Hello and welcome to another episode of Chasing Excellence. My name is Patrick Cummings.

As always, I'm here with Ben Bergeron. Thank you so much for joining us this week. How are you been?

Doing great, Patrick. I'm excited to chat with you. You as well. We've got listener questions about

how to think about the year we're wrapping up, the year we're about to enter, and the value of negative visualization.

Here's the question.

I go into every new year feeling sort of disappointed with what I've accomplished in the previous one,

but super optimistic about the new one.

Of course, things which I didn't anticipate will start to go wrong.

So I want to go in prepared for things to go wrong and ready to tackle those challenges head on, rather than expecting things to go wrong. So I want to go in prepared for things to go wrong and ready to tackle

those challenges head on, rather than expecting things to go right and be disappointed. You guys have

talked about the power of negative visualization. That makes sense in a specific sports context

where the situation is like, you know, my jump rope breaks or I get a bad judge. But when thinking

about life in general, it's stuff like my dad could get cancer and die,

or I could be unemployed and unable to find a new job, things which are pretty overwhelming.

So how do I mentally prepare for things to go wrong without just worrying about them?

Okay.

So if the question is, how do I prepare for things that go wrong without getting overwhelmed by them?

You've talked about negative visualization and sports.

And just so let's have an understanding of what that means that people haven't listened before.

The idea behind that is the top performers are not just visualizing the perfect race, the perfect match, the perfect game.

They're visualizing themselves, experiencing adversities, challenges, hardship.

But here's what I think is being missed. They're not visualizing it and getting overwhelmed.

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