Mental agility for athletes -
Published October 13, · Updated August 31, How do you deal with uncertainty? How do you handle unexpected events? How do you react to change? Do you panic and avoid dealing with the situation or do you look at the situation with curiosity, explore alternative ways to move forward and pivot, if need be?
The ability to think on your feet and solve problems by quickly moving between different ideas is the key to creativity at work. Mental agility makes you confidently step up and solve difficult problems when everyone else is taken aback by an unpredictable situation or an unforeseen circumstance and wondering how to deal with it.
Mental agility is necessary to innovate, embrace change, and thrive in the face of uncertainty. Building mental agility requires radically transforming your thinking for both speed and accuracy. It involves the ability for smarter reasoning by asking meaningful questions, drawing insights and analyzing situations with better mental clarity.
However, you can learn to think in a flexible way—accept change, find the next best course of action and quickly move forward instead of being stuck in one place.
It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change. Many people mistake mental agility with toxic positivity—they deny their emotions and keep pushing forward no matter what comes their way.
Mental agility is not toxic positivity, it is optimism blended with reality. Your default wiring to fight and resist change makes an unexpected situation feel like a threat.
Unless you consciously fight the urge to give in to your emotions, feelings of helplessness that such situations tend to evoke will make you mentally rigid and shut down thinking. If you want to be present to the needs of a changing workplace and thrive in uncertainty, follow these 5 key practices to achieve gains in performance, develop greater focus, and enhance thinking.
When you do things you have always done or the ones that make you comfortable, you give limited opportunities to your brain to grow. Your brain learns to associate certainty with safety and anything uncertain as a threat.
Sitting within the bounds of your comfort zone makes mental agility impossible—how can you think quickly in an unpredictable situation when your mind is engulfed with fear, anxiety and worry?
Pushing yourself to do new things or the ones that make you uncomfortable tunes your brain to accept discomfort as a part of life—you stop seeing change as a threat, become more open to diverse ideas and learn to navigate complexity instead of avoiding it. When your brain is not overwhelmed by strong emotions, it can think clearly.
You can move quickly between different ideas and respond to events in a flexible way. Use this habit tracker printable template to record your daily, weekly and monthly habits and see how you are progressing.
Real change is difficult at the beginning, but gorgeous at the end. Change begins the moment you get the courage and step outside your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone. When finding a solution to a problem, most of us settle for the first best idea that comes to mind.
We hardly take the initiative to explore alternatives or consider other viewpoints. Mental agility requires building curiosity to seek multiple solutions to a problem, weighing their pros and cons, identifying the best one in the moment, taking action and moving on.
Doing this for problems you face on a regular basis makes this process automatic—it becomes a habit. Your brain learns to quickly absorb new information, draw connections between ideas and find the best course of action to move forward.
It allows you to look at things differently and come up with new solutions to problems. Without curiosity, you accept the status quo and assume things only work a certain way.
Work through complex problems, identify correlations, and see the big picture using these mind map worksheets. