12/19/2019 Q: Why Should you Develop a ‘Championship Mindset’?

Do you want to be a great athlete, a great student, and a teammate? If so, training your mind is the most important thing you can do.

It’s a far more important activity than lifting weights or practicing your sport-specific skills.   In fact, strengthening your body and training your skills should be correctly viewed as a sub-set of the primary activity of mental training, which consists of training your focus, your confidence, and your grit.  Before investing your time in any pursuit, you must take a step back and ask if it is contributing to the big picture; which is, to the end purpose of training your mind to be satisfied in the present moment. The practice is simple; you need to celebrate your ability to:

  1. Notice your current emotion.
  2. Accept it with non-judgemental undistracted awareness.
  3. And choose your most empowered response.

I am not the first one to notice this key insight.  Ancient wisdom and modern science, along with every sports performance book ever written re-visits this fact! For instance,  Sam Harris in “Waking Up” writes;

“Our minds are all we have.  They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.  This might not be obvious. especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement — when your goals are unrealized,  your are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing.  But it’s the truth.  Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.  Every relationship is as good or bad as it is because of the minds involved.  If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become ot whos is in your life–you won’t enjoy any of it.

Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved.  But what is the real significance of every item on such a list?  Everything we want to accomplish–to paint the house, lern a new language, find a better job– is something that promises that, if done, it would all ow us to finally relax and enjoy our  lives in the present.  Generally speaking this is a false hope.I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s goals, maintaining one’s health or keeping your family fed– but most of us spend our time seeking happines and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search.  Each of us is looking for a path back to the present” We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.”

Acknowledging that practicing these three steps, moment-to-moment is the ultimate game that we are playing, and the first step towards building a ‘Championship Mindset’.  In fact,  all the tools that you will practice within this course are designed to constantly remind yourself to ‘flip the switch’ and chose your most empowered response to events outside of your control.  That is the ‘process’ that all great coaches reference.  That is how you become happy.  That is how you live a healthy energetic life, accomplish your goals, and build great relationships that will allow you to flourish throughout your life.

If you’re ready to commit to this life then ‘Step into the arena’ now! Your sport will act as your training ground.

If not; keep reading the motivation in this section!

We can’t motivate you, the type of motivation we want for you comes from within. The purpose of this section is to provide the inspirational readings and scientific reasoning of why committing to training your mind is the most important thing you can do if you want to be happy and successful on and off the field. Throughout this course we will pepper you with inspiration, readings, speeches, etc. You can find these resources in this section. Motivation is great, but it is fleeting if it’s coming from an external source. We need to move from theory to practice and want to be great for our own sake.

Re-visit this section when you need an extra boost of encouragement to motivate yourself.

 

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PN:

101: Antifragility 101