How Can Performance Coaching Make You A Better Athlete?

Athletes who have had performance training know the harm that can be done to their game when they let negative thoughts, or what is known as "pessimistic thinking," takes hold. A losing team more or less gives up or possesses a losing attitude that affects performance. A marathon runner, for instance, is affected by thoughts of his inadequacies and becomes sure he can't make it for the duration. The strength of thought is usually disregarded and not given acknowledgment for all kinds of poor performance issues, missed plays, and even entire losing streaks and seasons.

A great deal of very famed pleasant results provided by people who deal with performance coaching are wasteful techniques which might appear like beneficial in the beginning but in due course of time, they turn out to be inefficient by actually fueling up the negativity that the athletes are looking to cope with and failure. Slogans such as "think positive" or "believe in yourself" are nice catchphrases, but they have very little to do with athletic performance, and as answers to wayward ideas, they simply do not work. In fact, an athlete who always engages a negative thought with the hollow phrase, "I think I can, I think I can," like the infamous little engine that could, is simply affirming the pessimism by engaging with it and allowing it a place on the stage.

In other words, in performance sports training, using catchphrases, or attempts to redirect negative thoughts, gives lifeblood to negative thinking and takes one's attention away from the act of the performance. This type of mental coaching tends to enable the negative thoughts, making them something that need to be dealt with instead of a voice on the sideline that can be acknowledged then understood.

Negative feelings might, in fact, serve a different purpose - they assist you see, with clarity, where you need to improve. So if you attempt to wrestle them down with positive affirmations or visualizations, you make them true, and provide them the power to truly affect you.

In short, the finest way to deal with negative thinking and improve your team's efficiency is to comprehend that negative thoughts and feelings are usual, necessary, and have an usually overlooked positive. They are an inborn sign that our thinking (not our life) is off track, and if we do not look in a different direction we will be certain to steer into trouble. Therefore, energizing negative thoughts by turning them into something that must be averted is the last thing an athlete, or any performer, ever wants to do.