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Now that January is in full throttle, there will many people hitting the track, joining gyms and doing whatever they can to shake off the slothful memories of the previous month. Some of you did not succumb to the endless platters of food and desserts that were paraded past you at every party. There are still others who remained faithful to their regimen of diet and physical training and have not lost much ground. These are the athletes, students, semi-pros and pros that have no choice but to keep up the peak performance regardless of what is happening around them. Whether you are a weekend warrior, a person returning to your workout routine or a stealth machine, you all share a common thread: the notion of competition. This article is about the demystification of competition and removing it from your life to enhance athletic performance.
Challenging yourself in any type of athletics takes mental stamina as well as muscular training; the adage “mind over matter” absolutely applies here! Putting your best foot forward in sporting events requires many levels of preparedness prior to engaging in the sport. The ability to win the game(s) of life is in having the fortitude to find balance on every playing field that is encountered. It is a willingness to accept that the mind controls everything in your particular, individual world regardless of your physical conditioning. Some mental training prior to the game includes studying playbooks, recognizing team signals, developing strategies and so on. During the game that mental training requires sizing up the opponent, looking for holes and revising strategies on the fly. Physical training before the game involves strength and muscle conditioning, drills and internal scrimmages. That same physical training during the game is expected to rise to the occasion and use the body to out maneuver the opponent. For most teams, coaches, players and weekend warriors, the only measurements of success are the points displayed on the scoreboard, the weight gained or lost and record for the season. Is that really telling the whole story?
If athletes are being honest with themselves, they would say that they spend a disproportionate amount of time concentrating on physical conditioning rather than mental conditioning. However, when exercise poses a challenge, whether it is recreational or at the competitive level, an imbalance in one of those domains is a recipe for either injury or uncertainty. The body, like the mind, acts with machine precision based on the tuning it receives. An impeccably designed body housing an indecisive mind is not going to be as effective or competitive on the field because it will lack the resolution necessary to bring both disciplines together. When you watch a Karate champion in action, a black belt who is at the top of his or her game, you are witness to conditioning that that has fully embraced the power of the mind/body connection. This goes for any champion who is in that “time managed zone” of mental and physical precision that appears to exceed the limits of the human body. These are the kind of individuals who demonstrate that there are only self imposed limits to a body that is operating within certain gravitational parameters.
Like everything else in life, physical conditioning must be balanced with mental conditioning and, without exception, they both need to be managed in tandem. Active mental conditioning can occur in two forms; that of meditation and creative visualization. On the website, www.thelifecoachonline.com, I discuss the difference between these two activities and why each needs to be attended to in its own time managed way. Every person has several “time-managed” zones as part of their daily life. These “zones” are compartmentalized segments of time that are given scheduling priority depending on the day of the week and the routine that has been set into motion. Those individuals who are regularly incorporating physical conditioning into their daily and/or weekly “zones” understand the discipline that is required to ensure that this training fits into its own slot of dedicated time. While that structure is indispensable to the development of an agile, flexible and strong physical constitution, the mental conditioning is absolutely vital to complete the package.
Any time that there is a competitive physical face-off with another person, the meeting on the field, ice, court or track must take place in the mind many time over before there has been any contact between them. For non-athletic individuals, the face-off could be occur in the office, their car during rush hour, setting limits with their child or going on a blind date. All of these involve some degree of non-physical jockeying which at its root is all about the prior mental conditioning that has occurred long before that engagement. Every battle of the wills or sense of competition is self imposed and every team, family or group association is as strong as its weakest link. Every team, company, family or group association has someone who is not physically or mentally up to the challenge. The best of these organized groups will take this into consideration far enough in advance to correct the imbalance. Most often, the stabilizing moment occurs when the group leader taps into the consciousness of one of the straggling members and discovers what the reason is behind the disparity. Sometimes there is .01 of a second between gold and silver at the Olympic Games; sometimes it takes .01 of a second to realize you are only accessing half of your true potential.
