Newsletter - 17 January 2022
Mental coaching for Athletes
Question: when I write down mental coaching….. what is the first thing you think about?
Most likely you will think about some obvious mental problems people might have and need help to recover from, like depression, anxiety or other mental illnesses.
Although that is not wrong (many mental coaches do help people with that) it is also not the whole answer. Mental coaching can also be applied to just become better at what you do, for example in sport.
The problem is that when you think about how to be better at something, you almost always first think about the things in the physical world (training, health, diet etc) without considering your inner part that is as important to be successful in your efforts.
As athletes, for example, we do spend a lot of time working on improving their muscle strengths with exercises, we do spend a lot of time on improving their physical condition levels by endurance training and we do spend a lot of time on looking for ways to improve our techniques and look for the right materials to use like running shoes, bikes etc. What we miss however, is the mental part, the very system that will make it all work together in the first place. As we became used to what it does for us, we actually take it all for granted of how it works, including all the flaws and errors that got into it over time (due to all the experiences we had in our life), making it perform a lot less efficient as it could be. And perhaps more interestingly, we also don’t look for ways to improve or upgrade it either!
To help you better understand that, let’s compare it with a piece of technology we all have in our lives, our laptop. We spend a lot of time looking at all the hardware components like better screens, faster processors, more powerful graphical cards, increased memory, all the cool applications to play with and all kinds of other devices to connect with it and improve it, without looking much at the supporting software that we need in order run all of it in the first place, the Operating System. Some of you might even ask the question now: “What is an Operating System actually”:-)
Well, in short is the Operation System (or OS) the core software that makes the computer work in the first place, it controls all the components to do what they are supposed to do in the most efficient way. It used to be called DOS (Disk Operating System), but there are many others you might have heard of like Windows, Unix, iOS or Android.
You as an athlete also have your own unique internal Operating System that makes all of your body parts work as they should in the most efficient way. It is an area where over the years a lot of research has been done. And although it is still an area where we know just only a small part of, we are already able to resolve issues and improve people's mental abilities substantially. Techniques like NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programing) of Anthony Robbins have for example given a lot of people the ability to overcome many of their mental shortcomings and enabled them to really grow in their lives, with sometimes astonishing results..
When it comes to sport and more focused, when it comes to Triathlons and Ironmans it is also an area where we believe we can add value to our athletes. That is why we have included it in our offer and give our athletes the chance to benefit from our knowledge and experience in this field to become even better athletes than what they thought they could be.
As an introduction we offer our Trifharder athletes a special deal.
You can book an introduction session of 30 minutes with our mental coach Arthur de Niet for just US$ 25,- (instead of the standard US$ 90,- per session). We also offer our Gold and Silver members an even better deal; they will receive a 100% discount as part of their special membership package, so their first session is for free.
In this introduction session you will, together with our mental coach, determine if there is opportunity for you to either resolve mental issues/blockades that prevent you to perform in sport or if you can perform even better than you do now. In the link below you will be able to download the USC MC self assessment and below that make an appointment to our mental coach.
You can let us know by clicking on the link Mental Coaching and fill in your initial details.