Mindset: a mental guide for sport

By Jackie Reardon and Hans Dekkers

Learn to deal with pressure and enjoy challenges

This book teaches you how to deal with pressure and enjoy challenges. It guides you through the exact same exercises professional athletes, world-class performers and business leaders have done to perform at their very best when it matters most. You’ll get all the practical tools to train how to stay relaxed and focused at the same time under all circumstances.

Mindset describes a new way of thinking in sport. It is written for athletes of all playing levels, coaches and parents of children engaged in (competitive) sports. You will be able to convert anger, impatience, tension and frustration into self-confidence, better focus and more pleasure, transforming your perception of sport and competition forever.

Elite performance coach and former professional tennis player Jackie Reardon has trained Olympic gold medallists and world champions using unorthodox mindfulness exercises with sport as a metaphor to improve their focus and awareness. Combining her expertise in professional sports and mindfulness she developed a hands-on philosophy called Friendly Eyes to guide athletes of all levels to reach their best. Friendly Eyes means: being kind to ourselves, being kind to others and to observe without judgment. Because by being friendly to yourself, you can make the progress you want.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mindset Publishers
• Release date: Mar 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9789082797411

Book preview

Jackie Reardon

Hans Dekkers

Mindset

A MENTAL GUIDE FOR SPORT

Fourth revised edition

This book is published by

Mindset Publishers

IJsbaanpad 43

1076

cv

Amsterdam

www.friendlyeyes.com

Translated from the Dutch by Beverley Jackson – www.jacksonacademic.nl

Graphic design by Aart Jan Bergshoeff – www.aartjan.nl

Cover designed by Friendly Eyes, Amsterdam

Photocredits: Punch/acceptance © Tetra Images / Corbis,

Good mistakes: © Fotolia, Eagle: © Dreamstime

ISBN 978-90-827974-1-1

1st edition 2007, 2nd revised edition 2012, 3rd revised edition 2016,

4th revised edition 2018

Fourth revised edition

© 2007–2018 Mindset Publishers, Amsterdam

Text © 2007–2018 Jackie Reardon and Hans Dekkers

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy, microfilm or any other means without prior written permission from the publisher.

The publishers have done their utmost to respect the rights of third parties. ­Anyone who believes that certain rights can nonetheless be asserted may apply to the publisher.

Content

Cover

Copyright

Preface – going for gold with friendly eyes

Mindset as an adventure

Mindset in a nutshell

Chapter 1

The malfunctioning machine and mindfulness

Pillar 1: Friendly eyes

Pillar 2: Good mistakes

Intermezzo 1

Action thinking: a mental warming up and cooling down

Chapter 2

It’s your game

Pillar 3: Curiosity

Pillar 4: Self-knowledge

Intermezzo 2

Choosing a good coach

Chapter 3

Playing tennis with a beard

Pillar 5: Self-discipline

Intermezzo 3

Is this cheating? And how to deal with bad calls?

Chapter 4

Life Versus Sport

Pillar 6: Acceptance

Chapter 5

Action thinking: the art of concentration

Chapter 6

Story Thinking: How Do You Escape From It?

Intermezzo 4

Improving your technique through feeling by using

Chapter 7

Tactics are based on feeling

Intermezzo 5

Passion

Chapter 8

Odysseus and the lotus-eaters

Intermezzo 6

Mindset at its best

Chapter 9

Personal Success Plan For Action Thinking (PSP)

A story to end with

Epilogue by Jackie Reardon

Epilogue by Hans Dekkers

Acknowledgements

Recommended reading

Preface – going for gold

with friendly eyes

Since Mindset was first published in 2007 we have had many reactions from all over the world and from so many different directions for which we are more than grateful.

Readers have emailed and told us how the perception of story and action thinking have not just changed the way they look at sport but also their outlook in everyday life. Due to this we were inspired to write a second book Mindset in Daily Life.

Mindset is based on universal principles. It is not merely a mental guide for sport, but also an awareness guide, using tennis as a metaphor to realize how unconscious so much of our behaviour is. And also to give us the energy, courage and pleasure to work on our mindset in a simple and tangible fashion. ‘Friendly Eyes’ are the foundation of achieving a balanced mind. If you look with friendly eyes, objectively and non-judgmentally – not just at yourself but also at the world around you – emotions will lose their power over you.

The Mindset method is based on the belief that we have a choice as to how to approach the world and ourselves. We describe a course of life that you may decide to adopt.

