APEX-Factor PEP Talk S1/E1 TGIM

The Apex Factor Performance Enhancing Podcast Series, or PEP Talks, aims to improve performance, awareness, and attitudes. The host emphasizes the importance of attitude in achieving success and suggests adopting a positive mental attitude (PMA) for positive results. He encourages embracing the TGIM attitude, or thank God it's Monday attitude, to approach each week as an opportunity for positive impact and change. The host shares personal stories from his sports career to illustrate the power of PMA in overcoming adversity and achieving success. He concludes by emphasizing the importance of maintaining a TGIM attitude and never giving up, as it leads to positive outcomes. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to wherever and whenever you're listening. This is the Apex Factor Performance Enhancing Podcast Series, or PEP Talks, intended to take your performance, awareness, and attitudes to the next level. I want to welcome you and thank you for joining this episode of the Apex Factor PEP Talks. The X factor stands for attitude, performance, excellence, and the X factor, that sixth sense that drives you to the top of your profession. The sole purpose of the Apex Factor PEP Talks series is to create positive change along your journey to building your unique performance mindset. Invest a few minutes in yourself today if you truly want to enhance your performance and take your career to the next level tomorrow. In the Apex Factor PEP Talks series, PEP, or P-E-P, stands for Performance Enhancing Podcast, a new category in podcasting that I created with you in mind. Apex Factor PEP Talks are shared wherever you get your podcasts to build your awareness, drive new ideas, add some skills, and create your performance mindset. My goal is to bring some positivity into your lives each and every episode. I'm your host, Kraj, aka Mark Kranick, and bring over 30 years of performance, positivity, and results. So let's go ahead and get started. Today's topic's all about attitude. We will dive into the TGIM attitude, how it will set you apart and can make you unstoppable. We can all agree that attitude is everything. The best part about attitude is you get to choose your attitude each and every day. If we approach anything in life with a negative attitude or a high degree of apathy, the outcome will be far less than desired. On the other hand, bringing a positive mental attitude, PMA, will be the foundation of all of your positive results. I love this quote. So Thomas Jefferson once said, quote, nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goals. Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude, unquote. So that says it all, right? Your attitude will determine your success. It will show you if you're on an achievement-focused or a procrastination-focused journey. Either nothing can stop you or you look for things to stop you. So a few months back, I started the hashtag FeelGoodFriday on my LinkedIn profile and Instagram under apex underscore factor to basically drive awareness around positivity. One of my quotes is, quote, apathy is the enemy of greatness, unquote. So when you feel apathetic towards something, you don't perform at your best. Apathy is indifference. Apathy is a complete lack of interest. Apathy is having no or zero enthusiasm. If you feel apathetic about anything, delegate immediately. Remove that task from your life. Do whatever is in your power to reverse that apathetic feeling or apathy in your life. And if you allow apathy to take hold anywhere in your life, you then become disconnected, distant, and or disinterested. So instead, create standards of excellence around everything you do at home and at work. Strive for greatness in every activity, project, program, position, situation that you find yourself in. Move away from apathy. Move towards greatness. Strive to be enthusiastic and watch your enthusiasm become contagious. Apathy is the enemy of greatness and you are far too valuable to let apathy win. It's time to get excited, get engaged, get connected, and make a positive difference in your life and the life of the people around you. Wake up every day and tell yourself it's time to be great. If you want to be successful at anything, it starts with your current mental state, the attitude that you bring to any task or project or situation. If apathy exists, you simply don't care about the outcome or what happens, right? You need to start by removing apathy, embracing a positive mental attitude, that PMA, and then you'll find yourself moving forward in a positive direction. So let's kind of dive in a little bit on TGIM, TGIM attitude, or thank God it's Monday attitude. This is a mindset that will set you apart from the competition, from your peers, from your colleagues. It creates a mindset that basically says every Monday starts a new work week and provides you the opportunity to make a positive impact on yourself, your family, your career, your network, your colleagues, and your organization. Each new week is a new beginning. So let go of past mistakes, let go of resentment, jealousy, envy, doubt, worry, and blame, and realize that you have a clean slate right in front of you. This is your opportunity to change the world for the better one day at a time. The opportunity to meet new people, develop existing relationships and take them to the next level, drive positive change, and become the solution. Take this TGIM attitude into every day, not just Mondays, to then be positive and drive momentum towards results each and every day. Instead of the obvious TGIF state of mind that most people have, where you focus on the weekend or your time off of work and maybe having a spirit of libation or two in your hands, add that TGIM attitude into your weekly regimen. It's fine to embrace TGIF, have some fun. However, if you want to perform better at work, build successes in your career and make a positive impact, you need some TGIM attitude in your life. TGIM is at the core of who I am, and I have had this mindset since I was a teenager. So that positive mental attitude, or PMA, is part of my DNA, especially in the face of adversity. And I loved playing sports, and I love sports now, but I grew up playing a lot of different sports. And I found that team sports teach you about resilience, teamwork, leadership, perseverance, preparation, execution, communication, work ethic, and even courage. I'm going to share a couple quick stories from my high school and college sports career to demonstrate why PMA is so important to you. So I played football, baseball, basketball, and track and field in high school. During the league finals in a track and field season, I was the anchor leg on the 4x400 relay team, so the mile relay team. If we won that event, we would be league champs for that year. So most of that race, we were in second place. So we were chasing the leaders. And when I got the baton, I was over 60 yards behind their anchor. So instead