In Part 1 of this series I discussed the relationship between confidence and winning and concluded that building a habit of winning is best developed by using the Scientific Method and proposing a hypothesis (game plan) each time you go out to compete. Once a hypothesis is created the next step is to improve your ability to coach yourself, to see what a coach would see and then make the necessary simple adjustments to your game plan that will allow you to perform better as you go.

Learning how to better understand why you performed the way you did during your performance takes time and needs a basis of comparison – a standard by which to compare how you performed to how you would have like to perform; hence, the development of your own Evaluation System. So, how would you like to perform? Try this simple exercise to find out:

Visualization Exercise

STEP 1
Identify your Ideal Performance State (IPS) using visualization to remember your best performances. For the purpose of this exercise, just pick one performance that stands out among the rest. In the future you can use the same process for any performance that you remember.

STEP 2
Understand what visualization is. Simply, it is focused daydreaming. Closing your eyes and remembering as many details from a past performance that you can and learning to see them in even greater detail.

STEP 3
Find a quite relaxing place. Sit in a comfortable chair making sure that your posture is straight and your arms are relaxed and resting on your legs.

STEP 4
Close your eyes and bring your attention to your breathing. At first, just pay attention to how you are breathing normally; how the air comes into your nose or mouth and how it exits. How your chest rises and falls with each breath.

STEP 5
Use a 3 count breathing technique to focus your breathing even more. Inhale through your nose for 3 seconds. Hold that breath for 3 seconds. Exhale that breath slowly through your mouth for 3 seconds. Repeat 10 cycles or until your attention is completely on your breathing and your body is more relaxed.

STEP 6
Breathe normally and shift your attention to the location of where your best performance occurred. Review, in detail, specific elements of the location. What city was it in? What did the surroundings look like? What were the courts, course, or field like? What were other conditions of the playing environment? Did they play fast or slow during your performance? What was the temperature that day? Etc.

STEP 7
Shift your attention to being on the court during the performance and ask yourself a few more questions. What were you wearing that day? How were you feeling – excited, calm, happy, nervous, …….? What was your heart rate during the performance? What was your breathing tempo – short quick breaths, or slow deep breaths?

STEP 8
See yourself performing. You chose this past event as one of your best. You need to bring your attention to the things that happened in this performance that caused you to select it as your best, and then seek to understand why they helped you play your best.

That is basically it, using visualization to identify the elements that caused your best performances. Once you understand the things that help you perform your best, then it is simply a matter of repeating those elements again and again (see Part 3 in this series on rituals and routines) to achieve the performance state that you want.

Often, it can feel, for the inexperienced athlete, that ideal performances are random, and in the beginning phases of competitive development, they can be; but as we develop our abilities and get closer to mastering our skills we realize that our best performances are not random, they are managed and calculated. And when we allow ourselves the freedom to enjoy what we have trained so hard to do we learn that playing in the ZONE, as someone has termed it, is not out of our reach.

The goal is to train ourselves to be completely present in our performance. To pay attention to when our mind drifts to things that hinder our performances and don’t help us stay present; and not to fight ourselves when things don’t go the way we expect them to go, but rather use the Experimental Method as described in Part 1 to quickly reset, and pay attention to what happens next.

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Part 3 in the “Learning How to Win” series will focus on establishing rituals and routines that will help us repeat our best performance over and over again.