Why This Book Matters

Neutral Thinking Defined

Practice One Let Go Of Past

Practice Two Ask What Next

Practice Three Reduce Negative Input

Practice Four Watch Your Words

Your Three-Step Move Today

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Hey, greetings, and welcome. Welcome to the Sweet Spot here on Making Moves Monday. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm your host here on The Sweet Spot. I'm your partner, your teammate here in the Game of Life. I'm a board certified psychiatrist at work in high performance, but more than that, I enjoy partnering with you as we discover all of the benefits when we combine science, soul, and success. The tagline we use here on The Sweet Spot. How are you doing? And welcome, welcome to Making Moves Monday. Yes indeed. Yes indeed. And listen, I want you to hear this. Monday is not just the start of the week here on The Sweet Spot. It's Making Moves Monday. Monday is a decision. Monday is the time we use to decide what we're gonna do. Every single week, you get this moment right here where you either drift into whatever the week decides to hand you, or you step forward and make your move. Making moves Monday. You see, the gap, the gap between whether the week is gonna decide for you or you're gonna make the move, the gap is the difference between people who get where they're going and people who wonder how another year went by. This week, sweet spotters, we are launching a seven-episode series built around one of the most important books I have read in years. We tackled quite a few books here on the Sweet Spot. This is an excellent one. Trevor Moads, it takes what it takes. Don't you just love this title? It takes what it takes. We could stop right there. That's a message. It takes what it takes. It doesn't take you being motivated, it doesn't take you being in the right mood, it doesn't take all the forces coming together so that you can win. No, it takes whatever it takes. And Trevor Moad was the go-to mental conditioning coach for many elite athletes. He was also involved in special operations forces. He was the mental go-to guy for championship level programs. Sports Illustrated called this guy, this author, this that this Trevor Moad that we're gonna talk about. Sports Illustrated called him the world's best brain trainer. Nick Saban, Russell Wilson. These are some of the folks that he has influenced. Now, the thing about Trevor is that he went on to be with the Lord in 2021, but the framework he left behind is something I still use in my own practice to this day with a lot of folks that I work with. Because this book had such a profound impact on me, and I'm hoping that in every episode this week, I'm going to share successfully, hopefully, one concept from the book. I'll give you my clinical lens on it, and one move that you can attach to it today and make your move. Because after all, it's making move Monday, it's making moves Monday, and it takes what it takes. So today's concept from this book, It Takes What It Takes, is the one that makes every other move possible. And you know what's called? It's called neutral thinking. And by the end of this episode, sweet spotter, you'll know not just what that is, you will know exactly how to practice it. Let's get right into it. So here's the Monday problem, right? Here's the Monday problem that we all face. We want to make a move. It's Monday. We know that we need to make a move on something. But sometimes we can't get out of our own heads. You ever been there? You just can't get out of your own thinking, you can't get out of your own way. We're still dragging last week's issues with us. It was the loss that we faced, the conflict that didn't get resolved, the thing that didn't go right yesterday or last week. Or we're already projecting into everything that could go wrong this week. You ever been there? Monday is a crazy place that you could get stuck. Either way, whether you're too far in the future or somewhere in the past, you're not right here right now. You're not moving. So you're managing your feelings more than your actions. And that's a place that we all get stuck. That's exactly what this author, Trevor Maud, was addressing in this book called It Takes What It Takes. He says, Most of us, most of us have been handed two mental options, our whole lies. Think positive or just spiral negative. Yeah, stuck between these two words. Have you ever been there where it's either you're thinking positively or you're spiraling with negative thoughts or they're just building on each other? Most of us live between these two choices or these two mental options. And you know what? Trevor Moad, this author, he rejects both of them. Did you hear what I just said? He rejected both in this book. He rejected thinking positively and thinking negatively. Most of the time, you hear a lot of authors talk about thinking positive. Well, he rejects that too. He says that positive thinking has a structural flaw. Because it requires a story that you may not fully believe. And the moment reality contradicts your story, like you miss a shot, the deal falls through, the conversation goes sideways, you don't get the job, you don't get the callback, the whole structure of your positive thinking just