One of the most touching stories was one I heard from a friendly-looking, middle-aged man who approached me after a presentation. He asked shyly for five minutes of my time and went on to tell me a fascinating story. It was about how he had changed his perception whilst going through a gruelling divorce involving a fight over the children. He realized that he was approaching his wife in a judgmental fashion, as a story thinker. Simply by constantly reminding himself to use friendly eyes and by raising his awareness to react as an action thinker, he managed to change not only his own anger, but his wife’s too, into a learning experience. Now they are separated and get on well and both have an excellent relationship with their children. It is these stories – perhaps even more than the many success stories in sport, which are also wonderful to hear – that make our hearts start beating faster.

Thanks to our readers, we have been inundated by ideas and tips about our account of how you can train your mindset. We use this feedback our courses and have created a free online video mental program to help people really understand the concepts in our books. My ideas were shaped by observations and experiences in my profession as a performance coach.

In preparation for the World Championships, the Dutch national women’s field hockey team worked with the Mindset method. Also the compound archer Peter Elzinga did this in his preparation for the Archery World Cup in Colombia. The hockey team and Peter Elzinga both won gold medals.

All these extremely disciplined elite athletes were willing to use and apply the simple and practical instruments of the Mindset method to go for gold with friendly eyes. They did this because they wanted to improve their mental focus and at the same time to enjoy the challenge of the matches even more. In my eyes these athletes have proven that passion and drive can be combined with friendliness for yourself and others. In this way, the battle field can become a playing field once again. And that is what Mindset is all about.

As a final note we would like to thank everyone who has supported us and who helps us to remain in action thinking. It’s a never-ending process, but one we thoroughly enjoy.

Jackie Reardon

Mindset as an adventure

THE WHY

This book is written for everyone who is looking for ways of achieving more balance and mental awareness. Why should you want to have more balance, and to be more resilient? Everyone is familiar with the constant noise of distracting thoughts that interferes with everything we’re doing and what we really want to be concentrating on. Sometimes it seems as if our heads are full of doubts, insecurities, and frustrations. It is like the constant buzz of mosquitoes that stops us achieving the sensation that we call ‘flow’ or ‘being in the zone’. And we all want to be in the zone in everything we do. Whether it’s taking part in sport, making a deadline, acting effectively at a meeting, or making music. We’d like to be able to keep those mosquitoes at bay, as much as possible. This book calls the constant noise of thoughts in the background ‘story thinking’, and we set out here to explain how to convert ‘story thinking’ into ­‘action thinking’. This book teaches you how to convert your mind with its endless noise and running commentary into a state of rest, balance, and awareness.

This book deals mainly with sport, although it is also important to see sport as a metaphor for life. We are convinced that you can achieve more rapid mental progress in sport if you try to achieve it in other areas of life as well. And it works both ways. If you change your mindset in sport, you’ll find it easier to change in everyday life.

Reading this book can be an adventure. We want to guide you, one step at a time, towards a better mindset. We want to teach you to use your strengths and recognize – and change − your weaknesses, whether you are a beginner or a top-ranked player, a recreational coach or someone who coaches professional players. What we hope to achieve is that even during a difficult match or a tough training session you can enjoy yourself, because you’re able to relax and concentrate at the same time, and get the best out of yourself. And you’ll find that you can apply this progress to all kinds of situations in everyday life.

Why is this book called Mindset? A ‘mindset’ is a way of thinking. A ­mentally strong player has a particular way of thinking, which we call ‘action thinking’. We refer to the opposite way of thinking as ‘story thinking’. This book explains how story thinking can be changed into action thinking.

More and more players now realize the overriding importance of the mental side of sport, and know that you can improve your game ­immensely by working on it. Dwelling too long on your mistakes, focusing too much on the score, playing against yourself: everyone knows that these things happen during matches, causing you to tense up and make unnecessary mistakes. Of course technique is an indispensable part of the game at every level, but our emphasis here is on the mental side of sport rather than technique. The understanding you can gain here can certainly be used while you are working on improving your technique: you can learn to make the improvements you want in an enjoyable way. You do this by changing the habit patterns of your mind. We shall give you tools that will help you to set about improving and strengthening your mental powers. The key is to invest instead of to consume. If things are not going smoothly, trying to solve the problem by going off to take a few extra lessons is a form of consumerism that can have the opposite effect. You can’t expect a few hours of coaching to produce results without ­actively investing in your own plan for mental development.

