How to Series; Embracing Stress
It’s natural to feel stress - in fact, it’s necessary. Stress is a requirement for growth, for performance, for progress, to be your best, and at times, for survival.
Emotional Management
Emotional management is a set of skills that allows us to understand, accept, cope with, express, and regulate our emotions, and react constructively to them. This is an important skill no matter what our endeavor or situation is.
How To Series; Embrace a Growth Mindset
The attitude we experience during our most challenging days provides a good example of our everyday mindset. Babies are a great example of those with a growth mindset. Their days are filled with embracing new challenges, exploring via trial and error, and ample failures.
Make That Old
Sometimes, even for unknown reasons, we make mistakes. Those mistakes can become emotional, whether from embarrassment, frustration, or both. And when we dwell on them, it can be hard to move on and learn from it.
How To Series; Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to monitor your internal (thoughts, feelings, emotions) and external self (the physical, i.e., tension, soreness, etc.). Cultivating your self-awareness is an important first step to developing your mindset so that the mental skills techniques required to perform consistently can be tailored and customized to your needs.
My Parents Don't Understand Me
One of the challenges is that youth/teenagers don’t yet understand themselves, so it can become hard for them to articulate what they are experiencing or for you to know how to empathize with them. It can feel a little like riding on a roller coaster at times.
Time Travel
Remember when we talked about Be Where Your Feet Are? To quickly recap, ‘be where your feet are’ reminds us that it’s best to focus on the present moment, not the past or future. Like I said before, there’s a time and a place for learning from the past and preparing for the future, but the middle of performing is not that place.
Do Hard Better
In my life, I’ve found that at times I’ve waited for things to get easier; the workouts, the long days, the back to back to back meetings, the mom life. But what has actually been happening all this time is that I’ve been learning how to handle hard better. I have been evolving, transitioning, and becoming better everyday.
Coaching from the Stands
The point of youth sports is for your child to grow, be challenged, learn from mistakes, improve, develop a lifelong love for sport, and most importantly, have fun. Winning is a by-product of all those things. It’s not that winning is less important, it’s that winning is not the only thing that sports are about.
Be Where Your Feet Are
Be Where Your Feet Are is a simple phrase that is a favorite of mine, and one I use with clients regularly. Your feet quite literally can only be in the present moment, not in the past or future.
Changing How We Talk To Our Youth
Our youth are still figuring out their self-esteem and how to think about their experiences. They are primarily emotion focused, and therefore it is our job as parents, guardians, and coaches to model how they can think about their performances. Facilitating healthy performance reflection in their youth years will set them up for healthy performance reflection throughout their lives.
The Relationship Between Frustration and Effort
There is a direct relationship between frustration and effort. When someone gets frustrated with something, they appraise whether or not their continued effort is worth it. Therefore, when one becomes frustrated and appraises the situation to be not worth their time or effort, they might make the choice to decrease their effort and as a result their performance also decreases.
What To Say On The Ride To The Game
In your mind, this may seem like a great time to talk to your youngster about strategy, tactics, and how they can contribute to the game, but oftentimes what they hear are the expectations you have of them and the pressure being placed on them to perform well from your perspective. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to talk to your kids about their games. But there is a time and place, and some do’s and don'ts, as well.
Mentally Train for Your Next Challenge
Most of the world’s best didn't get to the top by luck. It took many years of hard work, preparation, commitment, and focus. It took working on both the mental side of performance and the physical, technical, and tactical. It took sacrifice, vision, resilience, grit, and purpose.
Mind over Matter
As we started up, I quickly realized that I would be challenged in ways I hadn’t experienced before. This is where Mind Over Matter came into play for me, and why it’s relevant to having a Fit Mind. I thought I had a tough mindset, but soon realized on this hike that there’s always room for growth.
Positivity Can Be Exhausting
Is positivity important? Without a doubt! It is the foundation that will take you to where you want to go and who you want to be. Positivity is a choice, and there are positive take-a-ways from every situation.
A Really Good Day Out
Before my summit of Mt. Shasta, I had a ton of fear thoughts. What if I fall? What if I can’t do it? What if I’m scared? While these thoughts were a necessary part of my process, I had to shift my focus from the emotion of fear to the important mental and physical prep fear can also initiate.
The Mental Skills of Successful Athletes
Confident athletes display many attributes that contribute to their outlook, attitude, demeanor, and performance. Based on my experiences with athletes over the last 30 years, both as an athlete myself and in my professional career as a mental performance consultant, I’ve put together a list of mental skills that confident athletes exhibit.
Is Your Mind Fit?
We often spend a majority of our time improving the physical aspects of performance, which is obviously an important factor to being able to perform at your best. But let’s think about it from the perspective of the best of the best to those who are masters of their craft. What do you think separates them from the rest of those amazing athletes out there? The answer is mental strength, mental toughness, mental fitness.