You ALREADY Know How to be GREAT: Alan Fine at TEDxRockCreekPark

I truly believe that we

already

know

how to be

great

and that hope or dream that there is a better self and I think we all have that hope or dream that there is a better self lurking somewhere inside of us, it never started with me and because I grew up. Believing it wasn't very good and it started because when I was 18 months old I was in the hospital with an ear infection and the staff thought I had measles so they put me in isolation for a week and I could only see my mom and dad. a window in the door and apparently I cried a lot and when I came out I was painfully withdrawn, severely asthmatic.

I couldn't play sports for years and spent about half my time not being able to go to school, but I don't. I remember a lot about that. I vividly remember an experience I had when I was 11 years old and that experience shaped the rest of my life. My older brother signed me up for my school's tennis tournament. This is in Wales, where I grew up now. I had never played tennis in my life before, but I found myself in the finals playing against someone who I remember as the school hormone freak because he's 13, he's

already

six feet tall, he has facial hair, he's the captain of our team. school. rugby team, this is our school's athlete and we start playing and I'm just putting one foot in front of the other doing the best I can and after an hour I find myself 6 4 4 love in the head and this voice started speaking with me it was a voice in my head that said Alan you've already won 10 games you just have to win two more and you're going to be the school champion and I froze I never want another game and instead of concentrating on the ball Now I concentrated on this conversation that was going on in my head and the harder I tried, the worse I got and the worse I got, the harder I tried.

It

know

s what to do. I would never have taken the lead if I didn't know what to do. but I couldn't do what I knew and that experience started me on a journey to try to understand what was going on inside of me and how I deal with it because I quickly realized that that voice was showing up everywhere in my life and now I have come to believe that the biggest obstacle to performance is not knowing what to do, but doing what we know, taking action on things we already know, and not doing what we know appears everywhere in our lives.

Many of you, before coming here today, already knew one thing: if you did a little more or a little less, you would be more effective, so obviously it is not a question of knowledge for you, how many of you parents in Here have said yes to that child you adore so much when they nag you for that sugary treat knowing that in about an hour you will regret saying yes because you will have to take that sugar away from their brother or sister. high how many again are there? You know what you have to do but you are not taking action on it and this sometimes I think is an obsession that we have, we get trapped in this illusion that there is some knowledge that if I can just get my hands on that knowledge, then I will be able to achieve it. my

great

ness I'm going to have a breakthrough in what I do, and yet there's so much knowledge we already have that we're not taking action on.

I've come to think of it this way: if we think of a wheel of performance or a wheel of greatness and we make knowledge the edge of that wheel, then what we tend to do out of habit or education as we seek to increase the thickness of the edge of that wheel when we try to be better sometimes we can make it so thick that the wheel becomes so heavy that it doesn't even turn, we get lost and we get stuck in that knowledge and if knowledge was all we needed, If we all read the book and we all we would be world champions in whatever we want, there has to be other components and for me there are three other critical components and I call them faith and fire and focus, faith is what you believe. about you and your abilities, fire is about energy, passion and commitment, and focus is about what we pay attention to and all of these influence each other because what we focus on is what creates our beliefs and a lot of that happens in our early years and once we have a belief that directs and filters what we focus on and if we can point them in the right direction it will increase the fire and make learning and using knowledge much more easy and if we steer them in the wrong direction, it will lower the heat or make learning and using knowledge much more difficult and what really seems to drive this wheel is focus.

Focus seems to drive everything we do, what we pay attention to, drives everything we do, which then prevents us from doing it. doing what we know by using this knowledge that we have I call interference mental interference and I think of it this way that our greatness is equal to our focus plus our faith plus our fire plus the knowledge that we have minus this interference and this mental interference is that in the Colonel's dialogue that goes on in our minds constantly about what was going on in me on the tennis court saying that I just needed to win two more games and I would be the champion and the interference starts in us at a very young age.

I know how children learn so quickly and seem to have an insatiable curiosity, so imagine that mother sitting here on this stool and she's reading this book and so being and I'm the one-year-old that I am. her one-year-old daughter and I see her reading this book and you know what catches my attention. I'm curious so I'll take the book from him and explore it like children do. It has fantastic colors, it makes a lot of noise, it feels good, it even tastes good and then I'll get bored and I'll get interested in something else, then I'll get bored with it and I'll go back to the book and try to take it away from mom who's still trying to read it and I'll move on to something else again.

Imagine that happening four times the fifth time I go back to Mom who is still trying to read this. She says, no, I'm reading it and it becomes the first emotionally scarring experience of my little life. My key place of security in the world is terrifying me, but you still can't quench my curiosity. I'm going back, but next time I go back I'm in careful mode, will she catch me or not? And when people go into care mode, they begin to block the fire of their faith and their concentration because care mode is an interference. I am coming across what is perhaps one of our biggest fears and that is my fear of being judged.

My fear that mom will take away her love from me. The interference mode, beware, extinguishes our faith, our fire and our focus, and I believe it extinguishes most of them. powerful faculty that we have as human beings and that is our ability to learn, so what can we do to access this greatness that we have in us? I think it's there in what we already know before. I said focus drives everything we do so here's a blinding glimpse of the obvious we're always focused on something you know if you read a good book if you get lost in a good book or a good movie you're focused or in a good video game are you focused the key is us?

We focus on interference or we focus on what is really happening in the present. When you practice your sports well one day and poorly the next or when you play your musical instrument well one day and poorly the next, it is not a question of knowledge. knowledge has not changed it is a matter of focus when our children are smart enough to get good grades but they don't or when they do their homework one day and not the next that is not a matter of knowledge it is a matter of focus and Here's a scary statistic for you, by one estimate, one hundred and ninety-five thousand people die in US hospitals every year from preventable errors, that's 390 jumbo jets, by the way, from preventable errors from errors we have knowledge to prevent is not a question of knowledge, it is an approach in which we pay attention to the problems we focus on creates our beliefs and what we believe lights our fire, so I invite you to think about a couple of questions when you play, when you are researching how to access your greatness or trying to help someone.

If not, firstly, is it really a question of knowledge or could it be a question of fire of faith and focus that you are struggling with and secondly, in the way that you try to access your greatness, do you create interference or do you reduce? By focusing beyond the interference, that's how we can really get out of surveillance mode and now I've come to believe that I too know how to be cool and I got there because I was lucky enough to have some people in my life that made it so. It's safe for me to explore how I choose what to focus on and ultimately I've come to believe that the best service we can provide to another human being or ourselves is to make it safe for them. explore your own experience to explore what you focus on because that is why transformations and advances happen and that is why we already know how to be great, thank you