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 rainy day 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 and gives...

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...

I used to want to be liked. I mean, don’t we all? While there are some people that don't care (which I admire), those people are few and far between... and I'm not one of them. I actually have to work at it. 

I don’t mean I WANT to be disliked; that would be ridiculous. I mean it more in the words of my wise cousin Jamie who says, 

"Lindsey, to be successful you have to have a healthy disrespect for other people’s opinions.”

(Those are my magic words before I speak in public by the way. Use them, they work)

But you may have noticed, I’m less scripted, less pleasing in my writing and marketing than before. Of course, I didn’t THINK I was editing myself, but turns out, I was. But I did it in such a minimal way that I convinced myself that I wasn't doing it at all. Sneaky, huh?

I’ve been empowered by a number of things- Motherhood, the development of my programs to align with EXACTLY what I want to do, my own mindset work,...

2 Reasons You're Not Practicing Mental Training with Your Team

If you are here, you are probably either already practicing mental training with your team OR you fall into one of the two categories: 

1. You don't believe that mental training is the fastest and easiest route to higher performance.
2. You don't know how to train the mind. Maybe you've done some training in the past, but you've never had a proven system to teach mental training.

If you have a healthy appreciation of mental training, you may have even tossed around the idea of bringing Positive Performance (or another mental training expert) to your campus to work with your team.  

While bringing another coach in to train your athletes has its obvious benefits,  I want to propose another option, one that you may not have thought about before: Why don’t YOU become the mindset coach for your team? 

Before diving into these benefits, I want to first address the coaches here who...

A few years ago I started learning about emotional labeling and it sort of blew my mind. Not the principle of it- it’s exactly what it sounds like… you identify your emotions and label them. But you do it in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you ARE the emotion. So instead of saying I’m stressed, or I’m sad, you say I FEEL sad or I FEEL stressed.

Which is a pretty awesome tool because it helps you recognized that, although it feels like it, we are not ACTUALLY our emotions. Emotions are based on our thoughts, our thoughts we have the power to change.

But I digress. What got me about this particularly mindset hack is that it’s so freaking SIMPLE! I wondered why I failed to learn about it until I was 30. But isn’t that the case with a lot of these tools- we FINALLY find the ones that work for us and we think ‘why did no one tell me this before?’

I was listening to a podcast this morning about emotional labeling which got my...

I went skydiving one time. It wasn’t my idea. I was interning after college back in Ames, Iowa and when my internship ended, my boss said he had a surprise for us. He drove us out to a small airport one Tuesday afternoon,  plopped down $700 on the counter, and said... 

“I’m going skydiving today, yours is paid for if you want to do it too.”

I had never wanted to skydive but I knew in that moment if I didn’t take action, I NEVER would. I would let fear paralyze me and it would never happen. I also knew that THIS opportunity wouldn’t necessarily come again. Sure, there are a million skydiving outfits all over the world, but opportunities don’t just materialize over and over again. They are there, and then they are gone.

I’m glad I did it. It was exhilarating, terrifying, and something I will always remember. I know if I had thought too hard about it, if I’d told myself, ‘I’m only 25,...

Like many of you, I have a lot of balls in the air every day. I’m wearing one hat in the morning, then I switch to another, then I switch to yet another and around and around we go. And that is on a GOOD day.

Things get thrown off one way or another all the time; someone gets sick, emotions get the better of me, or the unexpected ‘to do’s’ take center stage.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed. AND it feels justified. But what if it isn’t?

I read a book a few years ago and it SO hit home because it challenged this cultural belief that we HAVE NO TIME.

The Truth About Time

Forgive me for paraphrasing a really good book, but this is what I took away from it (mind you, some of this is probably my own thoughts triggered by this book):

• We have something like 30 hours of leisure time a week.
• We CHOOSE to be busy.
• We are addicted to being busy.
• Prioritize your time and you’ll find you have more of it.

Honestly, I think about this book...