Mindset and the Art of Creating Good Habits

Bridging the Gap Podcast

Practitioner: Donald Christensen

Don grew up playing golf with his family, and began to play more competitively as time went on. In high school he won four state titles in Washington State. His skills helped him get a scholarship to play golf at Stanford University (pre-Tiger he added in). He cites being exposed to some mental coaching as youngster (i.e. reading The Inner Game of Tennis) as the spark the interest that would influence his career choice.

After finishing at Stanford Don attended the University of Washington where he obtained his PHD in Clinical Psychology. During his time at UW and following Don worked with various athletic teams at the school and teams in the community. He currently works for Shoreline Community College, where he has been a professor of psychology since 2004. Additionally he works part time as a consultant for athletes in the local Seattle area.

Links:

Author: https://www.shoreline.edu/dchris/donchris/

Quotes:

“What I typically tell people is, if you wanted to have six pack abs could you do that in a day? Unless you are going to a plastic surgeon, that’s not going to happen. The same thing is true with mental skills…if you devote the right effort over a sustained period of time, they grow and they change.”

“Mental skills are very much like physical muscles, if you train them properly they will change.”

“By their nature, habits kind of, at least initially, operate outside of our awareness. So with this mental work…you are hopefully bringing awareness to those habits and modifying them to allow them to serve you.”

“The first stage is control by others, the second stage is control by yourself, and then the last stage is automatic.”

“The argument is the best execution of those actions comes when you move into the final stage and it’s automatic.”

“If you are relying upon reminders to yourself to do something, particularly when pressure comes it’s not a recipe for successful behavior. It’s not a recipe for high performance, in fact you will probably underperform.”

“I like the notion of a sports psychologist as a facilitator as opposed to expert. I mean ya, we have some training and some knowledge that people may not have, but I like this idea of people becoming their own coach.”

“I usually joke with athlete, I tell them that I hope you mess up majorly while you work with me because what we will do in the aftermath is we will review it.”

“When we fail, when we struggle, when things don’t go well, we often don’t want to revisit those moments.”

“What if it’s not failure, what if it’s feedback?”

“When we get excessively anxious, we are actually impairing the pre-frontal cortex. You can actually see it being inhibited, and that’s one major piece of the brain we are going to rely upon to that kind of mental talk yourself through it work. So we are handicapping the very part of our nervous system that we would need to be able to use to pull off that kind of execution. I think better to learn that skill beyond that, so that again its automatic, it’s habitual. Such that, when that part of the brain is impaired it really doesn’t matter because you are using a different aspect of yourself to do what you are doing.”

“The brain goes to what’s familiar. That’s where it wants to return. Is that good thing or a bad thing? It depends on what’s familiar.”