TOM FOXLEY MINDSET COACH
Success can be a matter of holding your resolve. Unleash your inner athlete with Foxley’s simple mindset reboot
“The more vividly you can picture the ‘future you’, the more you’ll behave in ways that will bring you closer to achieving your true goals”
The first time his heart stopped beating, Crossfit coach Tom Foxley
was 13 and cycling home from school. His heart restarted with a “whoosh” and sped up to what felt like 1,000bpm. He thought he was dying. When he felt well enough, he cycled home and told his mum.
Diagnosed with sudden death syndrome, an umbrella term for unexplained cardiac arrest among under-35s, the keen footballer and cricketer distanced himself from anything that would raise his heart rate, turning instead to his Playstation. He became an introvert. He stopped trying at school and was bullied. After 18 months or so, the doctors were no wiser about his condition but figured he’d be fine to start exercising again. Around this time, the 57kg sapling met a former Royal Marine who’d started working for his landscape gardener parents. A seed was planted. Tentatively, he started working out, not discouraged by how he couldn’t run more than 400m without stopping or manage a single pull-up.
“Everyone minds the gap between where they are now and where they want to be,” says Foxley. “They don’t look at it from the other side: where they’ve come from and where they are now.” He adopted what’s known as a “growth” mindset: the conviction that he could develop his qualities and change the world around him. Conversely, a “fixed” mindset – the belief that your qualities are set – makes action harder and less enticing.
Foxley, who went on to serve four years as a Royal Marines reservist and founded Mindset RX’D – a “scalable, learnable system to master the inner athlete” – also had a clear vision of himself wearing the unit’s green beret. Part of the reason that we often struggle to make smart, long-term decisions is that, when considering our future selves, we activate the same brain regions as if we were imagining a stranger. The more vividly you can picture the “future you”, however, the more you’ll behave in accordance with your goals. In one study, subjects who were shown a digitally aged picture of themselves were prepared to save 30% more for retirement.
One of the biggest game changers for Foxley’s clients – who include Crossfitters and adventure sports athletes, among others – is envisioning what kind of person they want to be, rather than fixating on goals, which are still important but outcome-centric.
“Right now, I can display the character traits that’ll take me to where I want to be,” says Foxley. Instead of the delayed gratification of adding 10kg to your deadlift in however many weeks or months – and feeling like a letdown if you manage 9.9kg or less – you can enjoy the instant gratification of being the kind of person who’ll get up and try: “When you think of it like that, ironically, you achieve the things that you want to quicker.”