"I’ve been visualizing ever since I was 12 or 13 when my amazing mother introduced me to it," Bianca Andreescu said. "I find it very helpful ... I believe we create our reality with our mind."

No big deal, she just won the U.S. Open at 19 years old, defeating 23 time Grand Slam winner Serena Williams.

YOU know visualization is a powerful mental training tool for athletes. You may already be implementing it with your team, maybe by utilizing our popular BRAVR™ Method.

But I want to take a moment and REALLY talk about visualization. 

In my humble opinion, visualization is the single best tool for getting your subconscious brain aligned with what you are working toward. When you fail to do this, hard work doesn't mean as much as it should. You can easily work and work and work and self-sabotage every step of the way without even knowing it.

That’s why, when I work with athletes, I teach them to visualize. When I work with mindset...

One of my favorite coaches of all time was the hardest on me.

Isn’t that true for most of us?

She was the one that sat me down and told me my freshman year that I wasn’t cutting it, I looked distracted in workouts and needed to step it up.

She was the one that sat me down and had the real talk real talk of making sure I wasn’t getting too boy crazy in college and keeping my eye on the ball so to speak.

She was the one that would look me straight in the eye and tell me to get my mind right and start competing.

I would have run through a freaking brick wall for this woman. I still will. (It’s Katie Abrahamson-Henderson at UCF by the way). I knew in my soul that she believed in me. I knew that she pushed me hard BECAUSE she cared. And when she was hard on me or disappointed, it hurt, but it motivated me to push to another level.  

I love her to my core but not because she was NICE all the time; her positivity was in holding me to a high standard. 

I...

Here at Positive Performance, our business circles around one big question:

"How do I perform better?"

The answer isn't so simple, involving a really broad set of answers that reach into various facets of athletic and mental training.

But, in the spirit of this season of giving thanks, I’d like to talk a bit about how thankfulness affects performance. Mostly, being grateful means you have to...

Think outside of "you"

Within our mental training program, we teach a principle called ‘Belief in a Purpose’. Essentially, this is about playing and living for something beyond the scoreboard.

For some people, this “something beyond the scoreboard” might be their religion, personal growth, or spirituality. For others, it might be about the pride of a job well done, the challenge of hard work, or the joy that comes from being a part of a group working towards a common goal.

It doesn’t matter WHAT the purpose is. It matters HOW that purpose...

I do better with limitations. If you give me a project and tell me I have forever to do it, my brain does not get excited. But, if you give me a deadline, I will knock it out like it’s my JOB. I think most people are like that. Ever had an athlete who got better grades in season than off season?

With just a little challenge and a little adrenaline, BOOM, your mind will focus on RESULTS and you'll get WAY more done. 

When deadlines don't exist on their own, there are ways to give yourself limitations of your own in order to really benefit from this type of a mind shift. 

How to Create Deadlines for Higher Productivity

The next time you're feeling sluggish or demotivated, or overwhelmed by your task list, try the following process. 

1. Give yourself a task
2. Give yourself a time limit that is WAY shorter than the length of time it typically takes you to do this task. 
3. Shift your mindset from ‘Take the time I need to get it done right’...

You know what’s really easy? Being negative. You know what’s really hard? Being positive.

I see it all the time. I start working with a client and suddenly they are able to:

• Lose 50 lbs despite the fact that I don’t teach ANYTHING about fitness or weight loss
• Quit smoking after YEARS of trying despite the fact that I know nothing about any smoking cessation tactics.
• Start 100k businesses after years of thinking about it.
• Go from crying and wanting to quit their sport to playing their best in a few weeks.

Am I just really good at what I do?  

Well yes, but I’m not a magician. As I tell my mindset coaching students, what we do is NOT heal people or get people to another level or pull out better performances; what we do is hold a space for them to find that in themselves. Now, this isn’t EASY to do. I will give us credit for that. But the work is done by the client. We don’t FIX them, we help them find the solutions inside them, to trust the path they’ve been scared to want; we help them step into another level with a steadying...

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...

I remember being at a wedding in my mid 20s. At the time, I was still playing professionally, living 8 months of the year abroad and getting paid to play a game I would gladly play for free. It was in many ways a dream life. It was challenging in many other ways that I won’t go into here but it was simple in one distinct way; I knew every single day if I had won or lost.

At this wedding, I was talking to a former collegiate and professional basketball player I knew, 8 months pregnant with her 3^rd child. She said the hardest thing about the real world was not knowing what success really was. I understood what she meant, one of my favorite things about sports was the sometimes instant gratification of hard work or at least the instant feedback of what was working and what wasn’t.

And I see this SO much with myself and clients. When we don’t see results, and we aren’t even sure what results we are looking for, things can get confusing. After all, there...

 I went skydiving one time. It wasn’t my idea. I was doing a summer internship and my boss surprised me with a skydiving day. We drove out to a hangar in the middle of Iowa cornfields. And he said, “it’s paid for, you can do it or not.”

So, I jumped. I knew I would never have another opportunity like that.

I’ve done other scary things- I’ve ran faster than I’d ever ran before, I’ve lifted weights I wasn’t sure I could do. I’ve swung from a trapeze 50 feet in the air. I’ve gone ziplining over the jungle.

But I’m not really an adrenaline junkie. I look at people that take serious physical risks (ummmm like Free Solo??? Don’t even get me started on the riskiness of some people) and I’m not one of them. I like to PUSH myself physically but setting yourself up for getting hurt is a whole other ballgame. I always say there is real fear and there is FAKE fear.

(And then there is the middle area of...