WINNING MINDSET STARTS EARLY FOR WINNERS

A winning mindset starts before anything else. Get it locked in as soon as possible.

I heard a variation on sports talk radio where a host and guest talked about professional athletes on losing teams.

Big time pros never consider themselves losers; they’re good players on bad teams that don’t win.

In other words, it’s not their fault. Do they have a point?

In football, new coaches come in and change things. Most of the time they say things like, “I’m going to change the culture here.”

What’s that supposed to mean? It’s a winning mindset.

Jon Gruden jumped out of the broadcast booth to the Oakland Raiders, now Las Vegas, with culture in mind.

He told his starting quarterback, Derek Carr, that he was going to change everything about his game and how he played. Carr agreed and the Raiders are better for it.

Did it help that they brought in Marcus Mariota for motivation?

Carr never started a playoff game through his first six seasons. The then-Oakland Raiders lost in the AFC wild-card round to the Houston Texans in January 2017, two weeks after Carr suffered an injury.

In those six seasons, that playoff berth was the only time Carr posted a winning record. Although Carr improved his accuracy over the last two years under Jon Gruden, the 40 touchdowns to 18 interceptions isn’t a great ratio.

Winning Mindset Is Contagious

We all fall into unproductive slumps now and then, but not on national television in front of millions of sports fans picking us apart.

Priorities change for everyone, but not in ways easy to understand.

Whether it’s a health issue like cancer, or keeping up an exercise routine, things change, get in the way, and derail the best intentions. Then we either lay down and die, or claw our way back.

I’m a fan of clawing back, so are you, or you will be if you keep reading.

Avoid Blaming Others

If you’re on a team, a boss, or a married person with kids, don’t blame others when things don’t turn out the way you expected.

Know your role, your job, and learn how to do it better. Find a coach, a mentor, or a marriage counselor for proper guidance when you feel the need.

More important, get guidance when someone else starts sticking it to you, blaming you, and you know it’s not you. If you get blamed, don’t blame back for a fix.

Take a page from professional athletes, good players on bad teams. They got where they are by grading out ahead of everyone else at each level of play from high school, to college, to the NFL.

Everyone you see on Football Night In America, Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, and the traditional Sunday game schedule, are at the pinnacle of their sport.

The saying goes that even the worst team in the NFL would beat the best college football team in any given year. I heard it again yesterday watching the Lions try and ruin another Thanksgiving.

Maybe the young guys in the booth forgot about the old game between college all-stars and the NFL champions.

The last game the College All-Stars won came in 1963, when the Green Bay Packers fell to the College All-Stars 20-17. Packers coach Vince Lombardi felt humiliated.

“We used to have a social get-together after a night game,” former Packer Boyd Dowler recalled in 2013. “Lombardi came in, and he looked visibly upset — like death warmed over. He wasn’t real kind when we got together for training camp again.”

Packers great Willie Davis added that Lombardi “would always bring it up to us when we weren’t playing well. Believe me, we never would forget it.”

What’s that mean for the rest of us working on our winning mindset? Stay on our game, be fair, wear a mask, wash hands, stay socially distant for the biggest win over covid19.

Be a winner, a reading winner.