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In this article I will discuss two elements that are critical to enhancing your self-image and improving your productivity as an athlete. Those elements are:

• Knowing how to be effective at rewarding yourself;
• Discovering the power of the magic in a mirror.

We think of the body as having one brain, but that’s not true since there is no end of brains in the human body. Inside every individual cell there is an intelligent decision making process (proteins) that is tuned into and reacts to the world around it. You can even remove the nucleus (DNA) from a cell and the cell will continue to be functional until it dies from old age. Some of the larger brains (neuron bundles) of the body are located around the organs. The term ‘gut feeling’ has value since we talk about the fact that some decisions are based off how we feel about something in our gut and there is no question that sensations felt in the gut relate to what is occurring in our life. I point this out because the stomach is linked to emotion and feeling—such as butterflies before a race or a first date—and recognizing that is one of the keys to taking up arms and going toe-to-toe with any adversary you face.

REWARDING YOURSELF

I meet with young athletes on a regular basis and ask them this simple question. Who is your worst enemy or your most challenging adversary? After some thought, they all arrive at the same answer: “Me.” Surprisingly, athletes as young as ten come up with this answer. In some instances, they even have a reasonable understanding of how the dynamic works. However, when I challenge them to tell me what they have done on that day to combat their enemy, they mostly end up staring into space as they try to conjure up something that proves they are on the case. I stare back at them, my facial expression dripping with disdain and ask, “OK, what have you done this week or this month?” This gives them an opening and a few hands shoot up. I ask a few of them to relate what they have done. Their answers are usually things like, “I worked harder on a set”, “I went to an extra practice” or “I ate an apple instead of an apple turnover”. They seem proud to have found something that shows that they are engaged, but the reality is that most of the time none of us really are engaged. We all know this is an issue, we all KNOW that we are our own worst enemies, but we don’t go about defeating it in the same way we might go about dealing with a serious threat to our survival.

The key to doing this is a simple process. Begin by finding an occasion at least once a day and recognize the fact that you have done something good. This can be as simple as helping an old lady in a supermarket, taking a step towards achieving a skill or meeting a benchmark you’ve been working on for a long time. When you perform a selfless act or achieve a stepping-stone goal you usually feel good about it. However, that’s not enough to truly turn the tide into your favor. There is no doubt that you have to feel good when you walk away from that smiling lady as she thanks you for helping her, but the most important step for you isn’t helping her, it’s HELPING YOURSELF after you have helped her. To do that, you have to say inside your head, ‘GREAT JOB, good on you for doing that. You’re an awesome person for taking the time to help her.’ Most importantly, you REALLY have to say it with EMOTION. Don’t hold back on the emotion, make it a heartfelt ‘GREAT JOB!’ that elicits a smile on your face and a strong vibration that travels through your body and into your GUT. If you do it with genuine honesty, you will feel this in your stomach. If you don’t feel this in your gut, you haven’t been strong or genuine enough in praising yourself for your actions.

In helping groups or individuals understand this, I have no problem standing in front of a large group of people and saying, “Practice it, practice saying GREAT JOB to yourself!” So I stand in front of them, I think of something that I have done well that day or the day before, I get a hint of a smile on my face, close my eyes a little as I see it, take a deep breath into my lungs and I FEEL myself saying GREAT JOB. When I do this I can always feel the vibration going through my body and twirling around in my gut. I end with a big smile on my face and my eyes wide open. When I do this in front of a group I never fail to elicit a lot of laughter from them and in many cases notice people almost cringing at the thought of having to do what I had just done, since they are mortified at the thought of having to do something like that in public. When I observe the group dynamic of people trying this for the first time, I find that a small number are easily able to do this in a genuine way. They are open enough to allow themselves to FEEL it, and I believe them. However, most of us struggle with it since it’s something we’ve never done before, and in many cases baulk at the thought of doing, even when alone.

The key to all of this is the emotion bit. When emotion is the most significant part of the process, the amydala in the brain becomes prominent in the making and storing of memory, thus ensuring that the memory is of greater long-term significance. Perform selfless acts on a regular basis, recognize them as being done by a good person, and you will become someone who not only feels great about who you are, but the people around you will begin to see the strong aura you emit to them.

