Why is “PRODUCTIVE” a Magic Word for High Performers

1. Have a clear vision

2.  Get your priorities in focus, and 

3.  Be punctual

                  …Sounds like a pitch for being productive on the job, doesn’t it?

As an athlete or high performer you know all about being “busy”.  However, it’s not just important to be productive in school or at work so that you can squeeze in your invaluable training time.  You must also train with the principle of “PRODUCTIVE” at the core of each workout, so that you can get the most out of every training session.

How do you do that?  Here’s what the experts have to say about becoming more productive…

Peter Gruber says that you must have a VISION.  You need to get crystal clear about the specifics of that vision for yourself, to really imagine it in detail.  When creating your vision, check in on how do you feel.  Do you feel kinda strange or ‘off’ – then what part of your vision needs a re-work?  Or better yet, what are your self-limiting voices trying to talk you out of?

Mental Toughness coaches and other experts can help you define vision for yourself.  Let this vision be the ‘Why’ behind what you are working towards.

Tony Robbins says GET FOCUSED.  Over and over in a game or at a crunch moment you need to shut out the distractions and the mental noise to regain your focus.  Based on a UCLA study, your brain has about 48 thoughts per minute, and in the heat of competition you need to be able to ignore your self-talk in order be fully present.  This takes practice, daily practice.

So, it’s important to practice focus throughout your whole day, not just in training time.  Determine what your priorities are – in school or in work, or in life – and take specifically targeted actions.  By doing so, you’ll be more emotionally invested in what you are doing, which will fuel motivation and have a critical impact on your training and competition results.

Richard Branson says BE PUNCTUAL.  Being on time shows your respect for others – your coaches and teammates will definitely appreciate it.  Punctuality allows for efficient use of the time allotted, for work, school, or for training.  But the biggest impact is that being on punctual has you know yourself to be dependable:  When you know that about yourself, without a doubt you can rely on yourself in stressful, risky, and clutch situations.

So practice VFP: VISION, FOCUS, and PUNCTUALITY.  Grounding yourself in these three concepts will soon have you mentally tough enough for those killers days, tight games, and big dreams.

Watch this blog for future tips on staying and becoming more productive.

I’m really starting to understand the power of acceptance, like the acceptance of whatever happens – that’s not saying that I don’t ever want it to be a different way, or that I won’t train myself to do something different the next time if things don’t work, but rather accepting whatever happened because it already happened.  No use dwelling on it, since it’s now in the past and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.  As I say to my athletes, performance only happens in the present.  So any thoughts of the past only distract me from my performance right now.

I’m also beginning to grasp the true power of self-acceptance, accepting every bit of me (even those things I wish were different, like my tendency to cry when I’m really frustrated.  It’s just what I do, why resist it.  There’s so much comfort and power in accepting it).  I’m so hard on myself, I can be my own worst critic.  I can get so frustrated with myself.  And, what I’ve noticed is that doesn’t really help me!  So I’m choosing today to accept myself and my actions, all of me!

Here’s a practice I’m taking on this next week (with the full intention of continuing this practice indefinitely): I’m going to accept everything I do, whatever I say, and however I react.  I’m not going to judge it, or wish it was different, or put myself down.  Instead, I’m going accept whatever is, learn from it, assess, maybe even laugh and move on.

Will you try this with me?  Please send me an email next week telling me how it went!

Instantly, when I think about this practice, I take a deep breath and sigh, like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders.  I’m the only me I’ve got, might as well love every inch!

In sport, heck, in any kind of high performance pursuit, we talk a lot about goal setting and the mental toughness required to really put yourself out there and to maybe even fail (check out my blog on “Why Failure is Necessary” if you missed it). The path to our goals, especially our boldest and loftiest goals, is seldom a straight line: Picture a slinky, stretched wayyyyyy out – a spiral of sorts. Performance goes like that stretched, spiraled slinky – with moments of greatness, periods of stalling, and even some setbacks – up and down and around and around to your goal.

Enter in ‘Self-Reflection’ as a barometer of sorts. Self-reflection allows you to learn and find the good moments no matter where you happen to be on your spiral of progress.  Whether you’ve experienced your ideal result or had a setback, self-reflection gives you the tools to continue growing towards your goal.  That’s why I always advise athletes to engage in self-reflection after every performance, regardless of outcome (good or bad).  Self-reflection is different than debriefing your game, race, or performance; it’s more subtle than that, more like a private and compassionate conversation with yourself.

The trick to using self-reflection to grow towards even your loftiest goals is to regularly ask yourself the following 10 questions:

1. What kind of person am I to set such lofty goals?
2. What did it take to put myself to the test?
3. What did I risk to compete this time?
4. Did I execute my performance plan?
5. Did I put it all on the line, or did I have something left to give?
6. Was I coachable under pressure, did I self-correct?
7. Did I support or role model for others during the event (as in leaders leading or team mates working together)?
8. Did I improve on something since my last competition/event?
9. What did I do well?
10. What would I choose to improve on the next time?

