Sports Psychology - Sports Mindset Responsible For Improved Athletic Performance

When it comes to sports psychology, most “experts” focus on studying the psychology and kinesiology of athletic performance and success rates of those athletes and/or teams. When most sports psychologists work with athletes or teams to improve athletic performance, they often hone in on goal setting, relaxation and self-talk and, in some instances, they’ll see significant behavioral change. But, statistics show that this improved athletic performance doesn’t always remain consistent. Eventually, the individual or the team slides back down, oftentimes to the same level of achievement previously achieved before the sports psychologist came in. Why is this? The answer is very simple, actually. In most cases, sports psychology is addressing the effect instead of the real root of the issue, the CAUSE or, put more succinctly, how the athlete is THINKING. Any athlete can set new goals – both individually and in the spirit of a team – to improve his or her athletic performance. But if the athlete doesn’t truly believe – inherently – that the goal can be achieved, the goal will never be reached. Any athlete can work on his or her sports mindset to relax more or undertake self talk motivation before a game, match or performance, but unless that individual understands EXACTLY how the chemistry and energy of his or her thought is transmitted into the athletic performance, that athlete will have a difficult time maintaining the championship “sports mindset.” Real championship mindset is obviously a culmination of many things but, in the end, champions have one thing in common: They have crossed the “Knowing-Doing” gap. In other words, most athletes already possess the sports mindset – it’s been drilled into them just like the endless physical drills they perform every day. They KNOW what they need to do, but they’re not DOING it. Why can’t they just DO it? In the end, sports mindset really has nothing to do with athletic ability, agility, speed or strength. True sports mindset has to do with: - Understanding HOW to think, - Recognizing how unconscious thought has influenced the athletic performance to date, and - Learning how to permanently shift one’s thoughts into properly DOING what one KNOWS to do by first understanding how energy is involved in the creation of a thought. The organization, SportsMind Success – SportsMindSuccess.com – is one such entity that focuses almost exclusively on the core “thinking” issues that keep college and professional athletes and teams from achieving championship-oriented successes. With SportsMind Success workshops, webinars, consulting and ongoing curriculum built around this focus, athletes and coaches are finding that improvement is often quite dramatic, and that it proves to be consistently long lasting. In effect, old “thought patterns” are replaced with new thought patterns (and without any form of hypnosis!) and, as a result, individuals are finding that dramatic improvement also occurs in aspects of their lives OFF the field, too.