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Are
You Using Mental Training? Olympic, Professional, And Other Star
Athletes Use This Secret Weapon. How About You?
Mental training should be an integral
part of your sports training program. Choose a coach who is an expert
in this area, because it can make the difference between winning
and coming close. Are you using mental training to enhance your
sport success? Discover what it is all about. Here are five aspects
of mental training I suggest you incorporate into your game.
548
words.
Are You Using Mental Training?
Olympic, Professional, And Other Star Athletes
Use This Secret Weapon. How About You?
Bill Cole, MS, MA
Founder and CEO
William B. Cole Consultants
Silicon Valley, California
Do you have the right mental approach in your
sport? Are you playing head games to your advantage? As a leading
mental game coach, I use mental training in my practice to help
my athlete clients achieve higher levels of success in their learning,
training and performances. How about you? Are you using mental training
to enhance your sport success? Let's discover what it is all about.
Here are five aspects of mental training I suggest you incorporate
into your game.
- Mental Training Helps You Visualize Success. If you
have trouble nailing a skill, visualization can help dramatically.
If you feel stuck on a mental issue in competition, visualization
can help get you past it. Visualization is a huge part of the
mental training toolkit.
- Mental Training Helps You Train with Positive Habits.
Ever hear of GIGO? That's Garbage In, Garbage Out. That means
if you train haphazardly or sloppily, you will become sloppy and
random with your skills. If you focus, use precision and pay attention
to excellence, that's what you will get in your skills, and also
very likely in your performances.
- Mental Training Helps You Use The Principle Of Specificity.
If you practice any which way, and don't replicate how your actual
competition will be, when you arrive on game day you will feel
strange, unprepared and out of it. To get the confidence flowing
you need to train with specificity. That's where you set up training
to feel and sound like the real thing. That way, there are no
surprises.
- Mental Training Helps You Use Mental Rehearsal. You
can gain a competitive advantage with your mind if you play the
game in advance. That's right. You can mentally rehearse what
you will be doing in competition. You can plan for contingencies,
problems or map out your strategy and see yourself winning before
you actually do it. That gives you tremendous confidence.
- Mental Training Helps You Reduce Stress Symptoms. How
stressed do you get in practice? Maybe not much. How stressed
do you get in competition? Maybe too much. A mental training coach
can help you discover, manage and eliminate stressful symptoms
that interfere with your learning and performance.
Mental training should be an integral part of
your sports training program. Choose a coach who is an expert in
this area, because it can make the difference between winning and
coming close, and the difference between torturing yourself in training
and loving the process. Good luck!
To learn more about mental training, see related article
A Mental Training System Checklist: 50 Mental Game Tools Peak Performers
Use.
For a comprehensive overview of your mental abilities you need
an assessment instrument that identifies your complete mental strengths
and weaknesses. Here is a free, easy-to-take 65-item sport
psychology assessment tool you can score right on the spot.
This assessment gives you a quick snapshot of your strengths and
weaknesses in your mental game. You can use this as a guide in creating
your own mental training program, or as the basis for a program
you undertake with mental
toughness coach Bill Cole, MS, MA to improve your mental game.
This assessment would be an excellent first step to help you get
the big picture about your mental game.
Copyright © 2011-
Bill Cole, MS, MA. All rights reserved.
Bill Cole, MS, MA, a leading authority
on peak performance, mental toughness and coaching, is founder and
CEO of William B. Cole Consultants, a consulting firm that helps
organizations and professionals achieve more success in business,
life and sports. He is also the Founder and President of the International
Mental Game Coaching Association (www.mentalgamecoaching.com),
an organization dedicated to advancing the research, development,
professionalism and growth of mental game coaching worldwide. He
is a multiple Hall-Of-Fame honoree as an athlete, coach and school
alumnus, an award-winning scholar-athlete, published book author
and articles author, and has coached at the highest levels of major-league
pro sports, big-time college athletics and corporate America. For
a free, extensive article archive, or for questions and comments
visit him at www.MentalGameCoach.com.
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