Your past does not define whom you can become!

Who you are today is a culmination of experiences and perspectives and most of the time, how you are is OK.  You do OK.  But when it comes to professional sports, being OK isn’t good enough.  You have to be excellent or at least be striving for excellence but reaching that level takes determination, guts and smart work, but what happens to your focus when something negative happens in your life.  Perhaps a death, an injury, a fall out with a family member or even succumbing to pressure and stress.

Many athletes over the years have spoken about their struggles, Frank Bruno, Kevin Love, Michael Phelps, just to name 3 but a quick google search will bring you up a list even longer with no surprise.

So what can you do?  What can you do to move away from the struggles quickly and get yourself back on track.

Let me share this story with you

For many many years, a man had taken the same path to work.  He saw the same people, saw the same shops and felt the same way.  He was familiar with this routine and familiarity gave him a sense of comfort and this comfort gave him happiness.  He had no reason to change his route, he had no reason to walk faster, yet one day something changed but he didn’t know what.  His thoughts began to niggle at him.

This niggle grew into an itch and after several days, his happiness has turned into anxiety.  Instead of smiling at the people he walked past, he was on edge and avoided eye contact and had thoughts of changing something but he didn’t know what or how.  He was so familiar with his journey that thinking about changing it, only brought on a fear, so he tolerated and tolerated until one day he decided not to get up.

Sometimes when we feel the need for change, we fear what might happen if we did change, and the sense of familiarity pulls us back from growing and we continue to tolerate, even when you know something needs to change.

But these past events do not define who we can become.  Past events do not have to hold you down and stop you from achieving by doing and thinking differently.

You always have a choice to move away from negativity and choose to walk a new path and doing it is as simple as changing the direction in which you walk, who you talk with and recognising when you want change.  You have to hold yourself accountable.  You have to make new decisions because it’s very unlikely someone else will recongnise you want to change and help you.

So if you feel something needs to change, create that change for yourself!

Thanks for reading and remember to Take action, Reflect, Adjust and repeat 

Play with purpose

The Journey Part 19 – Growth and Change for you and I

“To uncover your true potential you must first find your own limits and then you have to have the courage to blow past them.”

Picabo Street

Without growth and change we become stagnant

The interest I have to help others grows, as do my skills when I listen to others and yesterday I received some great news that has made me want to up my game.

Yesterday I was approached by the director of an online community of around 40,000 people from all over the world with an interest in personal growth, professional development and mental wellness asking if they could use my blog to publish within an article and promote on their new website!

This could lead to more blogs being posted to a wider audience.

Sharing my insights, experience and tips to help others is something I enjoy doing, knowing if you can take just one golden nugget from my words, then they have been worth writing and so I agreed.

This new information led me to research how to improve my blogging skills because now, the game has changed and I want to learn and grow from the best and so I discovered a guy called Jeff Goins who really knows his blogs and from hereon-in, I’ll be making small steps in different directions to grow as a blog writer.

I listened to a podcast he was a guest on which can be found here, to help me understand how blogging can help others and generate money, and learned the following golden nuggets:-

Nuggets from Jeff Goins

• Writing a blog is, in itself a practice and is every growing
• Writing blogs can lead to Ebooks, webinars, training and tools to share with your audience
• Run your own race! Be specific in which race you’re running and use a combination of tools, strategy and principles. The tools and strategy may change but the principles set the foundation
• One of those principles is give before you ask (Heard from Gary Vaynerchuk). Give, Give, Give, ask.
• Be generous with your audience
• Make it about them and sometimes, someone may make it about you
• You can give away your success without asking for anything in return
• Spread your goodwill
• Listen to what the people who have done this, have to say and learn
• Lead magnet rewarding someone for their attention. Start listening!
• Become a student – Be willing without arguing.
• The oldest things that have worked for a long time are the strategies that will continue to work.
• Connect with influential people.
• Can I write a guest post for you? Can I share this tip with your audience?
• Case study strategy – Be humble enough to say I don’t know and can I be a case study for your suggestions and insights? People who share advice rarely hear from those who are applying the tips. So when you become the case study of the giants that come before you, you can find yourself in front of the audience.
• Masterminds – running masterminds growing together. Live events and conferences. Workshops.
• Do a step by step process for your audience
• Why Blog? To Spread an idea and to market a product or service I have to sell

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What Does This New Direction Mean For You?

Firstly who are you? Are you my ideal audience or are you just a curious window shopper?