collapses. Have you ever been there with that? The author Trevor says you cannot build a reliable move on a foundation that depends on things going your way. Yeah, positive thinking has its limits. Now, what about negative thinking? He said that there's zero data supporting it as a performance strategy. He says there's not one study that shows you where positive where negative thinking actually helps you be better. Not one case where telling yourself how hard it's gonna be could make you better. He said all it does is burn fuel before the move even starts. Let that land. When we are thinking negatively, beloved, we are in some ways burning the fuel before the car starts even moving. So he said that there's a third option. It's not positive, it's not negative. What's the third option? The third option for Trevor Moad was neutral. Yeah, neutral thinking is what he espoused. Neutral thinking is truth-based and behavior-based. What does that mean? You look at the situation exactly as it is. No drama, no sugar coating. You just look at the situation neutrally like a robot. And then you ask one question. And you know what that question is? Not how do I feel, but what do I do next? You don't ask what's the best case scenario, or how will this work out, you ask, what do I do next? Moab, the author, uses driving as an analogy. And I love it because it it's it works. It's a very smart analogy. He says you cannot in a car, if you're in your car, you cannot go directly from reverse to drive, right? Like if in your car, you can't just go directly from reverse gear to the drive gear. That makes sense. Your engine just won't allow that. If you try it, sometimes you'll know what happens, the car can buck, things can go wrong. The correct sequence is reverse to neutral, and then forward with the car, then drive. So neutral is not stopping, it's just a pivot point, it's the gear that makes forward motion possible, and this is what he centered on with this idea of neutral thinking. And that's very helpful for us because many of us only have two options in our mind: positive thinking or negative thinking. We're introducing neutral thinking here from it takes what it takes in your making moves Monday moment here with me, this morning, this afternoon, or this evening, wherever you're listening. Yeah, that's making moves Monday in mechanical terms. You cannot make a real move from emotional negative flooding. You need to be in neutral, you gotta get to neutral first. You have to have the clarity in your mind before you take the action, before you make the next move. Yeah. So how do you okay? So so okay, we got it. Neutral thinking. All right, what is that? So, how do we get there? Now, here's the part most of us never get. Most people never get this part. They hear neutral thinking and they think, okay, great, but how? What do I actually do? And then they think they just have to think nothing in their minds, they just have a blank mind. Well, Moad, the author, is specific about this. He said that there are four practices that he uses, and he comes, he comes back to those practices in the book over and over again. And I'm gonna tell them to you today because I think they're important for a making moves Monday. And I read the book so you don't have to if you're busy, okay? And so you're gonna get the four right now. I'm about to drop on you the four strategies you could use to be an effective neutral thinker that makes you a game, a clutch person in in in the moment when you have to perform. Alright, so you ready? The first practice he says, all right, is let go of the past because the past does not predict anything. That's what he says. Let go of the past because it isn't predictive. I'm gonna quote him. I'm gonna quote what he says. The past isn't predictive. If you can absorb and embrace that belief, everything changes. You instantly feel more calm. And the person who's more calm is usually more aware. And more times than not, that person will win. Getting to neutral, you see, it starts with releasing what already happened to you. We're not saying deny it, and we're not saying to pretend that it doesn't hurt, but what we're asking you to do here in this book is release it. The missed shot in the last game has zero bearing on what you're gonna do with your next shot. The bad week that you had last week has zero bearing on what you decide this Monday and what moves you're gonna make this Monday. The past is just information, it's not a death sentence, and it is not the future. There's a saying that I came across once put the past in the past where it belongs. So every time you catch yourself in last week, say this to yourself: that moment is complete, it has its own history. This one starts now. It starts right here and right now. So that's the first practice to become a neutral thinker. Let the past go, release it, because it's not predictive. Are you ready for the second? Let's dive in. Practice two, the second practice to becoming a neutral thinker is this. And I really like this one. Ask the behavior question, not the feeling question. Ask the behavior question, not the feeling question. So what does that mean, Dr. Sweet? Alright, I'll tell you. So this is the core practice of a neutral thinker. Moad, the