Once you’ve mastered the basic strokes and court movement principles, as an elite squash player, you need to get into “A Champion Mindset” as often as you can.

What I picked up from Winning Squash was Jahangir’s reliance on his cousin Rahmat Khan’s coaching skills and abilities. As a top squash player, reaching world #12 and a Khan, he understood and appreciated what it takes to be a champion.

Without a mentor, coach, friend and advisor, there is no doubt in my mind (or Jahangir’s) that his achievements would have been much less prolific than they were.

The key for any aspiring athlete is to get multiple points of view and then choose ONE that works. Listen, obey and respect that ONE voice. That ONE direction. That one FORCE.

Otherwise what happens is you get splintered into multiple, divergent directions and lose momentum and confidence. Confidence makes a big difference in a quick-response sport like squash. With mere fractions of a second to choose a shot (or return), the brain needs to feel it’s capable of pushing the envelope to select the best shot to make, instantly calculating the risk/reward ratios involved.

The second and almost as important revelation was Jahangir’s training regimen and mental focus. I expected this from the all-time-best squash player, but what I found interesting was how much of it was ‘trusting the coaching process’.

Even back then (the book was published in 1985), Jahangir noticed that young players had difficulty succumbing to authority (elders, teachers and coaches). I can attest to that with adults of all ages. There is something inherently arrogant with athletes who think “they know it all” even though they continue to languish in the “B” leagues.

Being coachable is a trait all champions possess. They recognise the need to have an outside perspective that focuses on them from a much more objective viewpoint with a set of skills designed and developed to extract the best from them.

You can’t be ON the court AND watch the game at the same time. Each has a role and responsibility to the process of creating and sustaining excellence. Today’s elite athlete has to invest in the best technology and training which now includes psychological training well beyond the traditional visualisation and pre-match preparation techniques.

Winning Squash is a classic – it captured the essence of the Champion Of All Champions – Jahangir Khan – at his apex of achievement.

All elite athletes face the dilemma: How much is enough versus too much?

Most athletes however it’s a case of too little and too infrequently.

Too often, there is a reluctance to going full-on with training when it’s the fastest and usually the safest way to create breakthroughs.

The challenge is knowing WHAT to do to push yourself beyond your current limits into a new realm of possibility. Unless you “up” the intensity, you’re simply not going to get those all-important quantum leaps you want.

Depending on your sport and level of proficiency, intensity can means doubling your on-court time, doubling or tripling your running or swimming distance, increasing your gym visits, yoga or aerobics classes to 2/day instead of 3/week…

You are the best judge of what ‘intensity’ means to you – one thing is for sure, you need to go beyond your comfort zone – ideally to total exhaustion (without injury or pain) or as close to it as you can.

What you’ll quickly realise is that you’re capable of much more than you’re currently doing.

What set Michael Phelps apart from all other swimmers is that he aimed to become the best swimmer HE could become.

Michael Phelps and his coach NEVER set any limits. His autobiographical book’s title reveals his and his coach’s mindset “No Limits“.

My message to you today is simple and straightforward – what limits have you placed on your training or playing?

What time limits?

What frequency limits?

What intensity limits?

Today’s blog post is short and sweet – for racket sport athletes as Chester Barnes, a table tennis champion said “get to it somehow and hammer it somewhere!”

There are two parts to this – Doing whatever it takes to get to the ball and then doing something with it.

Easier said than done!

Once you’ve mastered the basic strokes and court movement principles, as an elite squash player, you need to get into “A Champion Mindset” as often as you can.

What I picked up from Winning Squash was Jahangir’s reliance on his cousin Rahmat Khan’s coaching skills and abilities. As a top squash player, reaching world #12 and a Khan, he understood and appreciated what it takes to be a champion.

Without a mentor, coach, friend and advisor, there is no doubt in my mind (or Jahangir’s) that his achievements would have been much less prolific than they were.

The key for any aspiring athlete is to get multiple points of view and then choose ONE that works. Listen, obey and respect that ONE voice. That ONE direction. That one FORCE.

Otherwise what happens is you get splintered into multiple, divergent directions and lose momentum and confidence. Confidence makes a big difference in a quick-response sport like squash. With mere fractions of a second to choose a shot (or return), the brain needs to feel it’s capable of pushing the envelope to select the best shot to make, instantly calculating the risk/reward ratios involved.

The second and almost as important revelation was Jahangir’s training regimen and mental focus. I expected this from the all-time-best squash player, but what I found interesting was how much of it was ‘trusting the coaching process’.

Even back then (the book was published in 1985), Jahangir noticed that young players had difficulty succumbing to authority (elders, teachers and coaches). I can attest to that with adults of all ages. There is something inherently arrogant with athletes who think “they know it all” even though they continue to languish in the “B” leagues.

