Power Of Mind - How To Get The Best Performance?

Hello Tribe! Did you ever feel ever down doing a sport or an activity? Or did you ever feel unmotivated to do something and then just skipped the practice session? I feel like we have all been there and I think that this is the worst that we can do. Over the years I tried out different techniques to get better in different sectors of life and one of them is certainly sport. In this article I want to share with you what I learned about myself and what things I tried to do in order for you to try them out yourself as well. Maybe it will help you on a difficult day and helps you to be more motivated again.

Power Of Mind

First of all, I want to emphasize the power of the mind. When I first heard about it, I thought this would be something for crazy people. I am not joking. I thought that all those people who are taking psychological advise must have problems in their current situation. But I quickly realized that our mind is the source for our performance. Why else would almost every professional athlete have a mental coach with him?

I started to practice mental training every time before going to bed and also before every practice and match day. What did I do? I always started out with a routine that I would also do on the same day. As I was a goalie, it were the basic warm up exercises that I just imagined in my head. What I learned is that the more detailed your imagination is the better the result will be long term. I also started imagining potential game scenes in my head. Just things that I wish to do well.

The theory behind it is, that we can trick our mind into thinking that this is reality. In the end, our mind would not know what really happened at what was just imagined and I found it very fascinating. Especially in the beginning, this technique helped me out tremendously.

Sweetspot Of Performance

Then I want to talk with you about the sweetspot of performance. I think we all had this feeling where we felt invincible. We could not be touched and everything that we tried worked. For me it was always the case to have this little bit of anger in me, where nobody was my friend anymore but still have the control over myself. This was for me my sweetspot and this is where I was able to perform the best.

Think of this as the perfect temperature for an engine or for a tire where they can bring the best performance on the track. The question is now, how to get into this state? Well, for an engine or a tire it is pretty easy, just increase the temperature. But for the human mind and body it is alittle bit more difficult. This is why I figured out, that after every time I was in this state, I would write down what I did and what my thoughts were. I admit, that this is not easy and it would take you a while to figure out how to get into this state, but once figured out you can get into this sweetspot on demand, which is very powerful in my opinion.

Mistakes Are Necessary

Then, a very important lesson I learned is that mistakes are necessary for development. The key aspect here is to learn from them. I am very sure that you’all heard about this a thousand times, but it is just important to stand up one more time than dropping. This defines a great athlete and will also strengthen you mentally. You can already see that this article is very mental based and not necessarily physical but in my opinion the mental part is as important as the physical aspect of a game.

It’s Not Motivation, It’s Routine

Last but not least I want to come back to the beginning where I said that I want you to help being motivated. Well, I want to revert this a little bit and throw out a thesis that not everybody might agree on: routine is more important than motivation. I think that a routine that you could perform emotionless and without thinking is so much stronger than motivation itself.

How often do you think professional athletes are not motivated to go to practice? I am sure it is over 50% of the time. But why are they still going? Well, their mind is already in the routine modus and this routine is demanding them to go without thinking. Furthermore, once they are in the session, there are certain routine mechanisms that are just activating your demand to train. I had this a lot of times, where I was not feeling it but after a certain exercise I felt so energized and in the mood to perform.

If you take something away from this article that the mind is a powerful tool that enables us to perform great things in life. Not only on the sport aspect but in every other aspect in life as well. I think all of these lessons that I just stated can be used in different sectors and will help us to perform there as well. So far I was able to master it on the sports level and I will try to shift it over to my work life as well as my financial goals!

Published by ga38jem on
Sports Talk Social
On 16th October 2022