The Olympics are now well underway and I have no doubt that there will be lots of talk about psychology amongst the pundits and commentary teams. Once a topic that was barely mentioned, these days the vital role that our mindset plays on our performance is much more widely recognised. If you participate in sport and are reading this blog post, my guess is that you may be interested in bringing some of the techniques used by Olympic athletes to your own training. If you have never worked on the ‘mental side’ of your performance before, (or perhaps you don’t feel quite ready to jump into booking sessions with a sport psychologist just yet), I have put together a few things that you can begin to think about as a starting point. Enjoy!
1. What’s important?
It is easy to get so caught up in our sport (and training) that we don’t take a moment to stop and think about why we are doing it? Perhaps we have taken part in sport for so long, we can’t even really remember why we started, or perhaps we are new to a sport, and/or have just never given it much thought. Setting some time aside to consider what is important to you, and in turn how your sport training and participation links to those things, can be a really useful exercise to reconnect with your deeper meaning. Getting clear on this will help your motivation if (as it does for all of us at points!) it starts to wane.
This values exercise offers a practical way for you to start thinking about ‘what’s important?’. Give it a try. Once you have identified your values, now think about how participating in sport feeds into these? Perhaps sport is a way of you staying fit and healthy, which links to your value of family; or maybe you value achievement, and sport provides a way that you can push yourself. We are all unique, and there are no right or wrong answers.
2. What is in your control?
You may be familiar with the phrase ‘control the controllables’ (if you are a regular blog reader, you might even remember my previous post here). Essentially, we want to place our focus and energy (a limited resource) on the things that we CAN control, as opposed to those we can’t. But have you ever taken a moment to sit down and think about what these things actually are in your sport? And then reflected on where your focus and energy typically goes?
Try out this ‘identifying your controllables’ exercise. It will help you to notice if your focus could be placed in more beneficial areas. You may also want to keep revisiting the exercise as you notice more things to add. Once complete, you have a handy reference guide as to what things will be most beneficial to focus on – how do you think you are doing? Is there anything you could improve?
3. What would you like to achieve?
This may sound obvious, but it is surprising how many people have not spent time getting really clear on what it is they are working towards. This is likely to link to the work you did on ‘what’s important?’, since different people will have different goals and reasons for having them. When we do get clear on our goals, break them down, and spend time identifying the specific actions that we will need to take in order to achieve them, we are far more likely to be successful.
If you haven’t already, I would recommend checking out my previous blog post on goals here. This will give you an overview on different types of goals, and how they relate to each other. Then try out this goal setting exercise and commit your actions to paper!
4. What is the evidence that you can achieve your goal?
Our brains (rather unhelpfully!) will preferentially remember the negative as opposed to the positive. This means that if we want to remember all the great things we have done and our positive qualities, we need to give it a bit of a helping hand! Writing an ‘achievements list’ can be beneficial for a number of reasons, in particular it is likely to help increase our confidence (important for high performance!). When we are able to refer to examples of times we have achieved things in the past, we will feel more confident about doing so again.
Grab a notebook or use this ‘Achievements List’ worksheet. Write down all the things you can think of that you have achieved and/or are proud of. You may find it takes a bit of time to get started with this activity at first, but once the ideas begin flowing you will find that more and more spring to mind (because that is how our brains work). Once you have completed this activity, you will have your very own ‘confidence boost’ ready for when you need it!
Thank you for reading! If you have enjoyed this blog post, found it useful or have ideas on a topic you would like to see covered in a future post, please do drop me a line! I always love to hear from my blog readers and it also helps me to make the content as helpful and relevant as possible for you. Email me: laura@laurarowe.co.uk or use the contact form www.laurarowe.co.uk/contact
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