Читать книгу Sports Psychology For Dummies - Leif H. Smith - Страница 24

The first step is building awareness of what your ideal mindset can be. A good place to start is to make a list of some of your best performances. Speak with your coach, who can help you come up with some of these. Ask your friends, a teammate, or a parent or family member. As you discuss these performances, write them down in a performance journal or verbalize them in a voice notes app on your cell phone. Use the following questions to help jog your brain:

 How were you behaving? Smiling, laughing, cheering on teammates, communicating, bouncing back after a mistake?

 What were you thinking about? Maybe nothing? Something simple, like “this play” or “breathe” or “be here now?”

 What did you experience emotionally? Calmness? Focus? Excitement? Lightness? Ease? Confidence?

 What do you notice about your body? Were your muscles tense? Loose? Was your heart rate fast or slow or moderate? Was your breathing quick and shallow or deep, slow, and comfortable?

Once you learn more about your ideal mindset by logging your past great performances, you can begin to practice “re-experiencing” this mindset over and over again with the other tools included in this book. However, if you do not cultivate this mindset ahead of time, you will be simply trying to find the door in a completely dark room.

Todd frequently uses the following analogy with his athletes and performers. He tells them that he wants to meet at Starbucks for their next meeting. Since there are probably about 50 of these stores within a 20-mile radius in Columbus, it could be any of a number of locations. So what are they going to do? Drive to each coffee place and see if he is there? Call each store and ask if there is a good-looking sports psychologist in the store? Or Todd can just tell them the exact location. That way, they do not have to guess. They may know where it is already or simply plug it into their GPS. In the same way, if you know your ideal mindset for great performance, you can practice it right away. Or you can just let your mind continue to criticize you and run on its default setting. The choice is yours.