author says, most people go through their day asking the wrong question. Yeah. They ask, how do I feel about this? Do I feel ready? Do I feel confident? Do I feel motivated? Those questions put you at the mercy of whatever your nervous system is doing at the moment, whatever your nervous system is feeling, and your nervous system, as I'll tell you in a minute, is not always giving you accurate information. So the behavior question that he wants you to ask here instead of the feeling question is not what do I feel, he wants you to ask, what do I do next? The question is always answerable. What do I do next? There's always a next behavior inside of your control. The feeling question, how do I feel? What do I feel? How does it make me feel? I'm so into that too, you know. I gotta remind myself. Yeah, the feeling question keeps you stuck with that, and it can go in circles and it can last for a long time. Have you ever been there where you're you're in your feelings? Right, right. So, yeah, the feeling question keeps you stuck. The behavior question? What do I do next? That's the one that moves you. Imagine you're in a game, you miss a shot, and instead of saying, Oh my god, this makes me feel terrible, what if you say, What do I do next? It changes everything. That's the question you want to ask yourself now as you become a mutual thinker. Starting today, when you feel stuck, when you feel like the feelings are overwhelming, swap the question out. Not how do I feel? What do I do? Alright, so I gave you two, we have two more to go because we're locking in what you need to be as a neutral thinker. The first one, as a reminder, is let the past go because it's not predictive. The second we talked about just a second ago was ask the behavior question, not the feeling question. Not do I feel ready, it's what do I do next. You ready for the third one? We have four to go. This is the third one. The third practice, practice three, is reduce the negative input. Less negative beats more positive every time. I'll say it again. Less negative beats more positive every time. The author's direct about this. He says less negative is gonna beat more positive every day of the week. Because according to his research, it showed that trying to jump from a negative state into a positive one rarely works because the gap is too wide to jump out of negative directly into positive. But thinking of a car analogy, you he says moving from negative to neutral, that's more achievable. And it starts with reducing what's feeding your negative state. Yeah, just begin reducing the amount of negative thoughts. That's the place to start. Don't flood yourself with a whole lot of positive affirmations and try to cover it up. Reduce the negative incoming. That is practical and it makes so much sense. What it means is that you're curating what you consume, the news you wake up to, the conversations, the negative ones that you stay in, the negative social media accounts that leave you feeling weird or odd or angry or whatever that is. Yeah, the author talks about a negativity diet that we can be on that we don't even realize we are on. And we talk more about that on Wednesday. But today, today, what I want you to focus on, the key is this you cannot get to neutral if you're constantly pouring negativity into the system, is what he's trying to get across. The first step is not adding anything more negative to what you're already thinking about. The first step is not adding negative thoughts, and he's saying also you just don't keep adding trying to add things that are positive either. Stop the drain, reduce the negative thinking that you have, and let yourself come up to neutral. Does that make sense? Alright now, number four. This is the fourth and final practice to helping you become a neutral thinker. Watch what you say out loud. This one, this one, Moad, the author, is he's really emphatic about this in the book. He says, what you and I verbalize, what we say, is far more powerful than what we simply think. Speaking a negative thought makes it roughly 10 times more powerful, according to him. Your brain hears it, your brain plays it back, your brain processes this, processes this as something that is confirmed, and it builds a case around it. I have this saying I love to say is that the universe is always listening. So be careful what you say out loud because then it starts building it, you know. You say, ah, so this day sucks. I'm having an awful day. I'm gonna, I'm, I know I'm gonna have a really bad day today. And and before you know it, you look outside the window, the sun's not shining, um, you turn on the radio or the uh the TV, it's it's not working 100%. And then the case just starts to build, and somebody says something that that pisses you off, and you know how it works. So it's super important what you say out loud because it has a way of constructing your reality. So getting to neutral means governing your external language. Does that make sense? You don't have to be falsely positive, though. I'm not saying the opposite is not gonna help here. This author is not saying walk around saying all these positive things, he's saying that that's not even helpful. You don't have to perform optimism. You just have to stop saying the