Mind Over Sports

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.