MINDSET MATTERS

Train your mind along with your body.

Remember the last time you watched your favourite team win a game?

Or got freaked out by a horror movie?

Or imagine something terrible happening to someone you love?

What was that like? Remember that.

Notice how your body reacts.

Your heart beats faster. You start sweating, feeling excited or anxious. It’s as if you were scoring that winning goal, or running away from the guy with the axe.

Nothing is happening to you. You’re just watching or imagining stuff. But what you’re feeling is real.

This is because you use the same parts of your brain to imagine things as you do actually to experience them.

To our brains:

• what we think is “reality.”

• what we observe in ourselves and others is “reality.”

• what we imagine is “reality.”

What we think, see, and imagine it becomes “true”.

Whether you’re watching, imagining, thinking about something, or doing it: to your brain, it’s all the same stuff.

Your mind is powerful

This is why we focus on your mental game as well as your physical body.

What are you imagining?

What thoughts are you focusing on?

If you focus on your destination and mentally rehearse how you’re going to get there, you’re more likely to succeed.

If you focus on being a problem-solver, someone who meets challenges with resilience and creativity, that’s what you will be.

Conversely, if you focus on “failures” or setbacks (whatever you imagine those to be), your body and behaviour will respond. You’ll feel demoralised and paralysed — you’ll feel stuck and hopeless.