121. How To Influence Performance Through Thoughts, Feelings, And Behavior

Sports Mastery

In this episode, I had a magnificent conversation with Sugey Gomez, MA Sport Psychology. Sugey (Sue-hay) is currently working on her Doctorate in Sport Psychology. She's also a practicing certified holistic health coach.

Sugey shares her thoughts on:

?Thoughts > Feelings > Behavior

1. The idea that one’s thoughts directly influence ones feelings, which then impact ones behavior/reactions.

In other words, misguided or inappropriate thinking usually leads to negative feelings and poor performance, just as good thinking enables feelings and good performance.

2. Mental skills being life skills too.

3. Importance of self-awareness.

Awareness, the first step to making change.

Definition: noticing or creating recognition about areas such as what is going on in one’s body and mind, as well as what is going on around you. For example, as a mental skills coach/practitioners (my job as I am training as a sport psychology student), is to help clients first become aware of what they are experiencing, and then make positive changes to the way they think and feel, (and yes, how they perform) but first the athlete must be able to take note of what is happening internally.

Example: Athlete is losing focus at key moments then some sort of refocusing technique might be helpful. If, however, they are not aware of losing focus in the moment, then the refocusing technique won’t actually be useful. Often times, work needs to begin around building the athlete’s own awareness of the way they think and feel in certain moments in their sport experience, and then you can move on to teaching of techniques.