Sports: Red Flags for Over-invested Sports Parents
One of your most essential goals in your children’s lives as athletes is to have them gain ownership of their participation. They need to feel that their sport is their thing. But ownership isn’t just something that they can gain on their own. Rather, it is a gift you give them that offers so many […]
Read MoreLatest News: Writing for Leading Cycling Website
I’ve just been invited to write articles on the psychology of cycling for Pezcyclingnews.com, one of the leading cycling websites in the world. As an avid cyclist and someone who has worked with professional cyclists over the years, I’m excited to contribute to the sport. I’ll be sure to post my articles on my blog. […]
Read MoreSki Racing: Ten Lessons from an 8th Place Finish
Of course, I’m not talking about just any old 8th place finish in a ski race. After four previous World Cup starts in which she didn’t qualify for the second run, 16-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin broke through with an impressive top-10 finish (starting 37th) at the World Cup slalom in Aspen recently. Though Mikaela’s result was […]
Read MorePersonal Growth: Four Forces of Life Inertia
In a recent post, I introduced you to my Law of Human Inertia: The tendency of people, having once established a life trajectory, to continue on that course unless acted on by a greater force. In this post, I want to explore the forces that drive our life inertia. Many of us wonder what propels […]
Read MorePrime Business Alert!: Too Much Input and Not Enough “Innerput”
The Internet, and all of the new technology that it has spawned, has made information available at the fingertips of businesspeople instantaneously. The sheer volume of information now accessible on line is staggering. Information continues to become more available to more people in less time; from web sites to email to RSS feeds to Twitter, we have input at an unprecedented rate and volume. Ironically, as the frequency of information grows, the length of messages shrinks (e.g., Twitter’s 140-character limit. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; think of haiku). And, amazingly, the vast majority of this information is free. All of this information has been a boon to the business world. This ready access to important information has made businesspeople more efficient than ever. “Cloud sourcing” has created never-before-possible opportunities for collaboration that has resulted in an explosion of creativity and innovation at all levels of the corporate world. This new technology has enabled the business world to increase productivity to levels never seen before. At the same time, for all its benefits, any businessperson will tell you that there are costs to this 24/7 connectivity and accessibility. I have already addressed the issue of multi-tasking and work/life balance in previous writings. Today, I want to explore another unfortunate consequence of this torrent of information, namely, that our “mental inbox” becomes overloaded.
Read MoreSports: 5 Tips for Quality Training
There is nothing more important to achieving your athletic goals than what you do in practice. It is during training that you ingrain the physical, technical, tactical, and mental habits that will come out in competitions. If you establish good habits, you'll have a good chance of having a good performance. But if you instill bad habits, those will come out and you'll have little chance of performing your best. Despite its importance, most athletes don’t give much thought to how they can get the most out of their training efforts. That’s why the training time of athletes is often both inefficient and ineffective. So, in the spirit of total appreciation for the value of quality training, here are five tips that can help you get the most out of practice: 1. Have a goal and purpose. You must have a clear goal about what area you want to improve as you head out to training. For example, it might be technical, tactical, mental, or team related. You must also have a clear purpose for training each day. A purpose identifies specifically how you're going to achieve your goal for the day. If your goal is to improve something technical, your purpose would be certain drills that would ingrain that new technique.
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