Being coachable is a trait all champions possess. They recognise the need to have an outside perspective that focuses on them from a much more objective viewpoint with a set of skills designed and developed to extract the best from them.

You can’t be ON the court AND watch the game at the same time. Each has a role and responsibility to the process of creating and sustaining excellence. Today’s elite athlete has to invest in the best technology and training which now includes psychological training well beyond the traditional visualisation and pre-match preparation techniques.

Winning Squash is a classic – it captured the essence of the Champion Of All Champions – Jahangir Khan – at his apex of achievement.

For more outstanding books on the Champion’s Mindset and sport psychology books, click on the hyperlinks.

One of the reasons is that social (or club players) don’t overcome their current inertia. Inertia is defined as the predisposition for a body to remain in the state that it’s in. In sports psychology, it means doing the same things, over and over and over again. Reinforcing bad habits and preventing new skills and abilities to emerge on their own.

To overcome inertia, you need to create momentum. Momentum is best explained with the metaphor of the merry-go-round. The first pull of the merry-go-round is the hardest, then you can stand there and tap it to keep it spinning. Just like a BAD habit, a GOOD habit, once it becomes engrained, becomes your new default and effortless.

The hard part is creating that initial momentum, the catalyst or spark to start to make things happen.

The easiest way is to interrupt your existing patterns. For example if you’re a squash player, you could…

• Double the amount of time you play (in a week, or each time you play)
• Go to another club
• Increase the variety of players you play
• Do only drills and routines for the next week (or month)
• Register for a tournament
• Bet on a game with one of your regular partners to make it more meaningful (even $5 can make a difference!)
• Play at a different time – in the morning, lunch or evening – or weekdays versus weekends
• Buy a new racket, get new strings (change the tension in your strings)
• Play much better or much worse opponents
• Cross train to achieve fitness, agility, quickness or other ability that will help your game.
• Read a handful of books (more than just one to trigger your Reticular Activating System)

Once you’ve interrupted your existing pattern, as discussed in the crossing the Chasm Of Competence™ blog post, make a SHORT list of 2 or 3 REASONS you want to work on and set a SHORT timeline to resolve them.

Make sure the timeline is LESS THAN A MONTH. Create a sense of urgency – that’s the equivalent of the first pull of the merry-go-round.

If you don’t make it ‘urgent’ you’ll keep spinning your wheels, in the same place with no appreciable improvement or progress.

I will also be creating a new list of sports psychology books that go more into the general aspects of elite peak performance in sport.

Mental toughness is not just for sports athletes – it translates to all aspects of life.

A few pointers before you embark on mental toughness training…

1. You need to know the context you’re dealing with (the more specific, the better)
2. You need self-awareness (or a coach to know you)
3. You need to be willing to change and test if progress is being made
4. You need to be honest with yourself because all the dialogue is internal (or have a coach who won’t let you off the hook)
5. You need to have a plan (1 Percent Improvements)
6. You need to be strong because it won’t happen immediately, but once it does – WATCH OUT!

I call that being on the wrong side of the Chasm Of Competence™.

It’s when you don’t have the skill or ability to overcome your adversary… but you know you’re close, so close in fact you feel you could reach out and touch it.

In my case, that watershed moment occurred at the 2009 Australian Masters Games when I lost the Gold Medal match to ‘win’ the Silver.

First, I believe we’re either REASONS or we’re RESULTS.

So when I was losing and then lost the Gold Medal match, I made sure to make a complete list of all the REASONS I was losing as it was happening.

I say while I was losing because I knew that with such a bad ref and an opponent who was exploiting the bad calls (not on purpose, but due to lack of ability on his part), the match was over early on.

At the time, I wasn’t good enough to overcome my opponent AND the bad ref. I had never contemplated the extreme role a bad ref can have on a match. I was totally unprepared.

So I made my list of REASONS and one by one, I solved them. It took two years to get the result (The Australian Masters Games are played every second year), but I knew I did everything to create the RESULT I wanted by removing all the REASONS.

The Chasm Of Competence™ simply means getting rid
of all the REASONS that prevent your desired RESULT from happening

Once you’ve crossed the Chasm Of Competence™, you have the skills, abilities and thus the competence to produce the RESULT.

I call it a chasm because it’s an obstacle most social athletes never cross. The discipline, perseverance and tenacity needed to cross it either pushes them beyond their comfort zone or the resources (time, effort, money, drive, ambition) they’re willing to devote to their sport.

One of the greatest misconceptions about excellence is talent. There is no such thing. Talent is an acquired skill or ability – NO ONE IS BORN WITH IT.

Some of us develop it, while others don’t. It’s as simple as that.

Malcolm Gladwell explained the various concepts involved in his bestselling book Outliers.

