The Athletic Mindset

By Terry Orlick, Fatima Leite Kusch and Leslie Lewis, MFA –

The path to personal excellence happens by making your focus work for you and not against you.  This shift is how you can raise the level and consistency of your training and your performances.

Ultimately, YOU are the one who controls your own destiny through your positive decisions and your positive focused actions. You are the only one who can control your focus and your actions—this alone puts you in a position to direct the course of your training, your actions and your life.

Your focus is incredibly powerful, especially when it is positive and fully connected. Your focus will lead your life, your training, your nutrition, your rest, your performance and your reality in positive or negative ways. You decide. It’s YOUR focus! So direct it wisely!

Excellence is a Journey
If you want to get to a specific destination, it helps to know where you want to go and how you are going to get there.

What is it that you would like to excel at doing or being at this point in your life?

Whatever it is you want to be or do, you can be or become better and more consistent at doing it than you are right now. This is why you are using this book. 

The first step in this process is clearly identifying where you want to go in your journey to excellence.

I usually ask the athletes, performers and other people with whom I work, to write down two sets of goals. First, I want to know what your Dream Goal is.

Dream Goals
A Dream Goal is a goal that you would love to achieve, a goal that is within your stretched human capacity if you are willing to put in the time, effort, work, commitment, and full focus over an extended period of time. There may also be an element of ‘luck’ in some dream goals. It’s a goal where all the variables are not necessarily under your control, but one which you would LOVE to achieve and, somewhere deep inside you, you believe you can achieve.

Realistic Goals
For your realistic goals, it’s fine to identify more than one goal. You can see this as the clay from which you are sculpting your athletic career, finding out what is within your control and within the realm of possibility for you. In the next chapter, you will be asked to narrow things down again, but for now enjoy the process of imaging the accomplishments of your realistic goals for your fitness career.

At some point in your journey and your life, your Dream Goal and your Realistic Goal can become the same goal––because with time and focused effort, you come to know that you have a realistic chance of achieving your dream.

What a wonderful feeling, to come into the awareness that you are fully capable of realistically achieving or getting close to that Dream within a certain time frame. I wish that for you.

This Athlete Mindset Workbook guides you in simple and practical ways to help you learn how to excel in your training, your performances and your life so that you can live your dreams. By answering the reflective questions provided in this Athlete Mindset Workbook and by acting on your positive intentions, you can turn challenges into focused opportunities in every part of your life. This will free you to succeed in your training, your performances, and your life.

For more information about the authors or to order a copy of the work book go to: http://athletemindsetworkbook.com/