Bet on yourself

 It's one of the most famous slogans in basketball. "Bet on yourself," says Fred Van Vleet. He's building a whole brand on it, a brand based on hard work and all-round toughness. Bet on yourself. It carries both the connotation of pouring all your efforts into your own success and the recognition that success is never a given. It's a bet.

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke explores the idea that most of our decision making is like placing bets because we rarely have all the information we need to guarantee success. This is a great summary of the book. The key idea is that we need to separate our decision making process from our results if we want to make better decisions.

You can get good results from a bad decision and you can get bad results from a good decision. But you can't get consistently good results from consistently bad choices.

At NLP Canada Training, I teach people the skills they need to bet on themselves, to make good choices based on the results they want. They become more accurate observers of what they are feeling and thinking. They can distinguish better between their own instincts and the influence of the people around them. They use good information to make good strategies and they use willpower to implement those strategies.

They also manage the feelings they have when their good bets don't pay off. Good choices do not guarantee good results. There's an element of risk in every strategy. Betting on yourself means accepting a degree of uncertainty. You won't always win. 

But you will win more often if you have the strength of will to look at what might go wrong and pursue your goals anyway. That strength is not a gift: it's developed through knowledge and conditioning (just like basketball). 

There are no sure paths to success. But good strategies combined with the mental and emotional strengths to implement them are a sure path to improvement. Betting on yourself starts with developing those strengths.