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Take Your Own Vibe With You

Have you ever arrived at a competition venue and experienced a ‘good feeling’ about the event you’re about to take part in? Or, have you ever experienced the opposite and felt a ‘bad feeling’ before an event? What is that feeling? Is it real or is it in your imagination and, crucially, can a good or bad feeling have any real effect, positive or negative, on your sports performance?

The simple answer is, yes! A ‘good feeling’ is the result of positive energy in the environment therefore a ‘bad feeling’ is the result of negative energy in the environment. It takes positive energy to generate positive results so a ‘good feeling’ lets you know that the positive energy you need is all around you and is yours for the taking. Feeling that positive energy undoubtedly has the potential to positively affect your sports performance. Of course, feeling negative energy in the environment has equal potential to negatively affect your performance. So where does the energy in the environment come from?

Everything in the world around you is a form of energy. Everything that you can physically see and everything that you know physically exists is energy but so is everything that you can see only in your mind’s-eye and everything that exists only in your imagination because your thoughts and your emotions are also energy. All energy in all its forms vibrates, so everything, thoughts included, creates its own unique vibration and it’s those vibrations that you pick up on when you get a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feeling.

The thoughts and feelings of every individual at each competition venue generate the external vibe that you experience when you get there. But, your thoughts and feelings also generate your internal vibe so by simply learning to think positively, you can positively affect the outcome of every sports performance by taking your own positive vibe with you wherever you go!

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Related articles

• The 12 Laws of Performance – Positive Attraction (donmacnaughton.org)
• The 12 Laws of Performance – Can You Feel It? (donmacnaughton.org)

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Do You Have a Passion for Sport?

It’s not unusual to hear a sports commentator describe a sports performance as “inspired” or to describe a player or athlete as an “inspirational” performer, so what do they mean by that? What makes an inspired performance?

Inspirational people in sport can inspire other people to get involved in sport at grassroots level and they can also inspire good athletes to become great athletes at top level, but what makes them inspirational? More often than not, the people we describe as inspirational have achieved a dream that we also aspire to achieve. In fact, inspirational people are living their dreams, they have turned their dreams and ambitions into their realities.

So who inspires you in sport? And, here’s another thought for you, who do you inspire in sport? We all have the capacity to be inspired and be inspirational. The people in sport who inspire you may have successfully achieved an ambition that you share but your achievements may also be a source of inspiration for others who dream of achieving what you have already achieved – it’s all relative!

Inspiration comes from passion. Inspirational sportspeople have not only found something they feel passionate about, they have used the inspirational power of that passion to turn their sporting ambitions into their realities. To find your inspiration, you have to find the things you feel passionate about. Great soccer players don’t become great purely because they have great playing skills, they also have great passion for the game they play. Olympic champions don’t become champions just because they possess above average athletic ability, they become Olympic champions because they feel passionate about pushing themselves to their absolute limit and realising their true potential: they feel passionate about becoming the absolute best they can be. To find your success in sport, you must find your passion.

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Awareness of danger is a critical part of mental preparation and performance.

Thinking through potential risks and danger spots allows athletes to effectively develop effective pre-emptive strategies but not get pulled into only focusing on the negative or what you have to avoid. Instead putting your focus on what you want to achieve….(link full article on blog from this point)

So what is fear and where does it come from? At this point it may be useful to look at the “3 Brain model”.

Evolutionary: The Human brain has developed through 3 stages:

1. Reptilian
2. Mammalian
3. Cortex or thinking brain

Primitive survival responses come from the subconscious drives of sex, food, and survival of the older reptilian brain.

The more emotional responses come from the Mammalian brain emotions such as happiness, sadness, joy etc

The logical and cognitive responses and interpretations come from the more recent frontal cortex.

Internal conflict can occur when we “think” we “should” do some thing or feel a certain way. When we don’t this conflict is often between the inter-relationships between the 3 brains.

The  “amydallya” is housed in the reptilian brain when it gets kicked off our body is flooded with chemicals from the adrenal gland (thus adrenaline) that allows us to react quickly with a greater sense of urgency. This explains the great feats of strengths accomplished by people in extreme circumstances such as mothers managing to lift cars off their trapped children. But in modern life this amydalla response is often sparked off when no life threatening event has occurred, someone cutting you up in the car, bad call at tennis. This is known as the Amdallya highjack.

The 3 common, automatic reactions to danger are:

1. Fight – go into attack mode
2. Flight – get the hell out of here
3. Freeze – paralysed to the spot

Recognise when F.E.A.R. is False. Expectations. Appearing. Real.

Recognise when F.E.A.R. is False. Expectations. Appearing. Real. and when is there actual danger to pay attention to or needs preparation to avoid undue risk.

1. Develop a breath meditation practice to control physical emotion response to stress.
2. Evaluate performance challenges prior to performance and identify possible danger and risks based coherent analysis.
3. Know your own conditioned stress response fight/fight and freeze and identify the signals that tell you that these are being switched on and plan to de-escalate them if appropriate.

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