In the answer to these 10 questions, you’ll discover many reasons to celebrate. If nothing else, you can celebrate that you took courageous actions and caused results that will now offer you feedback to improve and excel the next time! You can then choose what you want to do with that feedback (for instance, you don’t even have to use it all!!).

Now here’s the true magic of reflection: None of the celebration has anything to do with the score or the outcome, but rather on the process that led you to where you are! By focusing on the process vs. the results, you can then build success into EVERY performance, no matter the outcome!!

“The only place SUCCESS comes before work is in the dictionary.”
– Vince Lombardi

** According to Wikipedia, “(Vince) Lombardi is considered by many to be one of the best and most successful coaches in Professional Football history”.

The other day one of the athletes I worked with at a workshop asked me the following question: “I was wondering if you could tell me what to do when your nervous for a race or something”. 

I figured some of you might have this same question, so I’d answer it here. 

Now the first thing I want to say is that there’s not one right answer here.  As an athlete, you will always have to play around with different mental toughness strategies until you find the one(s) that work best for you. 

That being said, here’s one way I’d coach my athlete to deal with their nerves:

1. Awareness: The biggest key in dealing with any aspect of mental toughness is awareness.  So the first thing I’d have you do is pay attention to how you’re feeling.  What does your body feel like? What do you feel like emotionally? What sort of thoughts are floating around in your head.  If you’re not aware, these feelings and thoughts can take over and sabotage your performance.  Just by becoming aware and saying to yourself ‘Man I’m nervous!’, you’ve already won half the battle.

1. Reality Check: Next I’d have you do a quick reality check by asking yourself “Have I ever before felt nervous and performed well?” or “Do I usually get nervous before a race, competition or performance?”  The reality is that when you care about something and want to do well, it is natural for you to get butterflies in your stomach and start feeling nervous in anticipation of the event.  This is a normal thing for athletes, as normal as sweating.  Notice you don’t start becoming concerned when you sweat, however you do when you get nervous.  Being nervous is as natural as sweating, so don’t sweat it.  It’s ok, it’s normal, and unless you start worrying about it or thinking that it’s going to affect your performance, it won’t.  The point here is to accept your nervousness a s a natural part of your performance (and if you’re not nervous, that’s fine too – some people sweat more than others too!).

1. Have Fun:  At the end of the day, if you’re not having fun, what’s the point?  Get connected to why you’re competing in the first place: Why you play your sport? What do you love about it? Focus in on all the things you love and do those things.  Enjoy every moment, whether it’s going well or not, since you’re going to have difficult times, you’re going to lose, you’re going to fail, so might as well have fun doing it :D.  Besides, in the difficult times, in the failures, that’s where you usually learn the most.

At Mental Toughness Inc., we teach that passion aids in the myelination of the neural pathways of the brain. These pathways link our thoughts to our feelings and behaviours.

Imagine racing determinedly to be first to the soccer ball, risking an off balance strike, and scoring a critical goal. The passion to pull it off, and the heightened emotion at the result, increases the production of the conducting material in the brain, effectively making this same emotional and physical response easier to tap into the next time.

How to harness anger to perform at your best

Negative passion unfortunately has the same effect. Imagine now digging a ball in beach volleyball so that your partner can set it perfectly for you. You scramble to your feet and run into position, launching yourself in the air in preparation for a monster kill …and your attack is just out at a critical point in the game. You’re angry with yourself. Your blood is pumping, your body is in fight or flight mode with the adrenaline of the point, and you are furious with yourself, seeing the gaff in your mind over and over. Guess what kind of neural pathway you are reinforcing now?

Positive Psychology researcher Robert Biswas Deiner has co-authored a book called the Upside of Your Dark Side. In the book he explores other perspectives from which to consider our negative emotions and inclinations.

He points out that ANGER may have a positive purpose:

1. The science shows that anger is associated with risk taking and optimism.
2. This means someone who is feeling anger may be willing to stretch themselves. As an athlete this may translate into testing the physical boundaries or pushing oneself beyond previous levels of exertion.
3. Anger is a signal that someone or something may be threatened.
4. This could relate to your teammates or even your long held personal goals. If the competition threatens these precious relationships, anger can spark a passionate outpouring of commitment and physical determination.
5. The third area where anger might be an asset is when anger, in the form of outrage, connects principles of right and wrong.
6. This is often associated with social justice behaviours. When honour, fair play and sportsmanship are threatened, anger may fuel the kind of behavior that many believe is the hallmark of a great athlete. Passionate social justice behaviours in the realm of sport look like extra ordinary effort, outstanding team play, and unmitigated fairness and maybe even ‘within the rules’ punishment of the offender.

So the next time you feel angry ask yourself what kind of pathway do you want to be able to access the next time.

Make a choice how you use the anger you are feeling: to generate negative feelings toward yourself or teammates, or to fuel you to greater athletic feats. Hardly a choice now is it?

Matter over Mind – Huh?

The common pairing of these two words is Mind over Matter. But, I’d like to argue that all too often our mind sets limits to which we unconsciously comply. The mind is the boss of everything we choose to do, and everything we ask of our bodies. So this blog is going to be about choosing ‘Matter over Mind’.

