The Mindset Of A Champion Blog

In a previous post, I discussed how much you should train and introduced the concept of overtraining with Olympic training anecdotes. I got quite a bit of feedback with one common question: How can I tell if I’m over training? From The Sport Psych Handbook, here are the physical and psychological symptoms you should look out for. Over course if you see these symptoms in your training partner(s) – let them know!

Overtraining - Don't do it!

Physical Symptoms Of Overtraining Read More »»

I don’t know about you, but I never thought I’d see the day when Mark Spitz’s record of 7 Gold Medals would ever be broken. Primarily because athletes today are so specialised that it would take a super-human to win THAT many medals against the specialists… But Michael Phelps did it with 8 Gold Medals – all in World Record Time in Beijing in 2008.

Sports scientists are suggesting that training loads are increasing by what some estimate as 10 to 20 percent every five years!

Mark Spitz, won his seven gold medals in the 1972 Olympics by swimming 9,000 meters per day. Within 20 years, the average COLLEGE swimmer was swimming more than this and by 1995, Olympic hopefuls were swimming a whopping 36,000 meters PER DAY.

That’s no wonder why elite athletes are complaining. 28% and 10% of 1996 Summer and 1998 Winter Olympic athletes cited overtraining as the reason for their sub-optimal results. Trying too hard didn’t work.

Michael Phelps 8 Gold Medals

It’s not a question of poor sportsmanship, winging or sour grapes. Read More »»

Today’s post is an inspirational half-time speech by Al Pacino in the movie Any Given Sunday. It needs no introduction. The YouTube video says it all – life and sport (football in this case) is a game of inches – whoever is willing to fight for those inches will win the game of life. Enjoy this courtesy of Andrew Powell of Montreal, Canada who forwarded this to me.

In a previous post I discussed the perspective of champions, what gives them the winning edge and ended with an example of Mike Tyson, promising to explain what’s happened after his championship years ended.

The word is accountability. In sport, competitors are held accountable to the sports rules, regulations and rankings. The higher the level, the more exacting and demanding the accountability becomes.

If you don’t hold yourself to that standard, guess what? You lose, you fall in the rankings, game over.

Accountability

It’s brutal and harsh. Read More »»

In a previous post, I discussed the concept of Competitive Performance Mentality. I got a lot of positive feedback from people saying that it was a simple and easy way to ‘extract’ themselves from the self-analysis process. Today’s topic is perspective. Champions have a different perspective than their non-champion colleagues.

Perspective is in the eye of the creator of that perspective!

3 Components Of A Champion Perspective Read More »»

In previous posts, I introduced the concepts or orientation, attributions and other psychological variables to help you think, perform like a champion. The next step is to assess your mentality. Your Competitive Performance Mentality to be precise. It’s a concept I picked up in a great book called The Sport Psych Handbook.

Read More »»

We’ve all experienced it – being ‘in the zone’… What an incredible feeling it is. Today, I thought I would clarify a few things about the ‘zone’ or as experts call it, the concept of ‘flow‘ which I think was coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, author of the book Flow. What you might not know is that flow is achieved when you experience a balance between external demands and internal skills.

Flow - Being In The Zone

When this relationship is 1:1 between difficulty and ability, the door opens and you can step into the flow. Because this is a balancing act, it’s a fleeting and rare experience. When the balance tilts with external challenges surpassing aptitude, anxiety is usually the result and conversely, when the balance shifts to your talent outpacing the demands made of you, you get bored, even sloppy.

You know you’re in the zone or flow when:

Read More »»

Last year, I competed in the 2009 World Masters Championships and I lost the Bronze Medal in my division by 6 points and the Silver Medal by One Game or I increased my ranking from a ‘Top 50′ to #18 in the world. Which one do you think I focus on?

That’s right – my ranking – NOT because I didn’t win a medal, but because I went in with the explicit outcome to INCREASE my ranking from a Top 50 to Top 32. Getting to within the Top 20 was HUGE accomplishment, but that’s not the point I want to make today.

The result doesn’t change over time just because I got so close to a medal. If I didn’t have the Mindset Of A Champion, I’d hate myself for losing, when in fact if you asked me BEFORE the competition, would I be happy with a top 20 ranking, I would have said “YES!”

But y’know what?

Easier said than done.

Distorted Retrospective Perceptions

I can see it in people’s faces – the ones who understand this and the others who don’t. The expressions give them away.

Your lesson for today is simple, but not that easy. Set yourself an outcome or goal and WRITE IT DOWN. Go ahead and compete and then RETROSPECTIVELY evaluate the result. Be honest with yourself and you’ll see your orientation and attributions will come into play.

Master yourself and you’ll master your sport.

This is a classic and says it all – “Clear The Mechanism” might not be catchy, but when you can do this, YOU are in TOTAL control, unstoppable, in the zone, the flow… At your ultimate very best. Learn to clear YOUR mechanism and watch what happens to your performance.

I recently competed at the 2009 World Masters Championships and ‘ALMOST’ had this mastered, but not quite – I know it’s one of my Next Best Steps to (excuse the pun) focus on. With bad refereeing (not biased, but just plain bad) this ability is paramount.

A friend who is a champion plays every point without distraction – like a ‘robot’ – totally in control. THAT is SELF MASTERY. That is the Mindset Of A Champion. This video is what I use to get into the ‘ZONE’.

I’ve blogged about Dr Malcolms Simons before, the first time introducing him with a post on self-awareness, then recently sharing some of his Words Of Wisdom and now I want to share some of his professional expertise in molecular biology and then relate this back to having the Mindset Of A Champion

Cell Language Theory

The concept of cell language has been defined in molecular terms. The molecule-based cell language is shown to be isomorphic with the sound- and visual signal-based human language with respect to ten out of the 13 design features of human language characterized by Hockett. Biocybernetics, a general molecular theory of living systems developed over the past two and a half decades, is found to provide a physical theory underlying the phenomenon of cell language.

Nerve Cell Language Chart

The concept of cell language integrates bioenergetics and bioinformatics on the one hand and reductionistic and holistic experimental data on the other to account for living processes on the molecular level. The isomorphism between cell and human languages suggests that the DNA of higher eucaryotes contains two classes of genes–structural genes corresponding to the lexicon and ’spatiotemporal genes’ corresponding to the grammar of cell language.

The former is located in coding regions of DNA and the latter is predicted to reside primarily in noncoding regions. The grammar of cell language is identified with the mapping of the nucleotide sequences of DNA onto its 4-dimensional folding patterns that control the spatiotemporal evolution of gene expression.

Such a mapping has been referred to as the second genetic code, in contrast to the first genetic code which maps nucleotide triplets onto amino acids. The cell language theory introduces into biology the linguistic principle of ‘rule-governed creativity,’ leading to the formulation of the concept of ‘rule-governed creative molecules’ or ‘creations.’

This concept sheds new light on molecular biology, bioinformatics, protein folding, and developmental biology. In addition, the cell language theory suggests that human language is ultimately founded on cell language.

What does cell language theory have to do with the Mindset Of A Champion? Read More »»