of focusing on how far behind I was, I turned my focus inward on my performance, on the things I control. So using PMA, that positive mental attitude, I focused on extending each and every stride, pumping my arms, leaning into the turns. I started to close the gap, but still had a lot of ground to make up. And I remember while I was running, a quote that my brother Rick gave me before the meet started that said, quote, just be better than yourself and you will not lose, end quote. As I was coming into the final turn towards the finish line, I kicked into another gear. At the finish line, I passed my opponent by a couple of feet to win the event and the league championship. What a time to break my personal best. Of course, I collapsed after the race, right? I'm exhausted. Left it all out there on the track. But never give up. Focus on yourself, your abilities, your skills, and most of all, your attitude, especially in the face of adversity. The next story is going into my senior year at Occidental College. So during my senior campaign as quarterback, Division III Occidental College in Los Angeles, our opponent was Azusa Pacific University. They were actually a higher division. They were a Division II school, NAIA, and they actually had, for the two previous years, they had Christian Akoye, the Nigerian Nightmare, on their team. And we lost my sophomore year and we tied them my junior year. And we were always the underdog. Now, my senior year, Christian made his way to the Kansas City Chiefs, and we were determined to defeat the rivals, right, the Azusa Pacific team, because they were bigger, faster, better, even though we were still heavy underdogs. So it was October 17th, 1987, and we played at Azusa Pacific, so it was on a way game. The game was tied, 24-24, with just minutes to play and we had the ball. So I ran an option to the left. Not minimal gain, nothing special, but at the end of that play, after the whistle blew in the pileup, their defensive end speared me with his helmet right into my ribcage, fracturing number 9 and 10 on the left-hand side. I could barely breathe. I couldn't shout. It was hard to yell the signals. And I had to lean heavily at that moment in time on PMA, on that positive mental attitude, to get me through this drive, this moment in time, because it determined the outcome of the game. So I was very set on not being taken out of the game, so I didn't want to make it appear that I was feeling the way I was feeling physically. And we actually were in a situation, fourth and six at midfield. So if we don't get a first down here, they get the ball back, maybe kick a field goal and win, the time's ticking. So I threw the ball to my all-conference wide receiver, John Billingsley, over the middle. And he actually bobbled it. And as he was falling to the turf, the ball was in midair, but he made the catch to keep the drive alive. And as we approached the goal line, with seconds left in this contest, my number was called, the naked bootleg to the right, where I scored the game-winning touchdown. We won 31-24, and I attributed that game, and especially the final winning drive, game-winning drive, to my PMA, the way I overcome adversity and never give up. So despite setbacks, obstacles, adversity, maintain your TGIM attitude, and good things will happen. Bringing that TGIM attitude, especially in the face of adversity, has tremendous results. So I've been fortunate in my career, I've traveled the world delivering sales and recruitment training and providing emotional, motivational, sorry, insights to audiences of over 500 people during my career. And one moment stands out to me when I was on a global conference in Birmingham, UK. The speaker was a boat captain that successfully navigated and sailed around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South Africa, regarded as some of the most dangerous seas on the planet with literally thousands of seafarers that have perished in these treacherous waters. He had great stories to share, and his courage was unmatched. He ended his presentation with this quote, and I quote, you either light up the room when you walk in, or when you walk out. Which one are you? Let me repeat that. You either light up the room when you walk in, or when you walk out. Which one are you? This quote put everything in perspective for me. He addressed that he only aligned with men and women on his crew that embraced the former of those two situations, because if one person on his crew brought a negative attitude, negative emotions, negative self-talk, or negative energy, then there was a chance that they would all be in peril. So negative self-talk, let's chat about that quickly and just kind of review how impactful it could be on your life. Negative self-talk can cripple your desire to get things done, cripple your ability to be confident, and share your many skills and abilities with others. We all have that inner voice telling us that we're not good enough. We don't possess enough credibility to have others listen to what we say. We'll never be good enough, right? Those kind of things come in and out of our head all the time. I'm here to tell you that you are enough. Your ideas are brilliant. Your experiences are unmatched and unique. Your impact will be positive. Start driving that negative self-talk out of your mind and out of your life. The more you can limit your negative self-talk, the more you can add that TGIM attitude into your life, the more positive impacts you will be able to make in your career and your life. Negative self-talk tears down our self-confidence, can paralyze our actions, and build up procrastination. The Thank God It's Monday attitude is a mindset where you are grateful for the new workweek ahead. You have the opportunity to meet new people, to expand current relationships, to create new ideas, and to make a positive impact. So my wish for you is that you embrace your PMA and that TGIM attitude and apply this attitude and this new state of mind into your daily routine. So this concludes Episode 1 of Season 1, TGIM Attitude. Remember that actions always speak louder than words, and prescription before diagnosis is considered malpractice. Add some positive mental attitude into your day through our PMA Positivity Paws and that hashtag FeelGoodFriday posts. And if your team or yourself needs development around performance mindset, you need to drive a retention-based culture at your organization, you need human capital, consulting, and analytics to be reviewed so you can avoid risks and you can build for the future. If you need to take your talent acquisition or recruitment teams to the next level or you want to connect around our mastermind mentoring groups, please reach out to me at Performance Mindset Associates or PMA at performancemindset.co. It's all about competence, confidence, and conviction, and you've got to know, you've got to feel, you've got to believe. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful day.