Mindset will teach you how to conquer your fears and to calm your thoughts, using action thinking. In the tension of a match (or in the stress of everyday life) you may often find that you lose the sense of ease with which you perform to the best of your ability. Deploying the right instruments will evoke action thinking. During the game itself, scanning and zooming (observation) take over, and thoughts become clear by implementing The Instruments. We shall be basing ourselves here on the work of Dr. Robert Nideffer (attention control studies), to clarify this process. In our view, all thoughts should be disengaged once the action in the match has begun. Decisions should be taken instinctively. This may sound exaggerated or even peculiar, but if we listen to what leading sports personalities say about a ‘flow’, it always comes down to the same thing: ‘I didn’t think, I acted.’ Mindset enhances instinct.

Mindset has developed a vocabulary that is concrete, simple, modern and accessible. It is ‘accessible’ in the sense that the terminology is neutral/ objective rather than confrontational. Take this example. When a coach asks his pupil: ‘Is there any story thinking going on?’, it will have a very different impact than when he asks: ‘Why are you so tensed up?’We have seen in practice that this makes a world of difference. In fact we have even heard pupils of different sports telling each other that they were ‘in story thinking’, without any of the depressing, frustrating overtones that usually accompany such situations. In other words, this terminology tends to motivate people instead of making them feel hurt or put down and creates the necessary distance to observe your mental state instead of losing yourself.

And since the vocabulary is simple and even slightly amusing sometimes, it soon becomes clear where the work has to be done. It also gives the pupil more insight into his or her own ­responsibility. Better self-management gives people the energy they need to make changes.

Mindset provides coaches with a general framework for ­com­­mu­­ni­cating with their pupils, using one or two words instead of complex sentences. This makes it possible to communicate about the mental side of the game in a specific, simple and tangible manner. Coaches often use an awful lot of words, which has the unintentional effect of ‘helping’ their pupils stay in story thinking.

In this book, our philosophy is applied to sport. But the two mindsets can be applied to any activity, using sport as a metaphor.

Consider, for a moment, the different ways in which someone may make music. The story thinker plays notes. Technically, everything may be perfect, but there is not the slightest bit of feeling in the way he plays. His mind is filled with too many thoughts that are buzzing noisily in the background, as mosquitoes do. The action thinker interprets. For him, the notes are just a basis to go on. ‘That was played with great feeling’ is a comment that has nothing to do with story thinking and everything to do with action thinking.

The same applies to communication. Sometimes you may fill in all the gaps yourself when someone is trying to tell you something. What you hear fits precisely into the image that you already had of the person. This is the story thinker’s judgment. It may turn out to be very surprising if you listen with more empathy and try, without making any judgment, to understand the real motives behind the person’s words. You may suddenly realize that you’ve never listened to him or her properly before, with the action thinker’s attention, but were already thinking up your own story or answer while he was still speaking. In other words, you were stuck in the thoughts of story thinking instead of the feeling of action thinking.

We do not claim that our approach is the one and only way of ­achieving your potential in sport. Many roads lead to Rome. We are convinced, however, that everyone who adopts an open mind to our approach can benefit from it and become a more complete human being. The inspiration for this book was drawn from Jackie’s experience as a coach leading over a hundred tennis holidays since 1991, the insight training of S.N. Goenka (‘Vipassana’), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey and the books of Eckhart Tolle. These were the signposts that helped to keep us on course. Another source of inspiration was ‘The Power of Full Engagement’ by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. Their ideas and approach helped to shape our ideas for the Personal Success Plan (psp), which at the end of this book will help you choose a single mental goal that is most relevant to you.

For those who are interested in more background reading, we would recommend the following books: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, Mindset by Carol Dweck (which was written at the same time as ‘our’ Mindset), and Headspace by Andy Puddicombe. They all present scientific facts and insights that are very much in line with our own method.

Mindset in a nutshell

Our philosophy

All around us, there are signs of a movement away from the lifestyle and way of thinking that are associated with the rat race towards a more conscious way of living and thinking. Mindfulness, slowing down the pace of life and stress management are all terms that no longer sound vague or esoteric. We call the traditional mentality of judging, rationalizing and attachment to the past and the future ‘story thinking’. The new way of thinking that Mindset advocates is governed by observing non-judgmentally, visualizing and focusing on the here and now by giving quality to everything you do. We call this balanced mindset ‘action thinking’.

By changing your mindset, you will get the best out of yourself, and you will find yourself able to do far more than before with the same level of skill.

Reviews for Mindset

[Maria Angelica · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Superb book not just for athletes but for normal people who play sports. It not only changes how you think of your game but it also unlocks a different perspective of winning.