If you want to learn more about how to cross the Chasm Of Competence™, you can read Bounce by Matthem Syed and Flow In Sports by Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi.

Fundamentally though, the books don’t reveal what YOU need to do to cross YOUR chasm. Each athlete’s chasm is different and specific.

For one it might be movement, for another racket skills and for a third fitness and endurance.

The key to unlock what I call your Exponential Potential™ is  self-awareness. Without it, you can’t identify the REASONS for your non-success. With unfiltered, honest self awareness, the REASONS become self-evident and crystal clear.

The challenge is being honest with yourself – to see yourself as you ARE, not as you wish you were.

Easier said than done.

So in closing, if you want to excel in sport (or any other endeavour), all you need to do is figure out all the REASONS you’re not achieving, deal with each one and watch your RESULTS improve. To know if what you’re doing is working or not, you need to monitor your progress and development. In business I call that Management By Metrics™.

In sport, you use tournaments and other point-based rankings, but you also need qualitative and intermediary measures. One easy way to assess your progress is with video analysis. Record yourself playing and then watch yourself – assess and evaluate what you’re doing. Having a coach to give you insight helps a lot.

One final point – Before you start on your quest to cross the Chasm of Competence™, you need to have what I call a Decision Making Horizon™. A clearly defined timeline to make the transition, transformation and metamorphosis. It needs to be reasonable, but short enough to create pressure. Without a sense of urgency, you simply won’t create the momentum you need to overcome your current inertia – That’s a discussion for another day.

If you’d like to know more about how you can acquire the Mindset Of A Champion, <- Click here.

First the celebration, then the explanation how I made it happen…

One of the foundational principles I teach (even my business clients) is:

Planned Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance

One of the key concepts is NOT to become superstitious – if you do, you’re putting yourself at risk for no good reason. You want to create a routine, one that YOU CONTROL 100%, leaving nothing to chance.

That means you need to document it so you can follow it carefully and methodically.

If you don’t have a routine, you want to CREATE one. Here are some examples of what I do to get ready for a competition.

• I play 2 hours/day for at least 1 week, ideally 10 days up to 2-3 days before a tournament. That gives me endurance and stamina to last if matches go to 5 games as well as quickness and speed.
• I taper off by not playing for 2 to 3 days, depending on travel considerations. This allows me to recover and be ready with full guns blazing right from the start.
• Each night before a game, I watch at least one professional squash match – one that I’ve seen before that highlights the player(s) that emulate what I am focusing on for the next game. If I am going to make more “kill shots”, I will watch a match with at least one player who is playing that way. I will just watch him, almost ignoring his opponent. If I am concentrating on footwork, then I will watch another match with my eyes watching their feet and not the ball… Depending on your sport, you may not have access to videos or DVDs, then substitute it with a magazine or other visual cue.
• The reason I watch the match the night before (and just before going to sleep) is to focus my RAS on the techniques I have been practicing. Letting my subconscious do its magic.
• I will wake up based on my match time – VERY EARLY for a morning match and later for an afternoon start time. It’s important (for me) to be awake at least 3 hours before a match, otherwise I am not alert enough to play in “peak state”. You need to test this, once again – based on your sport of choice and your own preferences.
• I get to the squash facility one hour before my scheduled match. I’ve tried getting there closer to the start time and it throws me off if the court becomes available early – this is why you want to have a SYSTEM… To test and refine what works and what doesn’t.

There are several other things I do, but am not willing to share in a public forum… but once the countdown starts, you MUST have another ‘countdown routine’ established – to handle your nerves and re-focus your excitement and arousal. I’ve blogged about arousal levels previously so I won’t go into that now.

The ‘countdown’ routine you establish must remain within your control – don’t rely on your lucky shirt or shorts or some other superstitious crutch. Make sure your system stands on its own – preparing you for peak performance.

For example this is part of my countdown routine:

• Go to the bathroom within 30 minutes of the start time.
• Drink liquids BEFORE the game to make sure you don’t dehydrate.
• Tighten shoe laces before warm up so feet are not cramped or uncomfortable when the first game starts.
• Warm up with lunges and quad stretches to extend the muscles, but not over-stretch them.
• Make sure you’re almost sweating before you get on the court.
• Replay in your mind your strategy for the game. (e.g. Hit deep and tight, only go for boasts when he’s out of position OR hit as many boasts and drops to tire him out quickly.)
• Maintain your POSITIVE self-talk with a focus on YOU and not your opponent – you can’t control him, but you can control “YOU”.
• During the warm-up – watch for his tell signs when he hits the ball, look for weaknesses, position and movement, while maintaining your focus on the rhythm, pace and feel you want to start off with.

