Mind Over Sports » Gymnastics

“AS YOU THINK, SO YOU BECOME”

mindoversports — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:30:03 +0000

Dr. Dean Ornish, one of the country’s leading authorities on the treatment of heart disease, wrote: “The mystics say what happens in your mind creates what happens around you. ‘As You Think, So You Become.’ What you think about intensely is what you begin to manifest in your life. What you meditate on or visualize tends to become actualized.” Dr. Ornish is correct. However, it’s possible to actualize negative events in your life if you have a low sense inner-self. For example, if you are an athlete with unresolved issues and are keeping your feelings bottled-up, you are lowering your self-esteem. Unless course corrections are made you will begin to develop a negative belief system, generating negative thoughts and negative events will begin to happen in your life. And you can be sure this will affect your performance in your sport. Some sport psychologists (and also Nike) would have you believe that you can “just do it” – replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. My experience is that negative thoughts cannot be eliminated unless you attack their source. Even the late Earl Nightingale, in his book Earl Nightingale’s Greatest Discovery wrote: “We become what we think about.” But unfortunately, he – like so many others before him – believed that by simply changing your thoughts you could easily change your life. But there is no such thing as a “quick fix.” That’s why so many professional athletes who have been through months of therapy and counseling eventually find their game elevated to a new level.

EASY WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM FOR ATHLETES: EAT ONLY TWO MEALS PER DAY.

mindoversports — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:44:00 +0000

If your coach tells you you’re overweight and need to drop a few pounds, here’s an easy way to do it without really dieting. As almost all weight loss “experts” will tell you, the secret to losing weight is to reduce the number of calories you consume daily. And if you exercise, so much the better. Here’s all you have to do: CHANGE YOUR EATING HABITS SO THAT YOU EAT ONLY TWO MEALS PER DAY. Your first meal, breakfast, should be around 9 or 9:30am. Your second meal, lunch/dinner, should be around 3 or 3:30pm. No later. And that’s it. It helps if you cut down on your starch and sugar intake but not essential unless you’re consuming massive amounts of them. Most physicians or weight loss experts will tell you that it’s that last meal you eat around 6 or 7 or 8pm that does the damage. It will stay with you all night long and will sit in your stomach like a log. And with this program if you get a bit hungry later in the evening, just have a piece of fruit (maybe an apple or a pear) or a carrot or celery stick. And it also helps to consume a substantial amount of water. In order for this program to work for you, it’s important that you change your mindset so that after a while it will only seem natural to have two meals a day. Try it. You’ll be amazed at the results. If you’re under a doctor’s care, be sure to run this by him or her before you begin.

YOU HAVE TO MEET THE UNIVERSE HALF WAY.

mindoversports — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:21:28 +0000

A few years ago Oprah Winfrey visited Springfield, Missouri, where I live. Now, I am a big fan of hers and admire how she picked herself up by her bootstraps and was able to change her life. But while in Springfield, she told a crowd of mostly women who attended her public seminar they were created with a calling. She said: “The universe has a dream for you. And it’s always working to move you in the right direction.”

Oprah was right when she made this observation, but not completely right. Though the universe may have a dream for us, and is always working to move us in the right direction, we human beings keep messing it up. Some of us often follow paths that are self-destructive, such as doing drugs, lying, or being dishonest with our feelings. You can see this very clearly when individuals get into trouble for having used drugs, or violently abusing a spouse, or driving while drunk and killing an innocent bystander.

The universe is not always working to move people in the right direction, but rather, only those who have a positive sense of inner self as a result of either being reared in a family where they were loved by someone unconditionally, or in instances where they were willing to roll up their sleeves and take a good hard look at themselves (as Oprah did) and then began making course corrections in their lives. This often involves many years of work and even therapy. There is no such thing as a quick fix.

Oprah should make it clear to her fans that the universe is always working to move us in the right direction providing we don’t follow self-destructive paths in our personal lives. If we are, then we need to address those issues and resolve them (or at least begin the process of resolving them) before we can get back on track with the universe and have it work with and for us. Anyone following self-destructive behavior should not expect the universe to work in their favor. Which is the foundation of how I came to develop the Psycho Self-Imagery process.

The Psycho Self-Imagery process involves resolving conflict in your life, not suppressing feelings, having a high sense of self worth (your inner self), bringing personal issues to completion (or at least begin the process of bringing them to completion), being highly spiritual, helping others less fortunate than yourself and having your life in harmony. Then visualizing yourself being successful and actually creating positive events in your life.
But when you have conflict in your life, when you are suppressing your feelings, when you have personal issues that you haven’t brought to completion, when you have a low sense of self-worth (inner self), when you are not helping others less fortunate than yourself and when your life is in disharmony, you will create negative events in your life.

Though “there is no rule without exception,” (Hermann Hesse in Steppenwolf) over the years I’ve found there really is no such thing as good luck or bad luck. We create what happens to us in our lives. Those of us who were loved unconditionally, either as children or by someone special in our lives, grow to love ourselves. And this unconditional love is the foundation for success and happiness.

University of Georgia’s Coach Suzanne Yoculan’s Mental Gymnastics

mindoversports — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:12:47 +0000

If every coach in America followed the example set by Georgia’s women’s gymnastic coach Suzanne Yoculan, they would almost always be assured of having a winning season.

According to an article in USA TODAY (April 24, 2008) Coach Yoculan “has team meetings every Monday to discuss chemistry and avoid division. She tells her athletes they can’t date ex-boyfriends of teammates and wears a T-shirt that says, ‘Save your Drama for your Mama.’ Yoculan, 54, used to throw her athletes out of the gym for emotional impact. Now she sits down and has individual counseling sessions with them.” As I’ve always maintained, team meetings and individual counseling sessions are very valuable to the chemistry of a team since they provide a forum for athletes to discuss what’s on their minds rather than just keeping their feelings inside themselves, which is a form of lying that demeans them and lowers their self-esteem, creating psychological baggage that affects their ability to focus. And when athletes know their coaches care about them as human beings first and then as athletic performers, they’ll play their hearts out for them. And in the words of All-American Katie Heenan, one of Coach Yoculan’s four seniors hoping to lead Georgia to its fourth consecutive title: “She loves us.”