There are two audiences I wish to share my knowledge with:-

1. Professional athletes wanting to overcome a tough time and move on from anxiety to improve quickly
2. Team Owners/Directors wanting change to improve the results

Taking one of the nuggets above, there are some principles, tools and strategies I would like to share with you and if they resonate with you, then I know we can help each other

Principles Of Values

• Accountability – Being accountable means taking ownership for successes and mistakes
• Balance – Knowing what to put down, what to invite in and what to adjust
• Calm – Letting go of anxiety, stress and bad feelings towards others and appreciating yourself and those you value around you

Principles Of Growth

• Have a valid reason to want things to improve or change
• Have an open mind to learning new concepts and perspectives
• Have an ability to put these new concepts and perspectives into action

Tools for you

There are four areas in which I have experience and expertise I need to share with those wanting to improve…(Click the link to find out more of each tool)

• 1-2-1 mental performance coaching for the professional athlete. When an athlete is struggling or wanting to remove stress and anxiety, I am trained in helping an athlete connect with their reality, create a vision and use psychological techniques to help them move forward quickly
• Consultations for teams/clubs. As a director of a national league basketball team that attracted top talent and won promotion in the first year, there are strategies I want to share with the aspiring team or club wanting to win and help them implement them should they need support
• Blogs. Writing blogs is a great way to share my expertise for free to anyone who has a desire to learn and grow in sports and also to find out a little bit about what drives me. I can categories them so it’s easier for the reader to find a topic.
• Resources. These free resources give you some strategies to use immediately to help you understand what you can do right now for change and improvements. Why wait! These will grow and change as I learn more from learning from clients and as they learn from me.

Strategy

This I need to work on!

I have the principles in place, I have the tools and now I need a strategy to get me results.

What results am I after?

Sharing as much as I can to those people I feel can benefit and when they are ready, they will let me know and I can support them on a more personal level.

Jeff has a few tricks up his sleeve to generate income that include an Ebook, Masterminds, Workshops, Live events, webinars and training to help the audience through investing their money and it’s some of these strategies I need to learn and begin to roll out.

Perhaps if you’re a former or current professional athlete or a Director of a team/club and have a great audience perhaps I could write a blog for you around mindset and how to quickly change your perspective for improved results?

Yes, you guessed it, that’s a strategy I’m open to trying.

The NEAT System

One strategy I have up my sleeve is a system. A system that incorporates principles and allows me to connect with the right people. That system is called The NEAT System and if you’re still reading this, then you believe in the system.

The system is based on the principles you can’t help all the people all the time and even though I may identify people as needing my help, until their desire to want to improve, becomes greater than their desire to stay the same, the NEAT System or any other system won’t be of any interest to them.

So I need a way to save them time and save me time and therefore energy and allowing me to focus on those who really resonate with what I offer.

As my journey continues, I would like to extend an invitation to subscribe to my blog so you’re notified when I next post and also make suggestions on what you’d like me to write about that can help you as a professional athlete or team owner/director.

The Journey To Become The Most Sought After Sports Mental Performance Specialist Part 10

“Most of us have grown up seeing the world as a place of limitation rather than as a place of inexhaustible treasures.”

Bob Burg

Improving My Performance quickly

We are still in lockdown on Friday 5th of June. I’m at home with my wife and five year old and have managed to sneak away for a few moments.

There are two major moves I made recently, ones I’ve put off because I had doubts in my head.

Something was holding me back from taking action and that something was caused by a block I created years ago so I had to reframe my perception of why I created that block and look at the idea from a new perspective, a perspective from wanting to become the most sought after mental performance specialist.

I realised I created that block when I didn’t really have a vision or direction and the time I would have to put into something I didn’t put much value into, was a waste of my time.

I was limiting my growth and potential

That was then.

My new perception is much more positive and has much more potential value because I now have a clear vision.

Marketing is an art form. It takes a clear and focused mind to create a marketing system that works and to create a marketing system that works involves making decisions and choices and learning from mistakes and celebrate the successes.

I’ve completed my Google Analytics online course and passed and have now integrated Google Analytics into my website.

I’ve launched a targeted Facebook Advert, a sponsored post to attract potential clients to my website.

So I’ll be able to analyse the traffic to my website to see what’s working and what isn’t and adjust when and if needed.

Let’s see what happens!

In sports when you feel there is a block stopping you improving, you have to understand that at some point in the past, you created a perception of a situation, an interpretation of a moment in time, and very quickly formed a belief.

That belief can become part of your psyche and acceptance that that’s just how things are so you navigate around it rather than deal with it.

But when that block is detrimental to your growth, you have to consciously allow your mind to explore what happened when that block was created and give yourself permission to look at that block from a new perspective, that perspective being the here and now.

Blocks can be created in the following ways:-

• A coach verbally instructing you not to do something
• A coach giving you a look of disgust or disappointment
• A coach Losing their trust in you
• Your inner voice telling you, it’s not worth it
• Your inner voice protecting you from embarrassing yourself
• I misinterpretation of an instruction (As my pro basketball client discovered)
• A sense of feeling lost and unsure (A football client was stuck here)
• Interpreting a situation where you placed yourself as not worthy…

These examples are not an exhaustive list and there are many other ways that can cause a block in your development, but when you remove these limiting or mistaken beliefs, the results can be amazing!

Your beliefs will drive your thinking and perception of the world so for example If you are a fan of a team that play in red and that team is doing well, you may associate the colour red to success and positivity.

These limiting or mistaken beliefs can occur in life, sports and business so if you feel stuck, frustrated or you’re underperforming, it’s worth finding out what the source is and address it.

I’m about to have a call with a person that has a lot more experience than me in a field I need to learn about. This call will expand my learning but lift me to a higher place of value in terms of giving back to the community, therefore allowing me to learn from the community.

I’ll let you know more about that soon.

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If you’re like to know how to improve your game quickly, please visit me by clicking here