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Mental Training: The Importance of Being Present to Access your Potential

a day ago
2 min

Mental Training: The Importance of Being Present to Access your Potential

There are a lot of mental skills an athlete needs to be able to access their potential and to have the confidence and focus needed. There are things that need to be done prior to games or competitions for mental preparation, such as visualization or mapping out how you want to handle certain situations that might arise. Then there are things that need to be done afterwards, such as self reflection, and watching game film to learn, grow and focus on what you can do next time t

Mindset Training for Athletes: Attitude is Everything

Apr 8
3 min

Mindset Training for Athletes: Attitude is Everything

Most of you reading this understand or have heard about the importance of ones attitude. Often when we think of attitude we think of good versus bad, or positive versus negative. Both of which are important, but what do they really mean? If we just have a positive attitude and think good thoughts does this help us do what needs to be done? Perhaps it does, but sometimes maybe it doesn't. I think like many things more clarity needs to be brought to the idea around attitude and

Sport Psychology Topics: Fear of Rejection

Mar 30
2 min

Sport Psychology Topics: Fear of Rejection

In this post I wanted to talk on a topic that most athletes deal with, and that is the fear of rejection. The fear that they are not good enough without certain results or outcomes. This is one of the biggest things athletes deal with that greatly impacts their mental health. As humans we seek to belong, to be loved. Often times though an athlete feels like this only occurs based on their results. To be able to separate who we are from what we do and the outcomes we get is on

Mindset Training for Athletes: Pushing Past Pretty Good

Mar 24
2 min

Mindset Training for Athletes: Pushing Past Pretty Good

One of the biggest barriers I see for athletes going from good to great, is that when things are going pretty good, they stop working on their mental performance. Often times when we feel like things are going good, we more easily get complacent, and don't feel like we need to do anything more or change anything up because things are going good. I hear it all the time that things are going good, so no need to talk, or a client has nothing they want to look at or they decide t

Mental Training for Peak Performance: Politics and Decisions out of Your Control

Mar 17
3 min

Mental Training for Peak Performance: Politics and Decisions out of Your Control

In this week's post I wanted to take a look at one of the biggest distractors for athletes. This is the politics that surround the game, and the decisions that are often made due to political aspects that impact an athlete. I wanted to address it because it is one of the biggest things I see with younger athletes that they struggle with. Often times when I talk to a veteran professional athlete they will indicated one of their greatest mental strengths is no longer worrying a

Mindset Training for Athletes: Power of Knowing What you Don't Know

Feb 24
3 min

Mindset Training for Athletes: Power of Knowing What you Don't Know

Majority of athletes are very routine based individuals. Routines are very important to achieve peak performance and knowing what types of routines are needed and what actions within each routine is very important. I have talked a lot about routines and the need to have them throughout your life, not just prior to your sports performance or during it. Saying that one important thing to also think about is the need to sometimes rethink what you are doing and making sure it is

Sport Psychology Techniques: Force and Function to Become More Aware

Feb 17
2 min

Sport Psychology Techniques: Force and Function to Become More Aware

Changing how we do things requires a great deal of discipline, but also self awareness. Self awareness is one of the most important mental skills for any athlete to have. The more aware you become the better you are at understanding yourself, your tendencies, how to manage yourself and what strategies or techniques to implement at certain times. Self awareness governs all other aspects of mental performance. You need to be aware of your self talk, your behaviors, your attitud

Mindset Training for Athletes: Don't Let a Bad Day Distract You

Feb 10
2 min

Mindset Training for Athletes: Don't Let a Bad Day Distract You

We are all human, as apart of being human is having good days and bad days. Or even bad weeks and good weeks. There is a natural up and down nature of being human and of being an athlete. Too often we get caught up in the bad day or week and don't see the big picture of how far we have come or all the good days that surrounded the one bad day. One of the reasons for this is we do have a negativity bias, so we are more prone to focus on the bad instead of the good, and we tend

Mental Improvement in Sports: Focusing on Effort

Jan 26
3 min

Mental Improvement in Sports: Focusing on Effort

In this weeks post I wanted to focus on one of the 5 aspects of the BEAST Mentality™, which is effort. As mentioned in the post on the BEAST Mentality™ effort is 100% in your control. You can control if you give everything you have or you do not. Now I wanted to look at this a little deeper and in a different light then maybe you have thought about. Sometimes when we look at the effort we gave we compare it to another time when we gave "more" effort. Now obviously sometimes t

Performance Sports Psychology in Action: BEAST Mentality™

Jan 20
4 min

Performance Sports Psychology in Action: BEAST Mentality™

There is so much noise and distractions in the world, and all too often it is these things that we focus on and creates a lot of unnecessary stress, anxiety and frustration. The mind is a very powerful tool, and depending on how it is used it can either benefit us greatly or can be to our detriment. Sports psychology is all about lookin to help individuals to perform at their best in everyday situations as well as critical high stakes moments. There are a variety of technique