As an athlete and/or a high performer in life there are two main ways in which our mind inhibits us. But first, let’s ask ‘why?’

• Why wouldn’t our mind naturally choose to engage in behaviours that would have us be our best?
• Why is it more natural for our inner voices to convince us to stick with what we know, do what feels comfortable?

The theories suggest that it goes back to our prehistoric roots. When we took risks or pushed ourselves to the point of being physically uncomfortable, the results were often life threatening. Fire, natural disasters, extreme weather and giant predators took no prisoners. It was play it safe or die.

So, how does our mind hold us back?

One way our mind holds us hostage is by creating an inner voice that convinces us to avoid risk, avoid fear, and avoid discomfort, both physical and emotional. This voice goes by many names in the lexicon of coaching, such as “the Saboteur”, “the Gremlin”, “the self-limiting voice”, and “negative self-talk”. This voice has one main goal: Keeping the status quo!!! It’s working, right? You’re safe, why rock the boat. So, through words, rationalization and unconscious emotional responses, we play a smaller game than we need to.

The other method our mind holds us back is by convincing us we are more tired than we are. There’s a study of runners who ran 20km. The first half of the group ran on their own and the other half was connected to a machine that stimulated their muscles. At 15km the first group fatigued; however, the group whose muscles were being extrinsically stimulated showed no signs of tiring. In other words, the muscles were not actually as tired as the other group perceived them to be.

It goes back to that prehistoric legacy, that we need energy for any potential ‘fight or flight’ responses. “We are wired to leave something in the tank,” says sports psychologist Jim Taylor, Ph.D. “Years ago, when we hunted for meals, we needed to conserve energy to get back home. Our minds want to make sure we don’t fatigue completely.”

So the next time you think you can’t do something, ask yourself: Is this my mind inhibiting my body? Is this an opportunity to practice Matter over Mind? Getting Mentally Tough is training the mind to move beyond the comfort zone, and let yourself, and your powerful body find new and exciting limits. Then bust through them again!

What an honour it was to be part of history, at the beginning of a movement aimed at abolishing the stigma of mental illness in sport.

One week ago Monday, over 30 former Canadian athletes, parents and mental health advocates rallied at Cherry Beach in Toronto to talk about how to raise awareness and ‘psych out’ the stigma of mental illness in sport.

AND, it was all captured on the CTV 6pm News in Toronto!!  So now, in the tens of thousands of people who watched the news, there are some athletes and their parents who know it’s ok to have mental illness in sport and what’s important is that you talk about it.

You can watch our interview by clicking the image below.

I am so proud to be one of the Psych Out the Stigma founding members, and look forward to this movement growing across the world.  Our vision –  all athletes everywhere will feel free to share what their mental health without stigma!

We then went out paddle boarding on Lake Ontario to close off the event (thanks to Paddle Sport Performance).

Stay tuned for future initiatives aimed at blowing the whistle on mental illness in sport.  If you’d like to take part, please join our Facebook Page, or email us.

Inspiration can come in many forms . . . and you never know when it’s going to hit you, but when it does, it’s a force to be reckoned with and you want to harness it with as much intensity as possible.

As an athlete or high performer, you can get really bogged down in the details, the everyday training, the repetition, the failure.  You can start to go through the motions versus taking inspired action, and the results are often less than spectacular.

So how do you keep inspiration present despite the repetition, failures, and details?  On Purpose.  You keep inspiration present on purpose and in action.  You see, inspiration isn’t a fluke.  It doesn’t just happen when all the stars are aligned and everything magically falls into place.  No.  Inspiration is a choice.

At any given moment you can choose to be inspired.  You can create your inspiration actively.  In sport psychology, we often use ‘Past Positive Experiences’ or ‘Vicarious Experiences’ to fuel everyday inspiration.

Mental Toughness Tips

1. Rely on your Past Positive Experiences

Take a moment to write out your Top 10 past positive experiences – did you win the championship, or have your best game, or even break a record.  Use all 5 senses: How did it feel, taste, look, smell, sound?  Write down your past positive experience in detail so that when you read it in the future you’re automatically transported back to and inspired by that moment.  Keep that list somewhere close to you at all times, like in your phone or gym bag, so you can refer to it for information whenever needed.

2. Collect Vicarious Experiences from others

Ever notice how other people’s experiences inspire you?  With Vicarious experiences, you literally live vicariously through other’s experiences and successes, using these victories to inspire you.  For example, another athlete might set a new record or do something you know how to do.  Then you might say: If s/he can do that, so can I!!!  Again write out a list of other’s experiences that inspire you (photos and videos work great to) and refer to them whenever you need a kick.

The point is, however you do it, it’s imperative that you actively remind yourself to be inspired.  And here are 2 new ways for you to take on your inspiration today.

“It is important that You get clear for yourself that Your ONLY ACCESS to Impacting life is ACTION!

The world DOES NOT CARE what you intend,

How committed you are, How you feel or what you think, and certainly it has no interest in what you want and don’t want.

Take a look at life as it is lived and see for yourself that the world ONLY moved for you when you ACT.”

~ Werner Erhard