I mentioned this week that my personal trainer, Andrew Maragh, introduced me at my unconference last weekend:

After working with him, I will never again believe that mindset is just woo-woo.

I would say to him: if I barely got through the last set, there's no way I'll finish this one.

And he would tell me: you're sabotaging yourself by talking like that. Followed by his favorite line: whether you say you can or you say you can't, you're right.

Never in a milion years did I think I'd be sharing sentiments like that with you. If I may be blunt, I always thought stuff like that was for weak people, and that I didn't need this fortune-cookie kind of reassurance.

Well, in the gym I am often weak -- and I do need to hear things like this!

The first time he urged me not to speak to myself negatively -- e.g., I'll never get through this final set if I barely completed the previous one -- I internalized what he had to say and I absolutely pounded out that final set. It felt good.

Roger Bannister was the first person to run a four-minute mile. But as soon as he did it, a whole bunch of other people did, too.

Those other people had not suddenly become great runners. They had been held back by a mental block: they assumed nobody could run a four-minute mile, so they didn't try.

In snowboarding the same phenomenon has occurred multiple times: a particular move seems impossible so nobody does it -- until someone accomplishes it and then everyone does it.

Mindset is real!

It's strange to contemplate that your own mind can actually hold you back, and yet we have all these examples of it doing just that.

For me I was convinced that I would always work for someone else. "I don't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body," I said in a 2008 interview.

That was my mind limiting what I could do.

Override that part of your mind that's telling you the same things my mind tried to tell me, and check out the quiz the Franbassador people have set up in order to determine what kinds of franchise businesses would be best for you.

You'll have some fascinating results before your mind even has a chance to tell you that this isn't the kind of thing you do.

This thing really works, by the way. The results you get really are great fits.

Give it a try:

https://www.tomwoods.com/whatkind

Tom Woods