Mental Toughness Training for Athletes: Delayed is not Denied

Jan 12
2 min

Mental Toughness Training for Athletes: Delayed is not Denied

One of the important things when it comes to mental toughness is being able to overcome obstacles and continue to persevere in the face of them. One of those obstacles is things not happening in the timing you would like. Rarely do things go according to plan and in the timing that you think it should or would like to. This is what I wanted to write about today, the ability to have a mindset to overcome something being delayed. Often times when things are delayed we feel we h

How to Improve Mentally in Sports: Creating Goals

Jan 6
2 min

How to Improve Mentally in Sports: Creating Goals

January is usually the time when people think of creating resolutions and setting goals for the year. This year feels different than years past but sometimes the turning of the calendar can offer a time to reflect and figure out where we want to go moving forward. Whether you are a New Years Resolution person or not, at some point during the year you most likely are setting goals for yourself, and trying to adjust certain behaviors that you feel you can be better at. So I tho

Mental Skills Training for Athletes: The skill of Focusing on Controllables

Dec 19, 2020
2 min

Mental Skills Training for Athletes: The skill of Focusing on Controllables

It is a skill to be able to focus on what you can control versus what you can not control. The human mind likes to rest of what we can't control, so we must have the awareness and discipline to shift that to what we can control. In each situation there are elements we can control but we have to have the skill to do so. So what is it that we can control in each situation? Well I have spoken on this before, they are Actions, Attitude, Thoughts and Effort. Two are more physical

Mental Strength Training for Athletes: Fully Commit

Dec 12, 2020
2 min

Mental Strength Training for Athletes: Fully Commit

What does full commitment look like? To help illustrate what full commitment looks like I want to use the example of the Vikings. When the Vikings arrived to their destination they would burn their boats. That is how committed they were to what they set out to do. They didn't give themselves an out when things weren't looking good. They had no choice but to storm forward. This is what full commitment looks like. However, all too often I see and hear the opposite. Athletes met

Improve Mental Toughness for Athletes: Find Solutions to Overcome Obstacles

Dec 1, 2020
2 min

Improve Mental Toughness for Athletes: Find Solutions to Overcome Obstacles

Success is not about perfection it is about finding solutions to obstacles. Mental toughness requires us to be able to figure out how to deal with obstacles, because they will occur. You have to face them head on and look to find ways to deal with them. This is something I do with clients on a consistent basis. We must mentally prepare for things to not go as planned and to make plans around things going off course. Now we can't predict everything, but it is important to thin

Mental Training Program for Athletes: Find What Works for you

Nov 26, 2020
2 min

Mental Training Program for Athletes: Find What Works for you

Everybody is unique, and what works for one person sometimes will work for another, but sometimes doesn't. There are many different was to approach mental training and the programs that get created for each athlete. There are definitely some staples out there that pretty much all athletes should utilize, such as visualization. However, there are things that work really well, for some, like breathing techniques during a completion, that for whatever reason don't work as well f

Building Mental Toughness in Sports: Commit to the Present

Nov 20, 2020
3 min

Building Mental Toughness in Sports: Commit to the Present

What is mental toughness? Many athletes are looking to become more mentally tough, but what is it really? There is no one thing that makes someone mentally tough. Rather it is a combination of psychological attributes, that when they come together allows someone to have it. There is a number of definitions out there but here is one when reflecting on them all that I have landed on. "The natural of developed psychological edge that results from a collection of skills, attribut

Mindset Coach: Getting Better at Who We Are Helps Us Get Better at What We Do

Nov 12, 2020
3 min

Mindset Coach: Getting Better at Who We Are Helps Us Get Better at What We Do

Mental training is very trendy right now, and hopefully the trend stays around, because it needs to be more than just a trend. It is something that helps athletes to thrive and reach their full potential. Mental training is necessary part of the equation to being an athlete and person, but it goes beyond what many think it looks like or means. When people think about sport psychology and mental training they usually think in terms of visualization, self talk, emotional arousa

Mental Improvement in Sports: The Complacency Trap

Nov 5, 2020
3 min

Mental Improvement in Sports: The Complacency Trap

When people look at great athletes, they only see one part of the equation. It is easy to want greatness, to want to win championships and to have the will to win. It is a whole different story to have the will to do the things that great athletes do when no one is looking. I see complacency happen a lot with athletes, especially on the mental side. There is a focus on always getting better on the physical side, but athletes will do a couple things on the mental side and then

Mental Strength Training for Athletes: Feeling Good Versus Performing Good