Don't Let One Bad Minute Ruin Your Day- Positive Mental Muscle Memory

Stephen Curry is the greatest three-point-shooter in the history of the NBA. His efficiency and ability to shoot from all over the court is a wonder to watch. He has perfect shooting mechanics because years of hard work have given him the ability to hit nearly 44% of his three-point shot attempts. In just ten-years he’s become the most prolific three-point shooter in league history.

Curry’s consistency is based on thousands of hours of practice and the confidence and ability to rise to the occasion in tense situations. Those thousands of hours of practice have honed his muscle memory to always get to the perfect shooting position and release, no matter how much pressure the defense is putting on him. From a technical standpoint, muscle memory is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition and in Curry’s case, thousands of hours of repetition.

Of course Curry’s incredible shooting skills are not just physical, the mind plays a massive role in his success. Great athletes have bad games, Curry included. The key is how quickly they can forget the bad game or situation where they didn’t perform in the clutch and move on to the next possession. There are many incredible athletes that never made it to the NBA not because of their lack of physical abilities, but because of their lack of ability to handle the mental side of the game.

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Take the Restrictor Plate Off Your Mind: Dealing With Self-Limiting Beliefs

Take the restrictor plate off.

One of my favorite scenes from the movie Old School with Will Ferrell is the scene when his character, Frank “The Tank” is working on his muscle car, “The Red Dragon”

“Took the restrictor plate off to give the Red Dragon a little more juice. But it's not exactly street legal, so keep it on the down low.”

I’m one of those guys that loves to quote movie lines and Old School has too many of them to count. Yesterday I was thinking of self-limiting beliefs and for some reason the quote popped into my head. For those that don’t know, the restrictor plate is a device you install at the automobile engine intake to limit its power. In auto racing they use the restrictor plate to equal the level of competition. Another example would be the “governor” on a riding lawn mower— essentially different technology but the same idea.

Yesterday I found myself in a contemplative mood in the afternoon. I just started a new sales year in my software selling job and I was putting my plan together for the coming year. Like so many people I find myself often fighting a constant battle to overcome the seeds of doubt that fester in my head— essentially those times when I’m restricting my own success through self-limiting beliefs. It dawned on me that all too often I’m letting fear and doubt literally restrict my performance.

How often are we limiting ourselves by putting a restrictor plate on our efforts?

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Let Your Kids be Bored

Let your kids be bored

 “I’m so bored.”

 It’s a common refrain you hear as a parent, when your child tells you that there is “nothing to do” and they are “SO bored.”

 My forty-something dad comeback?

 I’ll tell them to stop being boring and then follow it up by telling them that they don’t know real boredom. Trying growing up in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. You don’t know boredom until you find yourself on a cold January morning in rural Wisconsin with three tv stations (my childhood).

Our kids have the requisite video game consoles, books to read, traditional board games to play and, oh yeah, Pacific Ocean is a mile away. Yet, we still hear the refrain of how they are SO bored.

 You know what? It’s a good thing. You want them to be bored. According to Manoush Zamorodi, author of the book Bored and Brilliant, you want your kids to be bored and it’s good to be bored yourself.

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Embracing the Love of Your Fate

Last week I had what I perceived a very difficult work related phone call. As the clock moved closer to the afternoon conference call time, my dread increased. A tiny little part of me was hoping the client wouldn’t show up for the call.

The client showed up on the call, they always do. And, like always, the call went just fine. I’ve been in sales for nearly twenty-years and have had hundreds of such high pressure calls. I’m no rookie, and have the skill set and experience to handle these situations, yet none of that experience stopped the dread from building up inside me.

We’ve all been there and we all know the outcome. Whether it’s a job interview, a tough conversation with a loved one, or breaking really bad news to someone, It’s never as bad as it seems.

Not that the negative voice in our head care.

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How to Avoid Being "Out of Service" While at Work

Picture yourself taking your kids to Disneyland on a beautiful summer day. As you drive down the 5 Freeway towards the entrance to the park your youngest child points out Space Mountain and everyone in the car agrees that it will be the first stop. You find a parking spot, ride the tram over and walk through Downtown Disney. Your family excitedly rushes over to Space Mountain only to find that the ride is “Out of Service”. Your kids are unhappy. You tell them that things break down from time to time and it’s good that they shut the ride down to make sure everyone is safe. “Out of Service” happens. In the software world, where I’ve spent much of my professional career, we have SLA’s to promise a certain percentage of uptime. We do this because things break down and need to be fixed.

Running into the dreaded “Out of Service” sign is inevitable.

Human beings really aren’t that that much different. There are times that we are “Out of Service.” This doesn’t alway mean that we are physically incapacitated or out of work with an illness. These out of service days are self-inflicted, days when we are absolutely disengaged and going through the motions at work or in our personal life. Of course this is human, to a point. We all have these moments. The problem in today’s world is millions of workers are often out of service more than they are in service.

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Advice for Dads: The Important Transition from Work Time to Family Time

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Talking and writing about morning routines has become an industry. A quick Amazon search for “morning routine” yields fifteen books on the subject, and that’s just the first two pages of results. It’s a popular subject because the gurus are right. I personally have benefited greatly by building a repetitive system around my morning routine. While morning routines draw all the attention, There’s another routine that I think is equally as important, for different reasons.

A big challenge for many of us is the transition from “work time” to “family time”. With modern tech allowing us 24 x 7 access to our jobs plus more and more people working from home, the division between work time and home time is often blurred, resulting in millions of employees taking their work home with them, or not really finishing work in the first place. It’s a major problem that causes great stress in relationships with studies showing that a marriage to a workaholic can double the chance of divorce. With the number of people working from home continuing to grow the stress the lack of divide causes on families will only get bigger.

All of this stress and the expansion of the work window drives home the importance of not only having a good morning routine, but also focusing on your evening routine.

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The Need for Better Habit Forming: the Origin of Attentive Man

Today is a victory over yourself of yesterday, tomorrow is victory over a lesser foe

- Miyamoto Mushashi

There’s a reason I named my website Attentive Man. The name is very personal and stems from the fact that I was extremely inconsistent and often a downright failure when it came to being attentive. This lack of attentiveness was often in all areas, from my interpersonal relationships, to my relationship with my wife and even periods of inconsistency in the areas of engagement with my clients.

The idea of engagement was key. For all the times I was engaged with my family and professional life I would go through periods where I was completely disengaged. It was based on often not having my priorities straight, but it was also based on the fact I had really bad habits when it came to organization and focus. Things that come so naturally to people like my wife (thoughtfulness, organization) just don’t come natural to me. As a result, my wife and I weren’t flying in formation as a couple or as a family. The sad part was this pattern had gone on for years. I would have periods of improvement and then revert back to inconsistency. We men have to be engaged partners. We have to be engaged fathers. We have to be engaged employees and business partners. You can’t be partially engaged. So what was the answer?

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Free Your Mind...And the Rest will Follow?


I remember when I got my first Blackberry. I was mesmerized by it. You could surf the Internet and and receive emails? The future productivity would be amazing? Little did I know how it would not only impact my life, but also society.

I was living a smartphone driven life of constant distraction. The constant text messages from family and friends, social media apps and the need to obsessively know every detail about sports and politics created a life of non-focus and distraction. These distractions created a scattered mind and a non-engaged employee, father and partner. When my wife and I would inevitably get into an argument about my lack of engagement I would deny it and tell her that I had a ‘thirst for knowledge’. It was more a thirst for distraction and escapism.

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