Yesterday I had the privilege of watching the Pan Pac Masters volleyball team competing. New Zealand v’s ACT over 35’s, these men take their volleyball seriously and it was so impressive to me as the captain of the New Zealand team had hand picked my husband to play volleyball some 26 years ago and was still playing and still winning.
How do you define winning? See ACT beat New Zealand in the game we watched 3 sets to 1, but this 1 game would never imply that that team is a losing team. You see some Mondays I wake up and focus on all the little games or set matches I have been defeated in and my attitude goes south fast and my fear grows – playing the game IS winning.
How fast can you recover from a poor performance will determine your resilience in life and playing games allows you to increase your resilience. I also noticed that the players who could laugh at themselves the most maintained the best performance overall. Do you beat yourself up when you make a mistake or swear at yourself out loud or worse still internally.
As a kid I was always hard on myself when I did not perform at the highest standard, I found it impossible to laugh at myself when I let my team down. One of my mentors helped me by saying “you’re just a winner not winning”, this has taken such a pressure off me to learn that winners actually like to win.
The area of neuro-science has long been an area that I have explored, by inputting positives into my brain I am able to get a better outcome. In my psychology degree we learnt about the brains ability to ‘light up’ when we had thoughts and by forcing positive thoughts time and time again we can create a highway for our winning thoughts to travel. When I am stressed I simply watch these programs and it resets my brain in less than 3 minutes.
Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen, 2013, reported that we now have good evidence that solution-focused cognitive behavioural (SF-CB) coaching can reliably enhance goal attainment and induce behavioural change as well as positively impacting on a range of psychological variables including capacity for self-regulation, self-insight and solution-focused thinking.
I tested a group of my clients using MindPT and found this to be very effective. for 30 days I challenge you to use our Leisure Seekers MindPT program for FREE and see the results. I have been able to achieve one of my goals of running a marathon simply watching for 3 minutes before my run, I had never run over 20kms and within 3 months I completed a 42.2km run. Define what winning is and go for it!