Unlock Your Athletic Potential

Why leave the condition of your mind up to chance? You are an athlete. You train your body. You train your sport. But you may neglecting one of the most important factors of all for an athlete, your mind. This session discusses the importance of adopting a sports psychology platform through discussion and a playful experiential exercise I call Bowling Balls and Helium Balloons.

Understand that you already have a psychological framework that interfaces everything you do in life. Session 2 helps guide awareness to your existing thoughts, beliefs, and self-talk as the starting point for learning higher impact sports psychology skills. You will be guided through a series of self-reflection questions about understanding your current psychological framework and how that impacts performance in sport, using the self-talk framework of “I am.” Starting from awareness, then developing specific, targeted, and positive "I am" statements as they relate to life and sport is critical for success in athletic endeavors.

Everything we do in life begins with a thought. Everything. Understanding what drives you to perform and compete on both an intrinsic and extrinsic level helps you connect to a deeper sense of purpose. Being clear about your motivational factors now is critical when you need to access and dig deep in training and competition. We also discuss important motivating factors of Autonomy, Mastery, Belonging, and Purpose.

We can not accomplish anything if we don't first set our minds to achieving it. The goals you establish stem from your underlying motivation. How you set goals shapes your level of commitment and how you deal with barriers. A basic framework for how to establish goals, how to make them clear, meaningful and appropriately difficult, yet within reach is the basis of this session.

Achieving goals in any performance endeavor requires significant commitment, day in, day out. Establishing routines and remaining consistent is critical factor #1 as it relates to success. Bridging the connection to meaningful motivational and goal factors helps you stay consistent, even when life throws you barriers. Understanding your own personal barriers, and creating a basic plan of action will be discussed in this practice. You will be guided through an exercise I call "the barrier box."

Emotions impact everything we do, and play a key role in how we show up in the gym, on the field, on the court, the course or the trail. Understanding that mood can both influence and be influenced is the focus on day 6. Learning how to emotionally course correct during difficult moments is a key to this session. You will be lead through an activation exercise that is quickly followed by a guided meditation practice to learn how to shift those moments of physiological arousal into dialed in, game-day ready focus.

Mindset is perhaps the biggest buzz word going right now in performance psychology. Mindset is the general, default setting by which we appraise our experience, our world, and our surroundings. We can work to channel our mindset through specific skills that I call, “Setting the Mind.” A setting the mind practice involves deliberate, intentional and proactive thinking, involving both What we engage and How we engage. Setting the mind occurs before, during, and after training.

Everyone in the sports psychology world wants to talk about mental toughness. But mental toughness is not something you can magically conjure up or fake. It doesn’t just appear at mile 20 of a marathon, or spontaneously arise when we face obstacles. Mental toughness can only be forged through practice. And practice can only be forged by purposefully taking on challenges and doing hard things. Mental toughness includes 2 key ingredients; willingness and optimism. This session will include learning how to approach willingness both in and out of sport, and leaves the listener with a finding a personal challenge both in and out of sport.

You don’t rise to the occasion. You default to the level of your training. As you prepare for a hard training effort or competition, you may experience doubt, which can bleed into anxiety. Pre-competition anxiety is completely normal, yet doesn’t have to negatively impact performance. Rather, how you manage this experience is critical to successful outcomes. Channeling anxiety into excitement is one of those skills. Trust, in my opinion, is the biggest antidote that we have for anxiety, both in and out of sport. Learning how and where to connect to your own trust factors is crucial for high performance and will be taught in today’s session. And finally, control. We often focus on controlling variables outside our reach, especially as it relates to outcome. Focusing on controlling internal factors guides us and prepares us to access our training and perform at our peak.

Everyone wants to excel in competition. This could be performing for a big event on the world stage, or simply performing in your own backyard. Competition may be attempting a personal best when no one is looking, or shooting for a goal after telling your friends, family, teammates or social network all about what you're trying to accomplish. Competition can come from within or from external sources. Mastering the skill set to channel these emotions is critical to executing when it counts most. Today’s session puts all of these skills together in a 10 minute pre-competition meditation practice, aimed at arming the mind and preparing the body to execute high performance.