I have a lot of pet peeves when it comes to ski racers when they’re training including leaning on their poles shortly before a training run (no intensity), chatting it up with teammates when they’re in the starting gate of a training course (no focus), and half-hearted effort to the first gate (easing into the [...]
Have you experienced this before in a race? You’re in the starting gate and ready to go physically and mentally with less than 30 seconds before you put your poles over the wand, hear the countdown, and kick out of the start. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a course hold. It may be due [...]
In my last article that, well, focused on focus, I introduced you to what focus is, its value in your triathlon training and racing, common obstacles to effective focus in triathlon, and how your focus style influences your triathlon efforts. This article will get really practical by showing you what you should focus on and [...]
Focus may be the most misunderstood mental “muscle” in the sports world and this misunderstanding can be a real challenge for triathletes. Most triathletes think of focus as concentrating on one thing for a long time. In fact, many years ago, a former world champion told me that she improved her focus by staring at [...]
I’m no Zen master and I don’t expect you to teach your children to meditate all day. At the same time, the notion of mindfulness has much broader meaning than as an Eastern philosophy or for practitioners of Buddhism. In fact, it has tremendous significance for your children growing up in this crazy new world [...]
Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting. There is also little doubt that all of the new technologies, led by the Internet, are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental The uncertain reality is that, with this new technological frontier in its infancy and developments emerging at a rapid pace, we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children’s ability to think. There is, however, a growing body of research that technology can be both beneficial and harmful to different ways in which children think. Moreover, this influence isn’t just affecting children on the surface of their thinking. Rather, because their brains are still developing and malleable, frequent exposure by so-called digital natives to technology is actually wiring the brain in ways very different than in previous generations.
