Good morning. Welcome to the Increase Your Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,799. Today we're talking about rumble strips and anchors. This is a topic and these are concepts that we discuss all the time with elite athletes. Your mind is going to get distracted. There are going to be moments

when it is difficult to focus on what you can control. There are going to be moments when your

attention is focusing on things that don't matter and are unproductive. And so what do you do in those situations?

We talk about rumble strips and anchors.

Now the rumble strip refers to that patch on the side of a highway,

a long highway here in the United States.

Whenever you start to veer off the road,

your car drives over a rumble strip,

which vibrates the car nudging you to wake up

and to get your vehicle back into the lane. It doesn't mean you're a terrible driver.

There's no need to panic. It's just a subtle, gentle nudge that you're off, you're outside of

your lane. Our negative, unproductive, unwanted thoughts can serve as

mental strips to you. Not a signal or a symbol that you're mentally weak or that you're a

terrible person. Your mental rumble strips are just a nudge that you're letting your guard down.

You're losing focus on the things that matter most.

And so one exercise that we do is we write down all of the improductive thoughts,

all of the negative thoughts, all of these things that do not help you perform at your best.

Now, if I ask you what those what those reoccurring

themes are, chances are you're going to know exactly what it is. You're going to be able to write down

your reoccurring thoughts, unproductive thoughts that could sometimes turn into huge

obstacles for you. And so rather than run away from these thoughts, we use them as

signals that we're getting off track. So that's where the rumble strip comes in, the mental rumble strips.

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