Sports Psychology - Mental Toughness Preparation

A few thoughts by some practitioners

1) Patrick Cohn

• Stop going down with a negative past, stop catastrophising, stop focusing on all the wrong things
• Develop a highlight reel (video of your best moments, put to music, visualise)
• Know why you deserve to be confident (the work you put in, your strengths etc)
• Only think of positive outcomes
• Stop focusing on the game until an hour before the game
• Focus on how to prepare to give your best, how to get ready for the game

2) Top 5 Skills - Mental Toughness for Sports

• Mental practice - visualisation (the key lies in detailed and specific visualisation)
• Get present - be aware through the day, all 5 senses, to the moment
• Use a mantra - 'I can do this', 'I never give up', 'I am the best', 'I will always find a way out', 'I work harder than anyone else' etc
• Letting go - Verbally forgive yourself
• Practice ability to focus - Pick something to focus on without other thoughts creeping in
• In sports you need short focus periods

3) Mental Game Checklist - How Coaches Motivate Athletes to Win

• Vision - Clear, vivid, compelling vision
• Meaning - Personal - get personal
• Outcome - What is the pay off for the effort
• Conflict - Remove conflicts / distractions from goal
• Results - Immediacy - short milestones
• Influence - Who can influence positively
• Support - Show them support
• Time - Time management 
• Illusion - You don't need to know everything, you need to know what is important
• Influence - Can we influence the outcome

5 Routines

• Feedback
• Repetition
• Approach - out of comfort zone
• Motive
• Effort

4) Vince Lombardi 

What do you expect of yourself?

What matters to you?

Your expectations shape your reality.

Principle 

• Be driven by a pursuit of excellence
• Commit to a focused plan of action without tolerance
• Develop and maintain self confidence

 

Routines

• Practice focused breathing
• Monitor your self talk - if negative stop, change, sing
• Practice thought stopping
• Take charge of your life  
• Discover Hope out of Hopelessness
• Practice perseverance
• Obstacles - lack of commitment, talking instead of doing, waiting for the perfect time

A Nice Link - 7 Ways Successful And Fulfilled People Think Differently

Interesting link.
The 7 Ways for those in a hurry

1) Be Curious
2) Make friends with stress
3) See chain reactions (or make connections between random incidents)
4) Ask more questions than give answers
5) Contribute before gaining
6) Schedule time for nothing
7) Value experiences over objects

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237866

The Pareto Principle - 80/20 Principle of the Trivial Many and Vital Few

This vital principle is named after Vilfredo Pareto and Italian economist who in 1906 published his findings that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people.

Based on this principle, a quality management expert Joseph M. Juran conducted more studies and specifically pinned down the findings as the 80/20 principle i.e. the trivial many and the vital few.

 The principle is simple - 20% of whatever you are working at is responsible for 80% of your results.

To apply this rule we must know what our 100% is.
1)  Write down all the tasks (100%) you do.
2) Categorise them into the 80 (trivial many) and 20 (vital few) based on their importance / desired result for you.
3) Focus 80% of your time on the vital few or the vital 20% and work on them on absolute priority basis
4) The vital 20% will bring in 80% results for you.

It will need a bit of analysis but once you have zeroed down, you can fine tune your activity better.

Do the right things first, leave out the trivial ones, and get great results. Try it!

For more info read this article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davelavinsky/2014/01/20/pareto-principle-how-to-use-it-to-dramatically-grow-your-business/

3 Things to learn From Anna Hazare

3 things to learn from Anna Hazare:

1) To believe that you are never insignificant - whatever you are, wherever you come from - you can make a difference if you want to

2) To have a purpose in life and back it fully with all of your belief irrespective of what the world may think

3) To act on what one believes, and let the act do the talking

As good a formula as any.