Performance misconceptions
Dr. Adam Naylor and Matt Cuccaro are heading the Telos Sports Psychology Coaching. They work with Top 50 ATP/WTA tour competitors, Stanley Cup champions, Olympic medalists, NCAA champions, UFC martial artists, Red Bull athletes, and C-Suite executives.
Leading sports psychologists, Dr. Adam Naylor and Matt Cuccaro shared insights on the mental game for high-performance.
What mindset we should have in training?
The meaningful mindset for training and preparation would be:
- Instead of wanting to do everything perfectly and without mistakes, we should embrace curiosity into all of our actions and experiences.
- Grinding in training should be replaced with creative playfulness. Hard work gets boring and tiring very fast. Also, the grind can get you in a trap of focusing on wrong work as creative playfulness gives you the power of higher awareness for growth.
What mindset we should have during the competition?
The desired mindset for the competition is not wishing to be confident but competing with poise in uncertainty.
Success is determined by our ability to deal with uncertainty.
How to have consistency in the performance?
It looks like we do everything the same. However, nothing is the same in a game or a movement and when we accept this the smoother everything will go.
What is the biggest misconception about performance?
Wanting to be calm, collected, and relaxed during a performance, would it be competition or presentation, is just not realistic.
We need to learn how to channel stress and anxiety emotions into purposeful action and joy.
What is a favorite mental skill?
Performance is about managing physiology and knowing the power of breath gives us possibilities to manage ourselves better.
Community is the most important
A lot of stress comes from fear of what others will say, how they feel, and how they will compare us against others after our performance. Turning people into the supporting collective helps us to reduce stress during competitions.
The mental game is a social game.
The all-time best books for the mental game of golf:
- Golf and the Spirit: Lessons for the Journey by M. Scott Peck
- The Soul of Golf by William Hallberg
Inga Stasiulionyte, Olympian, Master Performance Coach, and sports industry consultant, shares the high-performance insights and case studies of the challenges that her clients face.
