Sport offers us many gateways in life, and the entire range of sports in the world are a reflection of man’s almost endless ingenuity in creating a field for Play.

 

Now sport can be both a love and a frustration and, to be fair,

we aren’t all like Forrest Gump was with ping pong.

There are issues that are faced both by international champions and beginners alike – they (and we) all suffer from things that aren’t coming easy to us in the moment. And these complications make our game much harder to play at times.

Pre-match nerves, scoreboard pressure, choking at crucial moments, talking ourselves down, tensing up and degrading our motor skills, making poor decisions – are just a number that spring to mind. And it is very much in the mind where these complications come along to plague us.

Performance in sport isn’t all about being technically accomplished – it is more about becoming masters of our inner selves.

 

In my latest book “Mind How You Play – Enhancing your Sporting Performance from the inner perspective”, the approach is not so much about providing you with a bag of tools to apply when the going gets tough – it is about enabling you to change your way of being in your game, and through that helping you discover greater and more enduring pleasures and rewards from it.

 

“Excellence in Sport has no beginning and no end;

it IS merely about developing.

No one can ever know it all, yet we can always progress.

There is no such thing as the ultimate victory;

everything is just a step along the way.”

 

When I coined this quote a few years ago, part of my understanding about developing excellence was well ahead of its time – and other parts of my understanding were well behind, playing catch-up. A lot of my philosophical beliefs, ideas and approaches crystallized during this time of catch-up and I gained an understanding that performance is about being and not doing. I also discovered that understanding is much more than just knowledge or expertise – there’s a big difference. 

 

Knowledge can be the currency of wisdom, but is like money – we can earn it, put it in our memory banks, and then just leave it there. Like other currencies, knowledge is worthless if left lying in our vaults, because there it earns no interest, and serves no purpose.
So we need to SPEND it, and spend it wisely. Only by spending our knowledge do we start to discover its value; its value in helping us see the path to true purpose; its value in giving us a deeper understanding about the sporting life we desire, the one that we are striving for.

“There’s gold in them thar’ hills!”

Mastering our Inner Game is rather like prospecting for gold. We can take the well-worn path to the stream of uncertainty, and spend years panning for few nuggets and little reward …

Or we can tread the less ordinary path along the river of understanding, discovering rich seams along the way. At the end of the day the hills certainly are full of gold – and the more you Mind How You Play the more you’ll get the success you deserve!

 

Mind How You Play (paperback) is currently available from Lulu Marketplace. You can access this by clicking on the link on the right hand side of the page. 
The eVersion on Kindle is available here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-How-You-Play-ebook/dp/B00E82Q0KA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1375438972&sr=8-2&keywords=mind+how+you+play

(A more wider paperback release on Amazon and High Street book stores is planned shortly.)