Ultimate Mental Edge - Sports Psychology Blog

Achieving Your Goals

2010-01-29T12:43:00.005-05:00

Every athlete has a goal that they want to achieve in sport and/or life. Some may reach them while others will struggle to reach theirs. So what is the difference between those who achieve and those who fail? Let's look at a few factors:

Motivation - Ask yourself what is motivating you to achieve your goals? Is it coming from you or influence from other people? What drives you?

Commitment - Are you committed to working on your goals? If you do not put in the time and effort, then reaching your goals is going to be difficult and could lead to negative thoughts/feelings towards self.

Realistic - Your goal(s) have to be realistic to achieve. This is not saying that they need to be easy, but challenging. The key here is to use your previous performances as a base.

Readily Available - Are your goals written down and in a place where you see them everyday? If not, do that. Keeping a visual reminder will help motivate you.

*Action Steps*- The most important part of reaching your goals. How are you working towards your goal? This is critical to achievement.

These are just a few factors that set apart those that have a better chance of achieving their goals from those who do not. Setting goals is a great way to see your improvements and feel that personal satisfaction of success that will drive you forward to take your performance to the next level.

Dealing with Defeat

2009-11-20T09:48:00.004-05:00

We have all been there, that moment when you lose a big game or didn't get what you hoped for. You may feel a knot in your stomach, maybe you want to cry, maybe you are pissed, or maybe you just shut down. All these responses are quite typical and actually normal. As an athlete we have a need to feel competent and always at our best. When something happens to lessen either or both happen we can experience a variety of emotions and feelings ranging from anger to sadness to depressed. Over time depending on the degree of defeat you experienced, the following hours or days can feel like a roller coaster. One minute you think you are fine and the next the feelings and thoughts can overwhelm you. So, how do you deal with this?

For many athletes this is the million dollar question. How do I quickly but effectively get over my defeat. Quite simply there are two paths, helpful or non-helpful. You have the power to choose how you deal with the defeat. Many times athletes often experience a sense of powerlessness and if they can get that back they will have a much easier time taking control of their response. Going back to the choices, first let's discuss the non-helpful path. This path includes the doubts, critics, questioning. Examples I have heard include, I will never get over this, I won't ever be good enough and the always presents "what if's". The simple way to know whether what you are thinking is helping or hurting you is to ask yourself what you feel like after. Do you feel worse? Then it is not helping you move forward. The other path is the helping path. The key here is being able analyze and learn from what happened. Critique only what you know you control and will be able to work on. Keeping a journal of what you learned and will work on in the future will help you be able to move past the defeat as well. By choosing this path it will help you feel more positive and productive about your future performances or life situations. Instead of getting stuck in a negative circle, you can break free when you take control and decide that I am going to view my defeats differently.

Interesting insights from athlete meetings

2009-11-05T12:12:00.006-05:00

Many times all an athlete needs is someone to listen and help them work through whatever the issue is at the moment. Numerous times I have found that athletes will either answer their own questions or come up with a solution that is all their own. The great thing about this is that they came up with it themselves and it's theirs, no one can take that away. It is always great to see the look on my athlete's face when they come up with an idea and realize the impact it will have. It's a beautiful thing!

For example this week during one of my athlete sessions, we compared her thoughts/feelings of tumbling to downhill skiing. In tumbling she felt constricted and pressured, in skiing she felt free to make her own decisions. Pressure was the difference and that difference was making a huge impact on her ability to perform. The key is taking what she learned from the discussion and then figuring out how she can deal with the pressure surrounding tumbling.

Another example is the importance of focusing on the positive. From my own personal experiences I have seen first-hand the impact of changing your self talk from negative to positive. For me it was climbing on my road bike. I use to look at hills (and sometimes still do!) with great disdain and fear. Then one day I decided to look at them like a challenge and that it was only going to make me stronger and better. On that day, climbs were not as bad. I shifted my focus to my pedal stoke, my breathing, what I could control. I still do not particularly love them, but I don't hate them as much! But it is an on-going battle of will and mental fortitude to remind myself of the correct cues to focus on.

Takeaways from this post:
- Always be learning and apply what you learned.
- Focusing on the positive is key!

Dance Steps and Swaggering

2009-10-19T10:20:00.005-04:00

It happens to all great athletes. They get stuck in this moment and feel like they can't move forward. It could be standing at the plate micro-analyzing their swing, or a cheerleader frozen at the point of take off, or looking down a race course afraid you won't remember your line or even just as simple as the fear of it all. What is the common thread running through each of these?

