Being Aware and Present as an Athlete

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Mindfulness - Female Athlete

Maybe you have seen someone make an 80-yard touchdown catch or finish the marathon in under two hours and fifteen minutes? You’ll know that such accomplishments are things of beauty, in case you have. They look like things only a superhero could do – not the accomplishments of mere mortals. And these performances that are physical need more than just a well-trained body what empowers these sportsmen to do what most people can’t?

It’s about using its possible superpowers to reach top performance and training your head. But these techniques aren’t limited to improving your athleticism. Whether at work, in school or simply to boost life generally, we’d all want to enhance our performance. Utilizing the concept of the aware sportsman as a jumping-off point, we’ll research the practices that’ll get you.

Mindfulness, is about focusing on your inner self

Envision you’re delivering a demo. You can’t concentrate because you’re about what the audience thinks of you worried. Mindfulness would be the savior here. But just how do you become aware?

Mindfulness comes from inside. Everybody has a quiet, inner strength that may protect them from outside distractions.

Concentration of Man Running Down Stairs

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the godfather of mindfulness, stated that mindfulness means paying attention as in case your life depended on it.

Needless to say, that’s easier said than done, because we’re constantly surrounded by distractions. Our thoughts jump from topic to topic just like a monkey swinging from branch to branch.

Buddhists call this monkey mind. The monkey mind is difficult to control, but you can pacify it by practicing Buddhism. And once you reach a high state of self-control, you’ll discover yourself in the Zone.

The Zone is the best experience; when performing at their highest potential degree sportsmen enter it.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes the Zone experience happens when the scenario’s challenge and your ability are identical and high to every other. The Zone is like the calm at the middle of a thunderstorm. It’s what keeps the aware sportsman in the present moment.

And that means you have to be conscious of emotions and your own thoughts. You are able to practice mindfulness meditation by focusing in your breathing, sitting still and practicing simple consciousness: staying mindful of what’s going on in your mind and body at the present moment.

It’s easy to get distracted while achieving this. You might feel a wind, for instance, and recall a memory that is nice and begin to dwell on it.

By learning to be a Watcher, it’s possible for you to prevent this. Being a real Watcher means observing what’s occurring in your thoughts instead of letting it control you. Stay in charge of your thoughts. Don’t let it be the other way around.

Focusing only on your breathing

In the 2013 NBA playoffs, some camera people caught LeBron James sitting court side with closed eyes . Concentrating on breathing similar to this is one of the very essential portions of practicing mindfulness.

By controlling your breathing it’s possible for you to enter a state of relaxation. Consider the space between an inhalation and an exhalation as your interior center, where your Watcher watches everything. This sort of Consciousness of Breath, or AOB, brings you back.

Our respiration works in tandem with two other elements of our sovereign nervous system, each of which regulate other body functions and our heart rate.

The foremost is the sympathetic system, which will be activated by panic, worry and pressure. Our body floods with stress hormones, raises our blood pressure and makes our respiration shallower.

The next is the parasympathetic system. It releases the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which makes us more relaxed and lowers our heart rate. And when you focus on your own breathing, your parasympathetic system kicks into action.

Conscious respiration also can get you into instants of flow. Close your eyes the simplest way to practice AOB is to sit down and concentrate on the air moving in and from your lungs.

You can also lie down and do an internal body scan, where you imagine respiration through various parts of the body.

You do by stopping your focus, don’t get right into a state of flow; by concentrating on as few stimuli as possible you get. Our brains normally focus on several things concurrently. Reducing that number is what will allow you to get to the Zone.

That LeBron James was focusing on his breathing: it allowed him to be in the Zone when he stepped back onto the court.

Penetration is about understanding your own thoughts and the impact they have on your life.

There are a great deal of talented individuals in the world, but few of them reach their full potential. Why is that? Since they don’t fully believe in themselves.

Many people aren’t fully aware of the effect their beliefs have on their life. Our beliefs don’t just exist in our heads, yet: they establish themselves as customs.

Therefore, if you’d like to shift your behavior, you have to think about your customs and the underlying thoughts behind them. To put it differently, you have to realize the emotional blueprint your beliefs are founded upon. Here’s another way to take into account it: scrutinizing the thoughts behind your customs is like looking under the hood of your car, in place of merely staring at the dash.

Everybody has a special group of emotional blueprints, which includes their insecurities and other negative emotions. It’s important to keep yourself informed of those emotional blueprints, as the negative ones burst out in negative actions and can build up over time.

That’s what occurred when Zinedine Zidane, headbutted Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup and one of the very talented soccer players ever, lost his humor.

Succumbing like Zidane did to negativity will only hinder your advancement. Practicing mindfulness means letting go of who you think you are. So accept negative emotions like animosity or anger for what they really are.

Look at errors and failures this manner, too. Your errors don’t define who you might be! And failures are merely opportunities to learn and improve yourself.

Michael Jordan, one of the very best basketball players ever, embraced this idea in his “failure” advertisement for Nike. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” he said, “…lost almost 300 games. I’ve failed over and over again in my entire life. That I succeeded.”

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