“I’m an average club cyclist at best, but I know I have a di erent mindset compared to most other people”
dialogue saying? What am I saying to myself about this situation?’”
Answering these questions to recognise how you feel is the rst step towards a better emotional intelligence. If you can size up your own nervousness, it will be easier to overcome.
02 Avoid the ‘feeling/ thinking trap’
e ‘feeling/thinking trap’ is one motivation to dial-in to your feelings. You need to know them to avoid the trap. Rees imagines someone who set themselves the goal to run every morning before work. e alarm goes o at 6am. e person wakes up tired and hits the snooze button. ey tell themselves they’ll start tomorrow before diving back for more Zs.
“eir feeling is driving their thinking,” says Rees, “which doesn’t help them with the outcome they’re looking to achieve, which is getting t.
“What would be better is for them to think about it the night before and say, ‘It’s quite likely that when the alarm goes o at six o’clock, I’m not going to be feeling great, but I’m going to jump out of bed and just get my stu on and go to the gym anyway.’”
Overcoming your feelings by thinking in this way is crucial to success.
03 Know what you want from life
It’s a cliché that the most attractive men are those who know what they want from life. But clichés are often founded on truth. And Rees says it’s a big part of a high emotional intelligence. Most of his trainees struggle to answer the question: ‘What do you want from life?’
“Most people are really clear about what they don’t want,” Rees says. “But one of the big things for all of us is to be really clear and focused about what we want in our lives. Neuroscience tells us that to achieve your goals you need to focus on want you want with great clarity.”
Rees recognises this, and uses it in his Ironman training. When he wants to avoid injury, for example, he stops himself from focusing on injury-avoidance. If he focused on that, he may end up over-training. One technique to help you better understand what you want is the ‘handprint model’.
First, draw a handprint and write your goal in the palm. en write ve di erent things that must happen to achieve that goal on each of the ngertips. Once this is done, assess how close to achieving each of the
ngertip goals you are. is helps you better understand your current situation. You can then even create a timeline with details about when you would like to achieve each micro-goal.
04 Search for your blind spots
Everyone has blind spots. An ultra-cyclist’s blind spot may be his unconscious fear of pushing too hard in uphill stages. A blind spot is anything unknown to us stopping us from achieving our goals. And as long as you fail to recognise it, you’ll always struggle to overcome it. e problem is nding them. You’re blind to them. So you need other people to help you see.
Rees says feedback is the best way to notice these blind spots. He calls it the ‘food of champions’. Sports people are particularly open to feedback as they know it’s important to notice blind spots and progress to a more advanced level. But most of us often nd it di cult to accept feedback, depending on the culture we’ve been raised in. Making an e ort to listen to other people’s criticism, accepting it, and acting on it, will help to enhance anyone’s emotional intelligence.
05 Recognise that we’re all built for greatness
Rees believes we’re all built for greatness. He still refers to himself as “just a normal guy”. But he’s competed in some of the world’s toughest races and thinks anyone can follow his path with a developed emotional intelligence. Most of us, in fact, harbour a strong selfbelief at the age of ve. But by the time we turn 18, only around 5% of us feel the same way.
Rees knows this more than most people. In his book he makes himself vulnerable to traumatic experiences he had as a child – adoption, abuse, grooming. But we can always exercise our minds to re-embody that childhood greatness.
“I’m an average club cyclist at best,” he says. “But I know I have a di erent mindset compared to most other people.”