Fear. Fear is the commonality between those examples. We all can think of that moment in our sporting performance where we froze. Maybe because of fear of failing, fear of getting hurt, fear of others expectations, our own expectations, or making that mistake and not knowing how to cope with it. The list goes on and on. Each one of those fears are pretty normal and commonly discussed, the last one though, is key to changing the way you perceive fear. I have heard my athletes talk about "what if I make a mistake", that "what if" is the magic question.

Athletes tend not realize or fully understand the power and control they have when it comes to that fear of failure. Many times you can see the change in athletes as the fear begins to overwhelm. It could be in their body language, their tone of voice, their reactions. For example, my one athlete does these little dance steps when she get nervous before trying to jump. Typically they say, "Ugh I don't have control over this!", or "This is so frustrating, why can't I do this!". Each time an athlete says or thinks this to themselves they move further away from the ideal zone they need to be in to compete at their best. And the move is more of a fast slip than a slow drag. One fear compounds with another and before you know it, the focus is on all your fears and not the performance. Here a distraction can help, my one athlete thinks about swaggering, walking with that swag is silly but also refocuses your attention on something positive and walking with a confidence.

It is hard for athletes to realize the power they have to control their responses, we are so set in criticizing ourselves or letting the fear take over. It seems to be much easier to do that instead of fighting our fears. But on the flip side, athletes are normally strong willed, driven and do not like to fail. So why is it so hard to squash these harmful thoughts? It requires a different kind of strength, a mental determination that takes the same hard fought training that athletes do day in and day out for their physical stamina. You have the power to control your thoughts, now all you need to do is learn how.

What is Mental Skills Training (MST)?

2009-09-25T10:50:00.004-04:00

"What is mental skills training or sport psychology?" is a question I often get. I view it as the same training you do for your body to prepare for competition, but the focus is on the psychological aspect. The goal is strengthening your mental game to prepare for all competitive scenarios. So what exactly encompasses the mental game? Being able to focus on the correct cues, knowing how much energy to use and when, preparing for competition, controlling emotions, recovering from mistakes, etc. It pretty much affects all areas of the game. Once an athlete gets to a certain level physically, the mental game is what will set them apart for the others. Being able to control their nerves, their concentration, their energy, all go into making the top players who they are.

Delving into MST is like tacking a tough climb, it takes a lot of prep, dedication, hard work, but the reward is awesome. It takes the same effort as physical training, probably even more so in the beginning. As an athlete your thought processes and habits are well ingrained into your routine. Attempting to change those habits that are at a conscious and unconscious level take months of re-training. Changing your mental habits takes a lot of hard work and effort, but the payoff is vast. When you start noticing how you don't get as nervous stepping on the field, or you can relax when you feel tense up at bat, or you tell yourself that you are going to kill that climb, that is when you know something good is happening and it will only get better. The key is as long as you continue to work at it.

The next question is the all important one, how? How do I train and retrain my mental process? There are many skills and techniques an athlete can add to their so called "mental toolbox" to improve their game. Relaxation, visualization, self-talk, goal-setting, performance routines, focus exercises, among others. The goal is to be able to learn the skills/tools, have them available and implement them into their performance so they become automatic.

You maybe thinking, why should I add this and do all this extra work? I ask, how many days a week, how many hours do you train your body? Most likely a lot, now just take that effort and apply it to work on your mental game, I could almost guarantee you will notice improvement. If you are looking to improve your performance, this is it. No one said it was easy, that wouldn't fit the mentality of an athlete anyways!

UME starts blogging!

2009-09-15T11:15:00.002-04:00

Ultimate Mental Edge (UME) is excited to start a blog that will feature articles, tips and stories about mental skill training and how that impacts and/or affects performance. For those that have not heard about UME, UME is a sport psychology consulting firm that is based in Rochester, NY. It provides a wide range of services including peak performance planning, injury support programs, and team/parentcoaching services. I have worked with a wide variety of ages, skill levels and sports. Some of the not so widely known sports include squash, curling and sheep herding. Yes you read that correctly, sheep herding! Check out www.ultimatementaledge.com to read more about me and what UME provides. Also any suggestions about topics or stories to share are more than welcome!