football. I play football personally. Even now you have these athletes, like a wide receiver. He will run down and he’s wide open. The quarterback will throw it to him and he drops the ball. He was practicing excellence. He was trying to run, making sure he’s running his route properly in the right position, wide open and drops the ball. What I love about an athlete with the right mindset, he’ll go back into the huddle and he’ll say, “Rerun the play. Let’s do it again.” Short-term memory, self-compassion. They’re not beating themselves up. They’re not like, “Maybe I don’t deserve to be here.” Then they’ll go catch a ball that’s more difficult and complicated than the one that they dropped. That’s what excellence and compassion for yourself can do for you.

Michael Jordan, he said he missed more shots than he ever made, but we remember the very successful entrepreneurs, they’ve failed more businesses than were successful. They have a short-term memory where they’re like, “I got it. Lesson learned. Don’t do this, do this instead, next thing, keep going.” The little children when they learn to walk, I see in my nieces and nephews, they don’t beat themselves, “I fell down. I’ll never learn to walk. I suck at this.” They get back up and they keep trying, keep trying and they keep falling and then eventually, they’re totally fine.

You can learn a lot from kids if you just sit back and observe. Once we become an adult, we forget that. We don’t live that way anymore. I tell people to return to your childlike self and I don’t mean act like a child but observe how a child acts especially. Children fall down all the time and they’re not even conscious of it. They’re like, “I fell, let me get back up,” and they keep on going. As adults, what happens is the judgment. We’re so afraid of being judged. It doesn’t matter if someone judges you or not, but that’s the fear, an embedded fear that humans have, “If I fall, they’re going to judge me. If I fall short, they’re going to judge me. They’re going to look at me a certain way.” That stifles us and keeps us stuck. People are stuck in that place. They won’t try again because sometimes that mistake or that falling short and the judgment that was associated with that was so great that they won’t even try again at all. We have to have the strength and the courage to get up and keep going no matter what the judgment is. It’s funny how we let people that we don’t even know sometimes keep us in that place. It’s funny that we do that. It’s a serious issue. I say that it’s funny, but in all reality it’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed. In your work, did you have any strategies to combat that at all?

There are multiple things. The first is coming back to that mindset, realizing how much of it is in your mind. It’s the whole, “I’m afraid that if I do this, people will talk, people will say something, perhaps people close to me, perhaps who knows what.” The first thing that I remind myself is everyone is so busy with themselves, most of the times they don’t even know what you did. One practical example is when I first started my business, I thought I was going to do just mindset coaching, especially for entrepreneurs because those where the people following me online. I started advertising a program, and then realized quickly, “I probably shouldn’t do a mindset coaching for entrepreneurs because I’m just starting out as an entrepreneur. Let me have experience as an entrepreneur before I coach entrepreneurs,” and instead decided leadership training for women in Corporate America, bread and butter, that’s what I do. I put out a program. Three months later, I put out a different program. I remember when I first wanted to put out the other programs three months later, I got scared at that, “Will people notice that this is a different program? What will people say? “You suck so bad at the first one, you had to create a second one,” and all this.

As I started reaching out to the women who I personally knew, they said, “This is cool. When did you start doing this? When did you even open up your business?” They hadn’t even seen all my previous mistakes. Here I was worried about, “Are they going to judge me because of my previous mistakes?” They were completely unaware because life was happening to them and they were busy dealing with their own life. That’s the first thing that I remind myself. Everyone is so busy with them, people aren’t noticing your mistakes.

The second thing is, once again I saw from my own personal experience as well. As the people who did see me make mistakes, if anyone had any negative reaction to it, most of them didn’t mention anything. Sometimes people do, but you’ve got to learn to block it out. Certain people who had seen me persevere would message me. They say, “I saw that you were struggling with that and I see that you’re still around. That’s awesome. Can you help me because I’m going through a tough time now and I’ve seen that you’ve got through it? How did you get through it?” Then people start coming to you for help. Whenever I’m going through something that I’m struggling, I’m learning to persevere, I actively put it in my head and say, “This is going to help someone in the future. Someone is watching me and they’re going to need my help in the future because I got through this.” Those are two small techniques that I use personally.

If you’re doing something that you haven’t done before, you’re probably going to make mistakes. You can’t perfect something that you haven’t done before. Perfection comes through repetition, doing it over and over and that’s where efficiencies come in, synergies come in and all those things. If you don’t start, if you allow the fact that you’ve perhaps will make a mistake to handle you, you will never get started with anything. You have to tread the path. The first time sometime or another, you can’t avoid that. It has to happen. When you’re doing it the first time, you’re probably going to make mistakes, so deal with it.

Athletic Mindset: You can learn a lot from kids if you just sit back and observe.

I believe that you probably have heard this, failing sooner, making mistakes sooner, failing fast, making the mistakes fast, some people hesitate because they don’t want to make the mistakes. They wait five, ten, fifteen, twenty years before they get started. Whereas, you can be further down the road now if you would have gone ahead and initiated this process earlier. If you’ve got those mistakes out the way and allowed the process to run its course because it is a process. You can’t get around that at all. You’re a coach. How can people reach you if they wanted to reach out to you, have you coach them? Perhaps there are some entrepreneurs that are joining us, and they want some coaching with their business, corporations may be joining us and want you to come in and do some training.

I do leadership training at Fortune 500 companies.

How can they reach you?

You can reach me at SilvicaRosca.com. I have a whole bunch of stuff there or at Silvica@SilvicaRosca.com. You can send me an email or go to the website on how they contact me page.

I enjoy meeting with you and having this interview with you, Silvica. It’s been a pleasure to interview you. I know you’re a powerhouse, you’re a ball of fire and your information is so good. Thank you for joining us on the show. Thank you for being a member of the Game Changer Mentality Podcast. What are, if any, final words for the audience?

Believe in yourself. You are so much more capable than you could ever think you can. For human beings, there’s something about being put in hot water and that’s when you realize how strong you are. You’re stronger than you could ever think, keep going through.

Get out there and throw yourself into life, that’s what I’m hearing from that. That is a game changing message. Thank you to our audience for joining us on another wonderful show with Silvica Rosca. For our readers, please remember to check out our Facebook group, our Facebook community. You can reach us at Game Changer Transformation Community on Facebook and check out our other episodes here on the Game Changer Mentality Podcast. You know I love you. Thank you for being here with me. I want you to remember that greatness is your birthright. Until next time.

Important Links:

• Silvica Rosca
• Think and Grow Rich
• Extreme Focus
• SilvicaRosca.com
• Silvica@SilvicaRosca.com
• Game Changer Transformation Community on Facebook
• https://www.Facebook.com/SilvicaRoscaOfficial
• https://www.Instagram.com/thesilvicarosca/
• https://www.SilvicaRosca.com
• Is Life Knocking You Down? Read Rodney’s inspiring story – Get Up! I Can’t. I Will. I Did… Here’s How! https://rodneyflowers.com/get-up-book/
• Recognize Your Positive Potential – Essential Assertions by Rodney Flowers https://rodneyflowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• Get Access to Rodney’s Daily Inspiration in your Inbox Today https://rodneyflowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734

About Silvica Rosca