The Champion’s Mind: How Great Athletes Think, Train, And Thrive

"Yes. This is another one of those books for everybody. Top-level people can get some things out of it, and very low-level people can get a lot out of it, too. This is also written in a very practical, accessible style. He doesn’t use fancy language; he doesn’t use theory; he doesn’t cite research. And, just to mention this, in all the years I’ve been doing this as a consultant, I can barely remember anybody ever asking me about research while we are engaged in sessions. It just doesn’t come up because people just don’t care. If you can give them what they need—and these books give people what they need—that’s all people really care about. His approach talks about a few different things. He talks about greatness, and how to learn it from other people: to look around your sport world, the coaches and athletes at every level, Olympic, pro, national, local, and notice what you like or admire in those people. He says, if you can notice some of these elements, that must mean you have some of those elements in yourself, that you could develop. That’s a big message he sends. He says that champions are not made in gyms; they’re made from something they have deep inside them, a desire, a dream, and a vision. Let’s call that positive psychology. Then, on the flip side, he says: identify precisely what you do that hurts your own cause. That’s also pretty valuable advice. To put it another way: in what ways do you self-sabotage? In what ways do you defeat yourself? In what ways do you beat yourself before the game begins? Now, other authors would call that ‘self-limiting beliefs.’ I use all that language. A lot of people, when they come to compete, think: ‘Oh, I could never beat someone that good.’ Well, then what are you going to the event for? You’ve got to believe in your mind it’s possible to succeed. That’s the minimum starting point. Let’s see. He also talks about how you can hate to lose, but you shouldn’t be afraid to lose. I go a little bit further and say: convert the fear of losing into the hatred of losing. If you hate to lose enough, you’ll do something about it and train, and then when you compete you’ll lose a lot less. Another one is: to perform at a champion’s level you must cultivate long-term memories for your successes and short memories for your failures. This is language I use all the time. Champions have a short memory for the bad and a long memory for the good. He says: avoid the perils of perfectionism and paralysis-by-analysis syndrome, where you overthink —which, by the way, is really the absolute number one roadblock, mental block, if you will, for people not performing. Whether it’s learning, you can perform when you learn, even though you’re learning and when you perform, people overthink. Coming full circle—we started with talking about trust. Why are people unable to trust in themselves? Maybe they don’t have a history of winning much, so they’re overthinking, or they think they can’t win. Maybe they’re unsure of their training, so they overthink. Maybe no one ever told them: ‘Don’t think just trust. Just do it.’ Maybe no one ever told them that. And finally, a lot of people will get into overthinking because they want to win too badly. This falls under the fear of losing. I’ll wrap up discussion of this book by saying the following: great champions win consistently—not every time, but consistently so—because they’ve figured out all these psychological lessons and techniques as they’ve gone through their sport. Sport is a series of challenges. Roadblocks, if you want to call them that. Lessons. I like to call them lessons that have to be learned. How do I play against that kind of opponent? How do I play in these conditions? How do I handle it if I’m jet-lagged and injured? All these things have to be discovered—whether coaches tell them, or the person reads about them, or they just learn them on their own. Once these things are discovered, then lesson number 278 goes to the log book, and you move on to lesson 279. You keep rinsing and repeating. Eventually, champions have thousands of these lessons logged in their DNA. When they get in similar situations again, and they will occur again and again as they move through their career, we call that experience. The champions call that confidence. So it boils to the following: If you know what you’re doing, what’s the problem? Answer: There is no problem. Because I know what I’m doing. Because I know what I’m doing, I can trust my training. Universal, exactly. And I believe it can be. My offices are here in Palo Alto, California, about four or five miles from Stanford University, so I’m kind of the on-call sports psychologist there. I work with a lot of athletes over there. But over the years, while I’ve been working with somebody on their golf game or their tennis game, they might ask me: ‘I’m the VP of sales, can you help my sales team?’ Absolutely. That’s how my program The Mental Game of Selling developed. Then that kept going, and a similar request led to The Mental Game of Speaking. So depending on who I’m talking to, I call myself different things. I’m the founder and president of the International Mental Game Coaching Association. It trains and certifies people to become mental game coaches, or to have more of an expertise in that field if they’re already a coaching practitioner. This is a wide range of people. For example, later today, I’m just speaking with someone who’s a doctor of Chinese herbal medicine. I’ve had people who are chiropractors, therapists, coaches, trainers, parents. So this applies to everybody. I do a lot of interview training. That came about because I’ve done a huge number of interviews in the media. I’m pretty comfortable doing it, but I had to figure out how to be effective at that and I discovered that tons of people became hugely afraid when they go to an interview. Rightly so. But it’s all in the training. We come back to that same idea, whether it’s in sales, presentation, interview coaching, what-have-you: if you know what you’re doing, that gives you a feeling of self-security. And then you can turn your performance over to trust. We didn’t use this expression, but your unconscious. If you’re an athlete, you turn it over to your body. Some people turn it over to a lot of different things. The universe, if you want to go more broadly than that. Basically, trust is what it’s all about, to put out a consistently excellent performance. Good training, consistent training, recognizing your training is great. Then I tell people: just remind yourself that you’ve had excellent training and let all that natural goodness flow out of you."