Now that January is in full throttle, there will many people hitting the track, joining gyms and doing whatever they can to shake off the slothful memories of the previous month. Some of you did not succumb to the endless platters of food and desserts that were paraded past you at every party. There are still others who remained faithful to their regimen of diet and physical training and have not lost much ground. These are the athletes, students, semi-pros and pros that have no choice but to keep up the peak performance regardless of what is happening around them. Whether you are a weekend warrior, a person returning to your workout routine or a stealth machine, you all share a common thread: the notion of competition. This article is about the demystification of competition and removing it from your life to enhance athletic performance.
Challenging yourself in any type of athletics takes mental stamina as well as muscular training; the adage “mind over matter” absolutely applies here! Putting your best foot forward in sporting events requires many levels of preparedness prior to engaging in the sport. The ability to win the game(s) of life is in having the fortitude to find balance on every playing field that is encountered. It is a willingness to accept that the mind controls everything in your particular, individual world regardless of your physical conditioning. Some mental training prior to the game includes studying playbooks, recognizing team signals, developing strategies and so on. During the game that mental training requires sizing up the opponent, looking for holes and revising strategies on the fly. Physical training before the game involves strength and muscle conditioning, drills and internal scrimmages. That same physical training during the game is expected to rise to the occasion and use the body to out maneuver the opponent. For most teams, coaches, players and weekend warriors, the only measurements of success are the points displayed on the scoreboard, the weight gained or lost and record for the season. Is that really telling the whole story?
If athletes are being honest with themselves, they would say that they spend a disproportionate amount of time concentrating on physical conditioning rather than mental conditioning. However, when exercise poses a challenge, whether it is recreational or at the competitive level, an imbalance in one of those domains is a recipe for either injury or uncertainty. The body, like the mind, acts with machine precision based on the tuning it receives. An impeccably designed body housing an indecisive mind is not going to be as effective or competitive on the field because it will lack the resolution necessary to bring both disciplines together. When you watch a Karate champion in action, a black belt who is at the top of his or her game, you are witness to conditioning that that has fully embraced the power of the mind/body connection. This goes for any champion who is in that “time managed zone” of mental and physical precision that appears to exceed the limits of the human body. These are the kind of individuals who demonstrate that there are only self imposed limits to a body that is operating within certain gravitational parameters.
Like everything else in life, physical conditioning must be balanced with mental conditioning and, without exception, they both need to be managed in tandem. Active mental conditioning can occur in two forms; that of meditation and creative visualization. On the website, www.thelifecoachonline.com, I discuss the difference between these two activities and why each needs to be attended to in its own time managed way. Every person has several “time-managed” zones as part of their daily life. These “zones” are compartmentalized segments of time that are given scheduling priority depending on the day of the week and the routine that has been set into motion. Those individuals who are regularly incorporating physical conditioning into their daily and/or weekly “zones” understand the discipline that is required to ensure that this training fits into its own slot of dedicated time. While that structure is indispensable to the development of an agile, flexible and strong physical constitution, the mental conditioning is absolutely vital to complete the package.
Any time that there is a competitive physical face-off with another person, the meeting on the field, ice, court or track must take place in the mind many time over before there has been any contact between them. For non-athletic individuals, the face-off could be occur in the office, their car during rush hour, setting limits with their child or going on a blind date. All of these involve some degree of non-physical jockeying which at its root is all about the prior mental conditioning that has occurred long before that engagement. Every battle of the wills or sense of competition is self imposed and every team, family or group association is as strong as its weakest link. Every team, company, family or group association has someone who is not physically or mentally up to the challenge. The best of these organized groups will take this into consideration far enough in advance to correct the imbalance. Most often, the stabilizing moment occurs when the group leader taps into the consciousness of one of the straggling members and discovers what the reason is behind the disparity. Sometimes there is .01 of a second between gold and silver at the Olympic Games; sometimes it takes .01 of a second to realize you are only accessing half of your true potential.
© 2007 THE LIFE COACH ONLINE
www.thelifecoachonline.com