Mental Training for Performance: Your Secret Weapon is your Mind

Editors Note: This article is written by David Hodgson a Performance Coach, Business Architect and Advisor.

Your secret weapon is something you already have unlimited access to, is more powerful than any supercomputer and can be honed to your every whim. I think you already know what I’m talking about. The answer is your mind.

Our minds perform the most complicated tasks without us needing to think about them. This autonomous control in life’s critical  actions hints at the potential of our minds. They say we use around 10% of our mind. This has proven difficult to prove and disprove. What we do know is that the minds ability to adapt is huge. The potential of our minds is incredible and yet we know so little about it. The following example demonstrates what training our minds the right way can do:

Tony Robbins Experiments with Mind Training and the US Army

NASA, the US Army and numerous other elite athletes have undertaken some form of mind training. In 1987, Tony Robbins and a number of other Mind Trainers (using Neuro-Linguistic Programming) set about improving the pistol shooting in the US Army, the basic qualification at that time was ‘Marksman’, with ‘Sharpshooter’ and then ‘Expert’ coming above that – a Marksman being able to get 30 hits on target out of 45 rounds fired. Two groups of soldiers were taught side by side – one group getting the NLP based training, the other group – the ‘control group’- getting the standard army training.

The control group took 27 hours to get 73 per cent of the soldiers to Marksman level, with only 10 per cent of the group making Expert. The NLP based group took just 12 hours to get 100 per cent of the soldiers to Marksman level, with 25 per cent making Expert.

So what? I hear you say. Well, these same techniques that are undeniably successful can be easily translated to your training. There are a number of techniques that I can pass on and one of the most easy to adopt is using your imagination to increase your motivation towards a goal that you really want to achieve.

Using your Imagination and Visualization to Achieve Specific Goals

• First of all, find yourself a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.
• Notice how you currently feel. What emotions are you experiencing
• Next, imagine that future state, maybe you have just finished a marathon, maybe you have finished a gruelling gym workout, perhaps you are in those jeans that you promised you would fit back into.
• Now you created that event in your mind I’d like you to repeat the exercise but this time look at the event and see yourself in it. See what you saw, hear the sounds and feel the emotions that looking at this future event create for you.

Now, you have just experienced your future event, achievement or whatever it was, what does it make you want to do? Do you feel more motivated to move towards accomplishing that goal? Do you notice that you feel a little more excited about achieving your goal and all those events and actions that you need to accomplish in order to succeed?

This was an example of a simple way that training your mind can help you achieve your goals. This technique works for everything. Have you used visualization in your training before?

David Hodgson is a Performance Coach, Business Architect and Advisor, having created a niche in goal setting, performance and motivation. He works with the most respected organizations in the world and has brought their visions to life. David creates business and personal blueprints, assembles the right team to make the blueprint a reality and keeps everyone motivated throughout the process of accomplishing the goal.