Jim Murphy on Inner Excellence: How to Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance

If you want to be the best at whatever you do, it's about learning about human behavior and what drives human behavior. And it's the heart. And the heart has some deep needs. And the deepest need is for love and connection. Hi, everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to Radio Headspace. So what does it actually mean to be excellent? And more importantly, is it something we're born with or something we can train? My guest today is Jim Murphy, bestselling author and performance coach to some of the most incredible people in the world. Today, he's gonna break down how you can be the absolute best version of yourself. I really hope you enjoy it. Jim, thank you so much for joining us today on Radio Headspace. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you because I'm familiar with your work and I'm familiar with your book. And I think it would be so valuable for our listeners to get a little bit of background on you, and yeah, like how you got to this place of coaching and talking about excellence. So the first question I wanna ask you is, what does it mean to be excellent? Yeah, great question, thanks, Rosie, and thanks for having me, I'm grateful to be here. When I think about excellence, I think about nine characteristics of inner excellence and of the best possible life. And those characteristics are love and peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. So it's about becoming a certain type of person, a person filled with these characteristics. Inner excellence and excellence itself, to me, is about pursuing absolute fullness of life, which is embodied by these nine characteristics. Can you tell us what the characteristics are? Well, so love is the start. And so when I think of love, there's many different aspects of love. And in English, we only have one word for it. And so you might say like, "I love orange juice," or, "I love going to the fair." And so this is kind of the pleasure aspect of love. I get these good feelings for certain things, and even romantic love. And then there's the love that I'm talking about, which is sacrificial love. Sacrificial love is like, and when you think about it for others, and as we're created for relationship, is the willingness and desire to sacrifice yourself for someone else. And so from that comes joy. And so joy I think of as a byproduct of love. And so the way I define joy is a deep sense of wellbeing, freedom and gratitude, independent of circumstance. It's an inter buoyancy and delight that comes from love. I think it's such an interesting way of perceiving the world because it's such a positive outlook. So could you give us a little bit of background as to how you created own framework and perhaps how we can utilize the tools that you talk about to navigate the...