Being NR1

Optimizing Performance is what all sports are trying to achive and any athlete serious about performance are continiously looking for methods to improve their performance.

Are you?

I work as a coach to improve golfers and even Triathlon athlets. What I do is to help them Optimize their Performance on several levels in their sports.

Let me give you an example,
when setting an algoritm of continious improvement for a pro golfer he started to hit the ball 30 yards longer with his irons and up to 50+ yards with his driver.
When I worked with the traithlon athlet she got improvements and could get everything out on the competition day. Made a personal best on that course.

So, what is it that I do to Optimize Performance?

Any sport has a few fundamentals, one is the technical or mechanical side of doing a movement. If its hitting a golfball or swimming or running or trowing basketballs or any other movement there is always a Optimal way of doing the movement with less energy.

There is also a way to make the technique even better for the individual and I can do so without even understanding the sport!

I understand the basics behind the Performance, the brain, the emotions, the mental side and the hope and fears behind Performance due to my background doing NLP and modeling for more than 13 years. Now, NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is a great tool to find out the basics, what is going on behind the scene, the swedish 400 meter hurdler Sven Nylander did his personal best in the olympics, set a swedish and nordic record and was the first swede to run under 48 seconds.
He did it by using NLP to improve and being able to get the best out of him at age 35.

Now most laugh at mental advisers, coaches due to them often being clueless about the sport and how to improve Performance.

So naturally I got to prove that what I can do is for real, that I can actually do something that works and not only that, that its possible to do it again and when doing it the next time the Performance has improved.

This blogg, well its all about me observing and commenting on various aspects of the mental, emotional, physical and technical sides of the Performance of athlets.

Performance is a multipaced various level of interacting elements that can affect how well you do out there in your sport.

For example:

• Beliefs
• Emotions
• Mental (thinking)
• Physical
• State/s
• Technique
• Practice
• Competition
• Eating habits
  

They all interact and affect the performance in various ways.
If the belief is based on your percepetion and not factual information about your Performance you can either be better or worse as an athlet depending on what the beliefs do for you in your perception.

Let me again give you an example,
If you believe your good, even best, and you have a flawed technique, you will not get the best performance and when confronting with actual measureable evidence you deny them due to you saying in your beliefs and perception of those, the evidence cant be true due to me being good at what I do in my sport.
Confronting athlets with such evidence are important to actually find out what you are doing is working and also that what your doing in your practice relate to actual transfer to competition.(More on that later)

This is also true the other way, that you limit yourself due to a belief about how good your not and then when confronted with evidence again deny the truth about how well you do.

When you have a flawless technique and the skills to perform at the highest level in your sports, then its all about maximazing those into a fluid optimal performance in all aspects of your sport.

Making sure the physical attribute can support this level of performance, how you eat, and how the emotional and mental side in what your doing in your head affects your performance.

Being Nr1 in any sport is all about one individual at the time, what is to be done to get there are to Optimize every bit of your skills and other attribut that might affect your Performance.

You need to belive its possible.
That your able to do it.
That is done with a future orientation I use to create a future scenario where this already has transpired for you, its already real in the future but the experience of this future is all about having it today.

So how can you have a future in advance?

Well, your brain how simple and yet complicated it is are basically trying to make sense of what your thinking and what your not thinking.
All the time.

The input you put there, be it consious thinking what you want to do and the beliefs you often not aware of are feeding a loop of checkpoints to achive a balanced outlook at the world, in your percived reality.

Example;
Now imagine that your put in fear and doubts, and its not possible, this will hinder, stop any attempts to improve and you will taint the performance due to the performance not being sorted out in the various levels that needs to be sorted out for Optimal Performance.

A lof of athlets do that and the effects are often fear, doubt and worry about what they are going to do in the competition before they have done it.

The opposite of that is to do the following,
Make a belief of what is possible to achive, set a physical state of performing at your best, often fluid flow like, adding a future scenario where this with practice did lead to Optimal Performance and in competition did perform in the way you experienced before you did enter the compeitition.
This will lead to confidence, and trust in your own abilites and you are able to enter the compeition due to properly sorted out what you are going to do and not what to do.
Then you need to obviously have a good technique, and support by practice etc..but then its all about being able to execute at your highest Optimal Performance level that day.

Now, if we add a improvement to this new standard in Performance so that you will refine and update your performance on this new hight in you skill, then what would happen?

The reason mental practice works well is that your are able to mentally visualize the performance "perfectly", there is no trial and error by doing it physically so the input to your nervsystem is done perfectly each and every time.
This build physical connections to a feedback loop to improve what your doing over time.

Now, what if we set an automatic improvement based on the basis of previous performance, then what typically happens is that you be doing a simpler movement perfecting the technique without even training and practice at all...

Normally ahtletes have to do a numerous of mental visualizing drills, however, non have seldom tell you "how to do the Visualizing" so it might be your not doing it right even when you think you are but in practice aint.

Checking actual facts in how your actually perform is tidious and often boring.
Its however the real key to find out how to Optimize your Performance.

When you have a good technique, then its all about setting a continious loop to improve that over time and then to add the state/s to perform and how to access this state and performance level in practice and competition.
Naturally, adding the rest of skills, experience, eating habits, physically fit etc...
can also be Optimized and do affect your performance.

For me its sad to see how many athlets cant get Optimal Performance due to them not having the tools to do so or waste the talent and training due to not being able to cope with their thinking or emotions in competition and so on.

I play golf, I have set and started to do everything I am writing here about and are going to continiously update my experience of doing this from the start.
I am a 11.1 handicap today, last year I standed still in my Performance. I hit a platue.
I did not do what I will do this year, reason is simple, I practice and test out ideas in my game and have done so a few years.
This year, I started in the other end.

So, naturally my approach to the game has changed, what I have found out is that I need to check my actual technical skill, the baseline, the statistical data and to find methods to improve that.

So what I will do this summer for my golfgame is what I am teaching others to do in their sports.

My teaching is all about Optimal Performance.

Now to find out how I will do that.

/Robert Johansson
Re-new NLP