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Belief Patterns of A Professional Athlete

What are your Beliefs? What is holding you back from achieving Peak Performance?


A great exercise to increase your awareness of your thoughts is to simply, CYT: “Catch Your Thoughts” or “Catch Yourself Thinking.” Have a go right now. What are you thinking? Has your mind wandered off track? Are they powerful, positive thoughts or are you putting yourself down? Simply just become aware. We cannot begin to change our thoughts until we know what they are!

A great way to do this is to put post it notes with the letters CYT in places you will see all the time to help you catch your thoughts. You might put one in your training bag, your bedroom, bathroom, diary, wallet, – anywhere is fine! Just do it! This simple strategy is so powerful and yet so simple.

One of my athletes put “CYT” on the dashboard in his car and his initials happened to be CT. When one of his competitors asked what the CYT sticker stood for, he answered with his name and a made up a middle name, not wanting his mate to know his secret weapon! “Yon” his made up middle name became his nick name when he told me that story!

What words do you choose to feed your mind with?

I would suggest spending a week doing the CYT exercise. What do you say to yourself? What other negative statements are you picking up at home or training? For example, a fellow athlete might plant a seed of doubt in your mind, someone may put you down and you might even find that you are the greatest critic of you!

When I ask professional athletes to do this, I often get several pages! And my response to that is “Awesome!” That is because they are already half way to becoming more positive and believing in themselves as they have become aware of what they are saying. It is also worth asking your Mum or Dad or your coach what they hear you saying. Sometimes they might not hear you but they know from your body language what it might be! It is only when we are aware of what we are saying or taking on from others that we can begin to change and become the top athlete we dream to be.

You will learn ways of releasing these negative thoughts in the next few blog posts.

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