One last piece of advice – once you are in countdown mode, you have the right and the obligation to control everything you can. If there are friends, family and other supporters around, tell them you need to prepare and move away physically. Keep your eyes focused on your task without engaging eye contact with others. Make a point of moving around so it’s obvious you’re in ‘pre-fight’ mode.

You need this time to create what is called “concentration of focus” – you need a certain level of arousal to perform at your peak level. With time, you’ll know what that sweet spot is.

If you don’t practice routines like these that you develop and enhance, it becomes a roll of the dice each and every time.

You’ve trained too long and too hard to play the odds.

Of course every time you use your routine, you want to evaluate and assess the components and make the modifications as necessary, but not too many at once – otherwise you’re back at square one!

First and foremost, the territorial in-fighting between the various ‘organisations’ is killing the goodwill that MUST exist for a sport to flourish. Squash clubs won’t promote events at other clubs for fear of…. I haven’t figured this one out yet, but they don’t do it.

Instead of thinking exponentially, enabling, facilitating and enhancing their members’ experience, they hide and inhibit the growth of the sport that they need to grow.

Cutting their noses despite their faces.

I’ll give you an example. I just competed at the 2010 Pan Pacific Masters Games on the Gold Coast in Queensland only to find out it’s been held there every second year for the pat 10 years. I’ve been playing masters squash for the past 5 years and had never previously heard of it.

None of the masters players I know even knew the tournament existed, let alone that squash was included, not to mention it was now only staged in Queensland – How can that be?

But that’s not the only reason squash will remain sick as a sport rather than a thriving, vital  and growing sport. The multiple scoring systems are a nightmare for competitive players – especially when organisors don’t even know the scoring system until the day of the competition.

Can you believe that?!?!

What does it take to publish the $#%$% rules when you register? All it takes is a cut and paste of the rules which are sent to the printers WELL AHEAD of the event.

It’s not rocket science.

With 3 scoring systems, there are 3 completely different modes of play that are possible – limited training does not allow you to optimise for all 3.

Then of course there is the running of the events. When you have multiple age groups, each with different size draws as well as plate versus round robin formats, all running in parallel on multiple courts, the logistics are quite challenging – but there is a system to ensure things run smoothly.

It’s as simple as having a bulletin board with each court number at the top row with the next match indicated on the board AS WELL AS the following match, so each court has the next TWO MATCHES identified in chronological order. This permits all competitors to see when they are next up – based on the matches being played on THEIR COURT.

You’d think this is easy to follow – guess again. At the Pan Pacific Games, many games started 10 to 30 minutes early or late due to a total disregard for this fail safe system. Sadly, a competitor was caught off guard and actually lost a medal due to a late forfeit when her opponent used the late ruling against her.

I know this sounds like I’m whinging and I guess I am – it’s because it’s so disappointing to see us stuff this up when we can pull off the best Summer Olympics ever AND year after year have the Australian Tennis Open in Melbourne become the player’s favourite Grand Slam event.

We can do better – so why don’t we?

That’s the question for the day – I don’t have an answer because the problem is a complex political one. Until all the squash clubs and associations agree to agree and work together in a concerted effort, for the benefit of the sport – squash is a terminal patient on its deathbed.

There are fewer and fewer players and therefore less and less clubs. I can totally understand why. I am relatively new to the sport with less than 5 years of competitive experience and unless I was a diehard fan (addict), the negative experience of the Pan Pacific Masters Games would be enough to substantially reduce my enthusiasm, maybe even have me consider quit competitive play altogether.

There is nothing worse for an elite athlete to train for something and have the rug pulled from underneath him/her at the last minute. All that training is ‘lost’ for no good reason – of course the training will serve a purpose later on, but that’s not the point of competing.

You want to do your best EVERY TIME you show up. You invest the hours, make the sacrifices and spend the time and money – to get an outcome. One that is fair and that you feel you have some control over.

I really hope all this comes to a head and someone somewhere starts to change things because unless that happens, this is a train wreck on a collision course with the death of the sport as we know it.

I hope this blog post gets squash people thinking beyond themselves – tennis for example has had a lot of growing pains, but look where it is now.

A mature multi-million dollar “money sport”.

The same can happen for squash – but first and foremost it needs to grow up.

Sooner rather than later.

In case you want to know, I played well, finished 4^th in spite of the tournament’s challenges. I could have forced a forfeit and ended up with a Silver Medal when my opponent was late and I might have even ended up a Bronze medal when at 8-8 in the third game, I asked for a let on my way to a ball, was given a stroke that was totally wrong and I overruled it. Unfortunately, my good deed meant I lost the game and match 10-8.

Winning is VERY important to me, but not at all costs – when all is said and done, a medal sits at the bottom of a dark drawer whereas your spirit, integrity and self-worth is something you carry with you each and every day.

It should never become a burden!