The Mindset Of A Champion Blog

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.

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I found this lying around a squash club recently, I don’t know who the author is other than his first name is Phil. I thought it was worth sharing because (1) it’s pretty good prose and (2) I respect people who put themselves out there for other people’s fun and enjoyment. Thank you Phil!

We all come to hit the little black ball
some like to smash it against the wall
Others are so gentle
using angles and the feel.

We extend our bodies beyond their range
and in the mornings feel quite strange
for when the feet first hit the floor
us oldies stagger in pain to the dunny door.

The game is played indoors from the sun
but rain, hail or shine we do have fun
squashies are all very sincere
at the end sharing a beer.

Squash players come from far and wide
on a court there is nowhere to hide
the swing of the racquet heralds the start
throughout the rallies they try and stay apart.

At the front a drop shot squatting so low
as the opponent races in they’re struck by a blow
line an invisible wall
they crash in and try not to fall.

You miserable cad they let fly
tears running down their cheeks they cry
“Let please” the appeal to the referee
that is cheating as it all wafts free.

In a previous post, I introduced the concept of orientation. Today, I want to take the discussion a step further and explain how it affects what you do and don’t do in respect of your sports training. First and foremost, we have to discuss success and failure. I use the word outcome since it’s the first of the 4 Keys To Success that I teach in my Personal Mastery Programs.

From the previous post, how task-involved athletes primarily differ from ego-involved athletes is that with an ego orientation, the athlete will show (off) their ability at the expense of effort.

Owch! if you have an ego orientation, but KNOWING you have this orientation is more than half the battle.

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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:

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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’.

In business, I call it Management By Metrics, but in sport I guess I should call it Mastery By Metrics. The question is “How do you know how well you’re playing?” Today’s post is one of the ways I do it as an elite squash player.

These photos are self-evident, but the question for you is how do YOU know how you’re progressing? What feedback mechanisms do you have in place to gauge progress and development?

Squash Racquet Strings Usage Comparison

You want to consider this on an on-going basis so that whenever the opportunity arises, your Reticular Activation System (RAS) will pick up on it.

Squash Racquet Strings Usage Close Up View

In future posts, I’ll share additional feedback mechanisms I use. Of course if you have some you’ve used in other sports, by all means share them with me so I can share them with our readers!

This blog is all about bringing you stuff you wouldn’t find on your own. This YouTube video of Bruce Lee is fantastic. It shows what you can do when you are creative and want to demonstrate someone’s absolute mastery. He was so good, it’s almost believable. Almost.

Thank you to Michael Pye of the South Shore Diet for forwarding this to me. Thanks Michael!

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 »»

I have to be honest that I can’t believe they still allow this kind of intimidation to happen before a match, but that’s just my personal opinion. That being said, I think this an awesome example of how to get INTO the Mindset Of A Champion. I mean c’mon… How can you not want to GET GOING after watching this? This is classic neuro-associative pre-framing. All champions do it – whether they do it blatantly like this (externally) or internally within their own mind.

One thing is for sure – you have to get pumped up for your games, training and competitions – I’ll address this in future blog posts. There are several anecdotes that you’ll really enjoy!