The Mindset Of A Champion Blog

We’ve all heard it before “drink more water”. What you may not know, is that by the time you’re thirsty, your performance has already been negatively affected. That means if you’re serious about your performance, you have to include drinking more water. I’ll discuss other types of drinks in future posts, but for now, let me give you an additional tip that I have to be honest, really surprised me.

Men’s Health Magazine (November 2009) reported that in The Journal of Sports Sciences a study quoting that cyclists who actually wrote down their drinking strategy consumed 55% more water than those who didn’t. A drinking strategy for a cyclist can be be as simple as “the mouthfuls art the 15, 25 and 35 minute marks or at the 10, 40 and 50 Kilometers.” For a squash player, it could be “drink a full glass one hour prior to my practice/match, then half a glass on my way to the court, then 2 mouthfuls in-between each game, then a full bottle after the practice/match”.

Just having a drinking strategy can make a big difference – try it out and see what happens! Of course it may just improve your performance by a few percentage points, but in squash, that’s 1 point per game and y’know what? I’ll take it!

Too many people are looking for the BIG BANG solution, when very small, easy steps can add up to produce BIG RESULTS.

Stick with me and this blog and you’ll see how easy it really can be if you actually DO THIS STUFF!

This blog celebrates sports and its athletes’ achievements. This short video is one of those examples where the laws of physics seem to be twisted into a knot. Watch how this 9-year old scores this goal. You’ll be rewinding it over and over again in amazement. I once played with someone who had a similar trick – unfortunately it was way before YouTube was around.

If you have a secret weapon like this – develop and nurture it. The unleash it when you need it most!

Psst! If anyone can teach me a similar shot like that in squash, I’ll pay big money to learn it!

Thank you to Andrew Powell from Montreal Canada for forwarding this to me.

In a previous post, I blogged about identify the orientation you have regarding your sports performance. Because of your predominant orientation, you’ll create attributions differently and therefore KNOWING that attributions are will help you become more self-aware as an athlete so you can more easily and quickly realign your training for improved results.

Attributions are best understood within the framework of self-efficacy. Self efficacy is a judgment about one’s capability to perform a particular task (1) at an elevated level, (2) with certainty, and (3) repeatedly over time. It means much more than just being confident, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Where self-efficacy explains the transition from expectation to effort, attributions re-direct the focus to the causes of expectancy beliefs, that is, HOW success and failure affect continue motivation.

With this in mind, there are three critical characteristics that underlie attributions:

1. Locus of causality. Perceiving an outcome to have resulted from either internal or external factors. Can you see how your orientation can affect this?
2. Stability. Perceiving the likelihood of the same outcome recurring.
3. Locus of control. The perception of whether an outcome can be manipulated. Once again, your orientation will sneak in here!

Let’s look at some examples and be honest with yourself… Where do your attributions lie?

Locus of causality.

• Internal: Your effort or an injury
• External: Field conditions, Equipment, referee, judge

Stability.

• Stable. Your talent and ability.
• Unstable. Weather, luck.

Locus Of Control.

• Controllable (Internal). Your game plan, pre-game preparation.
• Uncontrollable (External). Opponent’s actions, referee, judge, field conditions.

From this summary explanation, you can see there are many dimensions or what I call distinctions to dice and slice the Mindset Of A Champion. The more precise you can be about WHY you do stuff, the better you can be at FIXING the errors and mistakes.

More importantly, if you can change, alter or improve your mental model and motivations, the physical manifestations will follow with a lot LESS EFFORT.

That is why the Mindset Of A Champion is the one defensible advantage that you can count on. Talent won’t be enough. There is always someone out there with more talent – but very few with the mindset to beat you and win.

So, the question for today is – where do your attributions lie? The more honest you are, the better your results will be.

Remember, this is a completely confidential process – ONLY you know (and of course your coach or other champions who can see right through you!)

That’s the power of this psychological stuff – once you know it, it becomes your weapon, like an X-RAY machine that reveals all.

Fun stuff isn’t it?

This blog is called the Mindset Of A Champion Blog, dedicated to anyone who wants to think, act and perform like a champion. Of course sports metaphors, analogies and anecdotes are used, but as we all well know, there are a lot of similarities and parallels between ‘life’, business and sport. I’ve been researching top trainers, psychologists and coaches and will share with you some of their key findings in this blog – such as your orientation.

Sports participants are said to have one of two orientations: (1) task-mastery when they take pride in the progressive improvement of their knowledge and ability relative to their own past performance or (2) an ego orientation, intent on demonstrating superiority over others, motivated by social comparison and desire statistics in the win column.

One isn’t better than other – as we’ll see in future blog posts, they affect everything you think about and do (don’t do).

Psychologists and coaches generally agree that even though DURING competition, one’s orientation can shift, we each have a predominant orientation. By knowing what that is, you can become much more self-aware of your behaviours – the ones that help as well as hinder your progress.

Give it some though – which orientation are you?

What does it mean in respect of what you do/don’t do, how you train and how you compete?

It’s worthy of reflection.

Of course you can then extend this orientation to your life, career, business and other activities and hobbies.

I’ve blogged about Dr Malcolm Simons before. He is truly an inspiration, not just because he was a top world-ranked squash player, but because he lives his life with such an intensity and passion that is so rare. Anyway, the reason I am blogging today is because Malcolm sent me this e-mail several months ago and with his permission, I want to share it with you.

An element which distinguishes some of us from others is the capacity to focus, to resist distraction.  Once we have prioritised how we want to apply our resources of energy and time, we then identify the essential elements and hold them in focus in order to most efficiently and expeditiously achieve the projected outcome. While the process takes place, variations arise, as they do with all evolutionary, emergent processes.

Another distinguishing characteristic of successful people is to be flexible enough to allow reprioritization as these inevitable variations arise. Some have been hunched earlier, so they come as less of a surprise and therefore incur less resistance to review and change.  Others are unexpected, even unimaginable, coming from some space that is not on the stage on which we are currently strutting. The mental image that I hold is of the Galilean thermometer in front of me now on my desk. The indicative glass balls respond to variations as they arise, in this case primarily environmental temperature. They respond smoothly as they sense the destabilising change, then float quickly to the appropriate level, in the process rearranging the grouping of the other balls.

I have the existential experience of reprioritization on a now-by-now basis, such that the process is as fluid as the thermometer indicator changes. Once priorities are rearranged, the secret is then to implement the most appropriate changes required, again, to ‘most efficiently and expeditiously achieve the projected outcome’.

Another element to which you allude, and which is to be recognized and usually avoided, is to change a winning game. [Personal communication removed] There’s a developed skill in seeing one’s life in that sort of structure so that the occurrence of variations and the impact of those variations on achieving a winning game or in departing from a winning game, are most easily discerned.

Whatever the stage on which we strut, and whatever the accolades or brickbats that we experience, always remember that “life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Words Of Wisdom that we can all learn from, thank you Malcolm!