By Olympian Courtney Thompson

“You should exercise unrelenting discipline over your thought patterns.  Cultivate only productive attitudes… You are the product of everything you put into your body and mind.”  -I Ching

In my experience, it’s pretty safe to assume that everyone wants to be confident.  No matter what you are doing: Playing a game, giving a speech, on a date, or taking a test at school, it’s going to be infinity more enjoyable when you feel good about who you are in that moment. In other words, confident in your own skin.

I know from personal experience how painful it is to NOT be truly myself in a given moment. It’s a feeling, in my opinion, significantly worse than losing or failing or any of the things we spend time worrying about.

What I want for you

This is my challenge to the athletes I work with: Fight and work towards being your true self, nothing more and nothing less, in every environment you...

Everything is going well until… it isn’t. Then what?

The thing is, you know and I know, that your athletes are going to STRUGGLE at some point- one mistake is going to turn into 2, 3, more? You will likely lose, an athlete will be in a slump. Someone will get injured and another will just have an 'off' day.

So if we KNOW this is going to happen, why not have a plan for when it does? In this information packed interview, I team up with Fast Pitch Fit founder and mental training expert Jenn Starkey to talk about how athletes can use her 3 simple hacks to get them back to a strong, competitive mindset when things aren’t going their way.

Her exercises demonstrate the true power of visualization and mental training and her way of teaching is truly special. (this will be a GREAT video to share with your athletes).

Watch the video, and take her lessons back to your team to show them how the smallest mental adjustment can mean the difference between a foul ball and a home...

With long, sunny days upon us in the northwest, many of us are finding lazy ways to pass the time. What better way to spend a summer's day than to dive into some great reads that will give you a lasting glow from the inside out. In response to popular demand, I compiled a list of some of my favorites.

About the books:

These books are of the inspiring, motivational, educational (or all three) variety; and contain fascinating topics to help you work on a little self- improvement and learn some cool new things this summer!

Some of these books are presented as though they are focused on women, but that’s just for marketing purposes (i.e. women tend to buy more self-help books). These books are for anyone that wants to improve.

Lindsey’s summertime reading list

Positivity: The 3-1 Ratio that will change your life, by Barbara Fredrickson PhD. One of the mothers of Positive Psychology, Dr. Fredrickson talks about the research behin d positive self-talk...

Being ON all the time is physically and psychologically exhausting. If you notice your athletes becoming fatigued toward the end of the season or at the end of a tournament, it may be because they are not relaxing and re-booting between games. In this video, Lindsey describes two visualization exercises that can help your athletes be ON when it matters, and relax in their down time; helping them ward off fatigue and stay sharp on game day.

In this video, Lindsey points out that visualization training is based on the scientific evidence that the brain responds well to imagery. You can tell yourself to relax, but it's more impactful when you imagine relaxing in a systematic, visual way. Here are two scenarios that you can use to help your athletes visualize decompressing.

Deceleration Visualization

Have athletes relax somewhere quiet. They can lay down or sit up in silence. Tell them to take a deep breath and release. Tell them the following:

1. Imagine you're driving a...

In my experience with literally thousands of athletes, I’ve typically come across two main types of athletes:

1. The athletes that are the same on and off the field in regards to their personality and characteristics. (more common)

2. Athletes that are remarkably different on the playing field and off. (less common)

This is what I mean. An athlete can be shy off the field and really turn it on when the whistle blows. Or they can be sort of the same; introverted in the classroom, on the field, in the locker room etc. The same is true for more extroverted, bigger personality types. Some stay the same whether they are competing or not. Some are the life of the party but sort of fade back when playing their sport. 

The shy, introverted athletes are the ones I want to focus on today. Specifically, the ones that are more reserved in their personal life, BUT would play better if they were consistently more aggressive on the field.

If you’ve...

Coaches often ask me, "Lindsey, can I apply what I'm learning in your trainings to my younger athletes?" To which I respond YES!  But, there are some tips that can really help you implement these tools in a way that makes sense with young athletes. 

So let's start with one of the most useful mental training tools: Visualization

(if you don't know where to start, the BRAVR method is a great focusing tool- you can download here). 

In order to teach younger athletes visualization, it's important to do it in a way that’s easily accessible and fun for them. Here are some tips on introducing younger athletes to visualization.

4 Tips for Teaching Visualization to Any Age

Use the Right Verbiage

Make visualization easily accessible to younger athletes by using words and concepts that they understand. They likely don't know what 'visualization' means and it will be easier to have them do it than explain what it is. Here are some examples of phrases that can get...

A guest blog, By Tyson Hartnett

It was my first game on my high school's varsity basketball team. I was a rising junior and the starting point guard after being on the JV team the season before. What do you know, my first game is against a crazy-athletic team that full-court pressed the entire game. Great, I thought. Just great. As the point guard, it was my responsibility to catch the ball and organize our attack against the full-court pressure.

At that moment (after my fourth straight turnover), I wanted nothing more than to hide and never touch the ball again. I was humiliated and embarrassed. But, even more so, I was scared. I was afraid that if I got the ball, I would fail yet again.

Clearly, it wasn't going very well.

At that moment (after my fourth straight turnover), I wanted nothing more than to hide and never touch the ball again. I was humiliated and embarrassed. But, even more so, I was scared. I was afraid that if I got the ball, I would fail yet again.

But, I...

The dreaded slump. Is there anything worse?

Whether you‘re the athlete in the middle of it, frustrated because you don’t know where to turn, or a coach, parent, or teammate watching from the sideline and feeling helpless, slumps suck!

The truth is, it doesn't matter how talented or experienced you are,

Slumps hit all sports and all athletes.

In the past three days, I’ve worked with two athletes experiencing slumps. Unfortunately, coaching athletes out of their slumps isn’t unusual. Far from it. Slumps are very common, and they don’t discriminate; they hit every kind of athlete, no matter their sport, gender, seniority, age, or skill. Here are the stories of my two latest slump-stricken clients:

Jack is a 17-year-old baseball player who had an amazing junior year on the plate. He batted over .300 and set his sights on a college scholarship. Then senior year came and he experienced a few rough at-bats, starting worrying about that college scholarship, and...

Imagine you possess all the material success you’ve ever dreamt of. You have a career full of accomplishments, you live in the house you’ve always pictured, and you hold the respect and admiration of your peers, colleagues, and friends.

In other words, you’d expect to be wildly confident in yourself, right?

Well, not exactly…. While we all picture a future where we ‘arrive’ at our most confident selves, the reality is that’s not how confidence works.

How does confidence work?

When I'm working with athletes, it’s easy for me to look at the ones who have been successful and think, “Now, that’s confidence!”

However, many times I don’t know the backstory of how they got to that point. So while, at times, I'm witnessing true confidence, the result of hard work, failure, and perseverance other times I'm seeing mere “surface confidence”, or an unsustainable, skin-deep confidence that doesn’t...

Picture this: It's 10 years from now and you are up for a promotion. You should be elated, but instead just feel exhausted by your 50+ hour work week. You glance in your reflection in the window. Even through the smudged glass, you see the deep line that has made a home between your eyebrows.

When did that happen? You ask yourself.

Then it sinks in: you’re unhappy. You haven’t been happy for a long time. This heavy realization begins to weigh on you as you consider the "what if's" of your past. You ask yourself, What if I had traveled more. What if I had taken the job I actually wanted. What if I had taken that year off to spend time with my family. What if...

What if you had made your life decisions based on the parts of yourself that you wanted to preserve. What if you had chosen the life course that would best reflect the strengths in yourself that you value, not your parents, friends, or professional community. The strengths in yourself that you value.

...