thing that digs the hole deeper for you today on Making Moose Monday. We're gonna go into this much more tomorrow on Take Action Tuesday, but I want you to know that this is what he wants you to stop digging the hole. Yeah, notice what you say out loud about your Monday, about your week, about yourself. That's where neutral thinking either holds or it breaks down. Because when you say the right things and you ask the right questions and you use these four strategies, you're giving and I know you're gonna laugh, the prefrontal cortex, the brain's CEO. We talk about this all the time. The prefrontal cortex is your planning CEO, it's the part of you that plans and understands things. And what you're doing is you're reducing the negative input that's coming in to that prefrontal cortex, and that helps you really think clearly. So, performers in my world who last are the ones who really understand this, they know how to get to neutral, they know how to find neutral when everything is loud around them and they come from a place of clarity, they're not using emotional hype, they're not using a whole lot of positive affirmations because those positive affirmations they burn out. I've worked with athletes who had rituals built around getting fired up before the competition, and you know, guess what? It worked, it works for a minute. The fire worked early, but I watched those same athletes struggle in fourth quarters or in overtime or on stage when the moment got big because the emotion had consumed everything in them before the end of the game or the end of the performance. So you've got to be careful that you're not just in drive and overdrive because that's its own problem. Making moves Monday here is not about motivation, motivation is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable. That's what this author is talking about. Today it's about getting to neutral. So the move that you're gonna make is grounded, intentional, and yours. So here's your move for today. One practice from Moad's four, the four principles that I just gave you, right? Pick a situation that's weighing on you right now. It could be at work, it could be in a relationship, it could be a decision that you've been trying to make. It could be something that's just been nagging you that you know you have to deal with. Something that when you think about it, you feel something. No, here's what I want you to do. Step one. I want you to state one plain fact about where things actually stand with you and that situation right now. Give it no story, no meaning, no spin, just the truth about what the situation is that you're facing right now. Just think about it. Ask yourself as step two here, ask yourself the behavior question that we talked about earlier. What do I do? Not what do I feel? What is the one action inside your control today that you can take? Not the solution, just the next move. What do I do now? That's step two. And then step three, I want you to identify one sentence you've been saying out loud or in your mind, in your head, that's keeping you in reverse. And once you figure out that one little nagging, doubtful, tricky question or statement that you have that's keeping you in reverse or move stopping you from being in dry, I want you to write that down and then cross it out, or type it out on your phone, and then I want you to delete it. Because that's how you begin to change the game here. That's it, and that's your next move. You've done the move because the author says this you can't do your way into feeling the way you need to, it's very hard, you can't do it. Yeah, so the the the idea is step back, breathe, understand where you are, and find yourself into neutral first, and then we will take the action, then we will do the next thing. Does that make sense? So you don't need to feel ready for this Monday, you need a fact, a direction, and a decision to be in neutral so that you can make the right move, and that's how this author thinks about moving forward on making moves Monday. It takes what it takes. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. This is the sweet spot. We are unpacking the book, It Takes What It Takes. We discovered today the idea of neutral thinking, and we reviewed four practices. Four practices that can help us be a neutral thinker instead of an emotional thinker, instead of a uh a positive thinker that that's not getting anything done. Practice one, let the past go. Practice two, ask the behavior question. Practice three, reduce the negative input. And practice four, watch what you say out loud. For science, for soul, and for success. You've been listening to the sweet spot. If this was helpful to you today, I want you to subscribe. It's completely free. And if you know somebody who's making a move and can benefit from being a more neutral thinker, share this episode with them. So, tomorrow, sweet spotter, tomorrow is Take Action Tuesday. Absolutely. I'll be back here with you for Take Action Tuesday tomorrow. Oh, yes indeed. And we're gonna go into something called the verbal governor tomorrow from the book. After tomorrow, you will never hear yourself the same way again. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. See you for Take Action Tuesday on the Sweet Spot.