One of the first questions that I ask athletes and coaches I work with is: Should you compete like you practice or practice like you compete? By far, the most frequent response is: You should compete like you practice. This answer seems perfectly reasonable if you think about it. When you practice, you’re relaxed, feel [...]
Defining success in sports is a difficult task. When I ask most athletes and coaches how they define success, it is usually in terms of results, whether wins, rankings, or times. Though, admittedly, results are the ultimate determinant of success, I have found that a preoccupation with them can both interfere with achieving those results [...]
Defining success in ski racing is a difficult task. When I ask most racers and coaches how they define success, it is usually in terms of results, whether place, points, rankings, or qualifying quotas. Though, admittedly, results are the ultimate determinant of success, I have found that a preoccupation with them can both interfere with achieving those results and can produce feelings of disappointment and frustration (or worse). One problem is that focusing on results can actually prevent you from getting the results you want for two reasons. First, if you’re focusing on results before a race, you’re not focusing on what you need to do to get those results. Second, focusing on results, specifically, the possibility of bad results, is what causes you to get nervous before races which will only hurt your skiing. Another problem with ski racing is that your efforts don’t always lead directly to the results you want because you can’t control everything in a race. In other words, “S&%# Happens” in ski racing that can derail your best efforts. To help demonstrate this point, let’s compare success and failure in our sport to success and failure in school. Let’s say you have an exam coming up. If you study hard and are well prepared, assuming the test is fair, the chances of your doing well are very high, say, over 95%. Why? Because there are few external variables that can prevent you from doing well.
In this article, I’m going to talk about “mindset,” which I consider to be an essential contributor to athletic success and a mental area that has only come to light in my work with elite athletes during the past three years. This topic is also where professional and Olympic athletes offer wonderful examples in which [...]
Hey parents, are you ready for another roller coaster ride called a winter of ski racing ? Racers aren’t the only members of the ski racing community who experience the intense ups and downs of our sport; their parents do too. The fact is that it’s hard being a ski racing parent. You invest your heart, [...]
Not long ago, I completed what has turned out to be a three-week international tour of sport psychology. During my trips, I have worked with athletes and coaches from the U.S., Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Russia in Argentina, California, Oregon, and Switzerland. One question that has emerged during my travels involves the role of mental preparation in athletic development. But before I get to that question, let me provide some back story. Whenever I speak to athletes and coaches, I ask them how important the mind is to sport success. With few exceptions, the response is that the mind is as or more important than the physical and technical side of sports. I am obviously biased given my work in sport psychology, so I won’t take a position on which I believe is more important. But I will say that the mind is an essential piece of the sport performance puzzle. Consider the top-10 athletes, male or female, in any sport. Are they all gifted? Yes. Are they all in exceptional physical condition? Yes. Are they all technically sound? Yes. Do they all have the best equipment? Yes. So, on game day, what separates the best from those who are close, but can’t quite get to the top? All of these other factors being equal, it must be what goes on in their minds.
Disruption is certainly in vogue these days in the business world. Yet, an interesting and contrarian article in The New Yorker challenges the conventional wisdom that disruptive innovation actually work. The writer debunks much of the findings of the Harvard professor and business guru Clayton Christensen that businesses and industries evolve or die through disruptive innovation.
A fascinating article describes research that is both counterintuitive and has potentially important implications for the worlds of business, sports, education, and beyond. The basic finding, not surprising, is that internal motivation (drive from your values, meaning, passions) produces the best outcomes. What is surprising was the finding that when internal motivation was combined with [...]
Skiracing.com just published the ski racing version of my Unified Model of Performance Psychology.
A fundamental question I have been exploring in the 30 years that I have been working in the field of performance psychology is: What does it take to succeed? My life’s work has been devoted to answering this question so that anyone who is willing to pursue their dreams can find success. Yet, in recent years, I have [...]