Sport Imagery: Your Most Powerful Mental Tool
If you do anything to work on the mental side of your sport, it better be mental imagery. Why, you ask. Because there is no more powerful mental tool than mental imagery and it can have a huge impact on your sports performance. I say this with such conviction because it had that effect on me when I was a young athlete at Burke Mtn. Academy, a private boarding school in Vermont devoted to developing world-class ski racers (it was also the first full-time sports academy in the U.S.) One summer I took a course at a local college that introduced me to the power of mental imagery. I applied it to my sport as part of my final project for the class and then continued to use it throughout the following fall and into the competitive race season. The results were nothing less than spectacular. From doubt came confidence. From distraction came focus. From anxiety came intensity. From timidness came aggressiveness. From inconsistency came consistency. And, most importantly, from decent results came outstanding results. When I studied mental imagery in graduate school, I learned why it is so powerful. Imagery is used by virtually all great athletes and research has shown that, when combined with actual practice, improves performance more than practice alone. Imagery also isn't just a mental experience that occurs in your head, but rather impacts you in every way: psychologically, emotionally, physically, technically, and tactically. Think of mental imagery as weight lifting for the mind. In my more than 25 years of work with professional, Olympic, collegiate, and junior-elite athletes, mental imagery is the tool that I emphasize the most with them and the one that I have seen have the greatest impact on their performances. Here’s the bottom line. If you aren’t engaged in a consistent mental imagery program, you’re not doing everything you can to achieve your athletic goals.
Read MoreLatest News: Heading to Doha, Qatar
I’m leaving on Saturday for Doha, Qatar for two speaking events at the ASPIRE4SPORT international conference next week. I will be giving a keynote address on Prime Sport: The Psychology of Athletic Performance and participating in a panel discussion on the role of technology in sport psychology training for athletes.
Read MoreParenting/Technology: Developing Children’s Healthy Self-identity
Self-identity is one of the trickier contributors to children’s healthy development because you can’t “do” things to your children to give them their self-identity. Rather, you can only create an environment that allows their self-identity to evolve naturally. A part of the environment that supports the emergence of culture and media, that aim to stunt, […]
Read MoreSki Racing: Your First Days Back on Snow
Greetings from beautiful Loveland, Colorado, where the air is thin, snow is amazing (kudos to John Hale and his crew!), the nights are cold, and the days are warm and sunny (in other words, ideal conditions for early season skiing). I’m out here this week and again next week working with racers as they put […]
Read MoreHealth: The Scary Connection Between TV and Life Expectancy
I just read a sobering study that found that television watching, which is one indication of a sedentary lifestyle, has a significant negative impact on life expectancy. Read about the study here.
Read MoreParenting/Popular Culture/Technology: Are Media Creating a Generation of Narcissists?
The externalization of children’s self-identities caused by the omnipresence of popular culture and social media today, that I discussed in my last post, has resulted in an unhealthy internal focus on the self among young people these days. Do you recall the story of Narcissus? The handsome fellow in Greek mythology who, because of his […]
Read More