With our goal to reach 1 million athletes and coaches with mental training, an important step in reaching that goal is answering the rudimentary (yet VITAL) question: What is mental training? 

If you’re reading this blog you likely fit into one of these categories: 

• An athlete who is researching various ways to improve your performance and break through mental barriers.  
• A parent who is looking for ways to help your struggling athlete.
• A coach (or aspiring coach) who is new to mental training and wants to explore how it can help your team. 
• A coach who is practicing mental training and wants a resource to help you explain it to athletes, parents, coaches, and athletic departments.

Whatever your path, we’re stoked that you’re here and hope that we can help you find clarity about what mental training is and how it can make a massive impact. 

(For the sake of clarity, we’ll be speaking to coaches in this blog, but...

Why do you practice long hours, put in time at the gym, run stairs on the weekends, go back to school, apply for that internship, or work overtime at the office? Oftentimes, you do it because you believe that it will all pay off.

You believe that it will earn you the result you really want.

Being greedy for results can be a good thing. It can keep your goals high, give you energy, and act as motivation when you’re approaching burnout. That little girl who says she’ll play in the WNBA someday might just make it because she has her eye on the prize, she’s greedy for results.

But being greedy for results is not always a good thing. When it goes too far, it can result in self-destruction. 

In this video, I’ll talk about:

• What happens in the brain when you care too much about the outcome.
• The symptoms of being greedy for results (the 2 ways you self destruct)
• How to strike a balance between not caring enough and caring too much. 

This...

In this short clip from our free, 1-hour mental training masterclass for coaches, we discuss how important language is in the way you talk about stress with your team.

This snippet is taken from our full-length masterclass, Game Face: Inside the Minds of Great Competitors. Click the link to join our next class! 

There you have it! In this short clip you learned that how you think about stress matters. We also gave you some questions to ask your athletes to help you understand how they view stress in competition. 

In the next part, we'll discuss how you (as a coach) can help reframe stress with your athletes and teach them to harness it in a way that will actually make them better competitors. 

Then (for the remainder of our 50+ minutes together) we'll teach you even more tools to help you create a team of relentless competitors who take ownership over their mindset. 

You ready to get started? 

Click the link to sign...

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...

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 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...

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...