Your phone is blowing up, employees and co-workers have a million questions, your assistant is pressing you with meetings and messages, clients are demanding your attention, and on top of all that outside noise, your thoughts are running in circles. You have so much on your to-do list that you don’t know where to start.

Stepping into the office can feel just like stepping onto the court – loud, noisy and hectic. But standing in the middle of a roaring stadium doesn’t have to throw you off your game and derail your focus. You can face each new day, meeting, and challenge with a focused mind. You just need to have the right playbook and know how to successfully execute the pregame pivot.

Normally, a pivot is made after the buzzer has sounded and the players are in action, but you don’t need to be on the clock to already start pivoting your day from hectic to successful. Here are my three steps to pivoting your day before the chaos even starts so that you will perform at a higher level, increase productivity, and effectively progress through the toughest day:

#1. Set Your Six

Most basic fact in basketball: You win by putting the ball in the basket.

You can be the fanciest dribbler, the best defender, and the fastest runner, but if you don’t know where the basket is, you won’t score a single point. You. Will. Lose.

Yet most people start their off-court days without a conception of what their basket even looks like.

Game Changers start every day knowing what we’re aiming for–the Daily Six. Every evening, we set our top six priorities for the next day. Those are the things that need to get done, the things we cannot be distracted from. It gives us the layout of the day and builds in natural targets in our schedules. It increases our productivity because there is no question about what we need to do. We cut straight through the noise–since we know what the basket looks like, it’s easy to identify what’s distracting us from it. Once we hit the Daily Six, and it doesn’t matter how beat we feel at the buzzer–we know we’ve won.

#2. Activate Your Attitude

There’s a word for the type of player who hits the court waiting to react–

WEAK.

The game doesn’t mold strong players–strong players form the game. That starts with setting our attitudes, deciding who we are and what type of players we’re going to be before we even see what trick moves the day is going to throw our ways.

Game Changers walk into every morning, meeting, and challenge with the mindset that the ball is 100% in our court and no one will steal it from us. We are forces to be reckoned with and no one can steal our intelligence, creativity, drive, or passion away. We face every situation with the unwavering knowledge that we can win.

Possessing this mindset is key for a Game Changer to pivot and overcome challenging situations, and it all starts with activating our attitudes at the beginning of each new day. Think about your Daily Six and decide who you need to be and how you need to play to get them done. Pick out the targeted motto that will remind you of how strong and capable you are, like, “Today I’m going to play hard and leave everything on the court.”

#3. Get on Your Goggles

You see the basket.

You’ve got your game face on.

All you need now is a set of goggles that’ll show you exactly how the day will play out–every move on defense, offense, every shot.

It’s not magic and it’s not time travel. Every successful athlete has an individualized routine to get their heads in the game before they hit the court–because they know that before you can play it, you’ve got to see it. Game Changers use the same strategy on every court–here are the GCM Game Goggles:

• Find a place where you can be alone and undisturbed for a few minutes to clear your head and get into the Game Changer mindset.
• Take five deep breaths. Concentrate on the oxygen flowing in and out of you, fueling you up for the game ahead.
• Visualize exactly how you want to execute the day ahead. Run through possible scenarios and prepare how to respond to perform at your absolute best. Repeat your targeted motto, energizing it with your projections of perfect play, and keep it with you to use throughout the day whenever you need the power boost.

That’s it–this three-step pre-game pivot could not be easier, but Game Changers employ it each and every day to play the strongest games of our lives. Start now, and I promise–YOU’LL WIN.