I preach three ingredients are all you need to begin reaching peak performance. Confidence. Belief and Effort. You spend hours perfecting your craft. Training your body. I’m here to help you train your brain! Lets talk about how confidence and belief boosts your ability.
Self-Confidence, and belief in your ability, are the most important ingredients that you must have to perform your best, come through in a clutch situation, or to achieve a goal.
Doubt. Fear and What ifs?
For many athletes and people in their daily lives, the moments just prior to a critical event or performance is where doubt, fear, and the negative “What ifs?” creep into our thoughts and limit our ability to perform up to our full potential.
Many of us are just not equipped, coached, and prepared to deal with these negative thoughts and feelings when they creep in. And, they always creep in at the time when we need and want to be at our best. However, we cannot be at our best with these negative thoughts running around in our head.
Your Body Follows Your Mind!
So, when we fail, or fall short of our goal, the most common error is to think that we must need more physical and technical practice to be able to do what we want to do. But this is usually not the answer. Chances are, that you are already physically capable of doing what you want to do, but your mindset is getting in the way of allowing it to happen when it matters most. If you don’t have confidence and belief in your ability…it’s very hard to succeed. Your body follows your mind!
For most of us, we spend the majority (if not all of our practice time) developing our physical and technical ability in our sport or area of interest. We may be able to achieve high levels of performance in our practice, but competition is packed with pressure situations.
Why can’t we perform our best when we really want to, and when it really matters?
Because most of us never learn how to be at our best under pressure. We never learn how to be mentally tough and prepare our mind for success. Because of the lack of this very important skill and ingredient, this is where most of us choke, crash and burn, fail, or maybe even worse…never even try in the first place.
The mechanism meant to “PROTECT” you…is keeping you from achieving success.
Have you ever really sat down after you failed, or came up short on your performance and wondered why you didn’t succeed, or win? What went wrong?
What can you do next time to create a better outcome? Did you notice when your mindset started to shift to the negative thoughts and what ifs?
And did you apply the correct techniques to propel you forward past these barriers, and to your success?
Or, did you just do what many people do and just say:
“Man…I stink at this…I’m no good…I can’t do this!”
A thorough evaluation is a very important step if you really want to get on with being able to do your best when it really counts. This evaluation process must be honest and also positive.
Yes, looking at, and acknowledging a failure can definitely be a positive thing as long as you learn something from it, and apply what you learn, until you finally reach success!
Stay positive and don’t beat yourself up here. This analysis is to learn what didn’t work, and why. And to put a different plan into place that will be more effective, and lead you to success. If at first you don’t succeed…try, try, again!
So how can we have the resiliency, confidence, and belief to try, try, again…until we succeed?
It’s easy to say, and really not that hard to do.
Practice these things before your next opportunity to be great:
1. It helps a great deal if you already have a positive internal dialogue with yourself in your everyday routine. If you don’t have positive thoughts and a belief that you can accomplish your goal, start by being nice to yourself and support your strengths. Allow your accomplishments and successes to fill your thoughts and not the failures, fears, and shortcomings.
2. Recognize when negative thoughts creep in and start to induce anxiety, worry, fear, doubt, etc.
3. Breath at least10 deep abdominal breaths – to relax – this slows your negative thought process. I have had many Athletes from Granada High School, San Leandro High School, and many others say that learning how to breath and relax was the biggest help in getting out of their slump, and getting their performance back on track.
4. Focus on positive things…your strengths!
5. Focus on your successes and achievements.
6. Don’t focus on what you have failed at, or are afraid of happening…these things no longer exist in your mind and body…see only positive outcomes!
7. Visualize exactly what you want to happen, until you have done it successfully over and over in your mind, and you truly believe you can do it in your mind, body, and spirit. I have had NCAA D1 volleyball players from Washington State University, motorcycle road racers, soccer players, baseball players, archers, etc., attribute their new success to visualizing the correct way. The power of the mind is amazing!
This is the most important and powerful ingredient when it comes time to perform!
Visualizing something in your mind actually fires the neurons that you use to physically do something. So, you can actually practice and get better just by visualizing the perfect swing, the perfect shot, the perfect serve, etc! This also helps gain confidence because you will know that you can do it, because you have seen yourself do it over and over again in your mind.
I’m sure you are physically prepared for your next challenge… but are you mentally prepared to succeed in your next challenge? Call The Winning State to become mentally tough, and learn how to set your mind up for success. Begin to win, right now!
–Jeff
Jeff McMillan trains student-athletes to perform at peak performance. “You train your body, I’ll train your brain!” Get Jeff’s “The Winning State” 3 Secrets to Peak Performance tips. Call 510-566-3263 Today. Click to visit Jeff’s website.
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