They are not distracted by the past or the future either. Champions are not distracted by crowd noise and photo flashes or hunger and fatigue. Confidence in tough situations – according to tennis great John McEnroe – is what separates great from average players. In order to be successful, you must believe that you can be successful. At the end of the day, the one you feed will win. According to an old Cherokee legend, there are two wolves fighting within us: one of them is positive and beneficial, while the other is negative and destructive. The three key ingredients of successful visualization are: vividly seeing yourself perform successfully, deeply feeling yourself performing masterfully, and thoroughly enjoying the process (SFE visualization). It’s true: you need to visualize yourself winning to get on the winning course.
“What is now proved was once only imagined,” wrote English romantic poet William Blake a few centuries ago. Consciously develop SMART goals: goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.
There’s no other way to build a strong and fortified foundation for mental mastery. To build mastery, you need to try to focus on one or two of your mental skills multiple times each day. At sunrise, ask yourself “How will I be a champion today?” At sunset, ask yourself “How was I a champion today?” The morning is for the intentions, and the night is for accountability.Ī mind-over-matter approach doesn’t develop overnight. Ask yourself the daily gut check questions.Ask yourself how are you getting better today? What will you achieve today? Excellence, after all, can’t be achieved yesterday or tomorrow. “It’s every day.” More precisely: it is today. “It’s not every four years,” says the motto of the US Olympic committee. An average athlete thinks in terms of the future: “One day I will.” A gold medalist, on the other hand, does it and says, “Today I did.” Sergey Bubka, perhaps the greatest pole vaulter in history, always advocated this: “Do it.
It’s not about outdoing others – but about outdoing yourself, until you can’t get the better of yourself anymore. “What will your life look like when you have become your own champion?” This is the key champion question. Rate yourself objectively: the point is not to get good grades but to see how you can better yourself. Take a hard, unblinking look at all aspects of your performance, concentrating on these four: mentality, athleticism, technique, and strategy. Here are some tips and tricks Jim Afremow shares with his readers to build mental strength: “It’s a mental ability to handle the pressure, to play well at the right moments.” Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar put it even more tersely: “Your mind is what makes everything else work.”Īnd the mind – just like every part of your body – is trainable, and can be perfected to suit your needs as a future champion. “Among the top 100 players, physically there is not much difference,” states tennis great Novak Djokovic. The thing that separates the top few from the many in any sport is mentality. So, get ready to reach the pinnacle of athletic excellence and become a champion in your sport today! Be your own champion – one of the world’s leading sports psychology consultants – explicitly states, this requires “a program of psychological preparation and interconnected mental skills, mental strategies, and golden wisdom.” His bestselling 2015 book, The Champion’s Mind, offers such a program – albeit a bit messily through countless short, succinct sections written specifically “for today’s busy athletes, coaches, and parents.”įor today’s summary, we selected some of the more attention-grabbing of these sections and summarized them just for you. However, building the right frame of mind to become an elite athlete is not easy. As usual, in his own strange way, he was right: when all is said and done, if you want to play like the best athletes, it is not enough just to be as physically dedicated as them. “Sports are 90 percent mental, and the other half is physical,” once said Yogi Berra, an 18-time MLB All-Star and the US’s greatest master of malapropisms.
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