4 Approaches to Developing a Strong Mindset
What is an elite mindset?
As told to me by Brian Cain in his Mental Performance Mastery Certification: your mindset is how you see yourself, your situation, and the world - basically your perspective.
So, if we break this down even more, a strong mindset comes down to the person having a strong/positive perspective around themselves, their situation, and the world around them.
We all know who the people are that have a weak mindset game. These are the athletes that may look like Greek gods - big, fast, strong, have their nutrition and sleep dialed - but they can’t seem to get out of their way when the competition bell rings.
Here are three steps you can use to help strengthen your mindset and make it ELITE:
Step #1 - Talk the talk, walk the walk
Have a growth mindset. Having a growth mindset is imperative to long-term success. Having a growth mindset allows you to take control of your life. The growth mindset is one in which you do not see right or wrong, or good or bad. Rather, you see the victory in the effort and success in the learning curve of the journey. You can work on this by paying attention and fixing your inner dialogue and language around events. Work on turning the negative into positives and taking control of your emotions and feelings through how you talk to yourself and the situations you are in. Provide proper feedback to yourself, your Coach, and to those you coach. When completing tasks, bring about appreciation and gratitude around the hard work you have put in to achieve what you have. Rather than saying or acknowledging the act, acknowledge the work you put to achieve the act.
Step #2 - Event + Response = Outcome
In life, it is not what happens to you, it’s how you handle what happens to you. It’s your ability to respond in a favorable way that is going to determine the outcome of the situation that just happened to you. We often do not have control over the events in our lives, but we do have control over our response. The more we can understand this control over the events, the more we can keep driving towards an elite mindset.
Step #3 - Starts, Stops, and Continues
I am a huge fan of reflection. I think everyone should reflect daily in order to understand their actions, responses and outcomes. One of the best ways to go about this is asking yourself these three questions:
What do I need to start doing?
What do I need to stop doing?
What do I need to continue to do?
These three questions can drive ownership, accountability, and awareness in your daily actions to keep you on track with your goals, fueling the elite mindset.
Step #4 - BFS
That stands for: Body language, Focus, and Self talk. Pay attention to these “big three”; these are three things that send us biofeedback around the current event or situation. These three things are talking to us constantly every single day and during every single event. We choose the power these have over us. They can provide strength and focus towards an elite mindset when they act soundly and correctly, or they can fill us with doubt and negativity. Have awareness around these three actions and correct them in order to fuel an elite mindset.
As I mentioned, I learned a lot about mindset and mindset coaching from Brian Cain, so look into him for even more information.
If you are interested in seeing how our coaches help to develop athletes' mindsets, shoot us an email at help@conquerathlete.com to set up a free consultation!