When you include this in a training context, the dynamic is essentially the same. You’ve been working on a new skill that requires a complex series of moves melded together into one fluent action. It might be something that gets broken into parts, and as you master each individual part you give yourself a big GREAT JOB! When done with strong feeling, a number of things occur. Acts and emotions are connected; you increase the secretion of a neurotransmitter called dopamine and that enhances the “reward” associated with the neuronal connectivity connected with that pattern of movement. It’s recognized as being very important to you. This makes it reproducible, and as your ability to reproduce that pattern of movement gets better, the process of wrapping myelin around that neuronal chain enhances the speed of the signal down the neural chain and this accelerates your ability to execute the skill at faster speeds. Eventually you can perform this skill effortlessly without even thinking about it. This is very important since all sport and most of our daily life occurs below the level of conscious awareness, so we depend on learned processes to keep us ahead of the competition on the playing field and safe from the many dangers that we barely register in real life.

On a cognitive level (in yourself), you feel good about achieving something and you allow yourself to enjoy the feeling of success. This should motivate you to seek out and recognize more and more success-based opportunities as you develop your skill level in your sport. The key is to become very good at patting ourselves on the back when achieving small steps, so making larger, more demanding steps seem more achievable. If you ignore the smaller steps and the many opportunities each day to reward yourself, that longer leap might turn into the Grand Canyon in your mind. As an individual, your recognition of your achievements in an athletics environment will have the potential to spill over into all areas of your life. If you use these skills to become a better athlete, there is no reason why they won’t work in the classroom or in your daily life interacting with others. In full swing, the effect can be circular, since the better you feel, the more you will recognize those elements that reinforce what you are doing or are trying to achieve. Positive steps will be lauded and negative ones will be seen as opportunities to be turned into positive ones. The enemy within will begin to shrink, and in time you will wonder at how your worst critic managed to gain control over everything you do.

In team environments, attitudes and actions are quickly contagious. Whether it’s selfless acts, recognition of the acts of others on your team, or exhibiting the passion you have for your sport when you smile and celebrate those steps, it will impact those around you. When you get excited about achieving simple goals on the way to bigger ones, you will help others see and understand the value of following that same path. We all talk about the value of having goals and structure, but we’re not always told how to organize such a set-up. Change your team environment into one that has many athletes using this process and recognizing their achieving together, and you will develop a force within your team that will be strong enough to overcome any obstacle. When individuals work together to overcome common foes they develop relationships that have fiber and meaning to them. Stronger teammates will help weaker ones, older will help younger and the net effect will be a spiral upwards towards greater achievements on both an individual and team level.

USING THE MAGIC OF A MIRROR

We don’t arrive on this planet as a clean slate, we arrive with baggage. As regards the nature/nurture argument, my opinion is that it is both. The hard part is that we don’t recognize this fact and in some cases some people are saddled with a large environmental genetic load and never escape its impact on their lives. I have seen this time and again in all walks of life and have often wondered why we don’t put in place educational programs that are aimed to help us understand who we are. Since epigenetics is an article in itself, I won’t delve into the subject but simply say that until we each take steps to know and understand our particular inheritances, we will struggle underneath the weight of the baggage we carry around. So I ask all athletes to give me ONE MONTH of doing this simple act.

When you finish brushing your teeth at night, take the time to look at and engage yourself in the mirror. Now, I know a lot of people will struggle with this since they will be loathe to be reminded of all the many faults they see, so the key is to not look at the whole, but lean forward and engage yourself with your eyes and your face. Don’t get caught up in the surface features and to look into your eyes in a way that helps you look into your own soul so to speak.  Ignore all the blemishes and wrinkles and say out loud, “I AM UNIQUE” and “I AM AN AWESOME PERSON”. Smile with your eyes and lips when you say this, and once again feel the vibration and emotion when you do. If you don’t feel that warm feeling in your gut then it won’t be genuine. For many this will be a struggle in the beginning so it will require some time to develop the ability to do it with emotion and feeling in a way where the mind/brain recognizes its value to you. There is no doubt in my mind that doing this every day for a month will change your perspective about who you are and what you bring to the life you’ve been given.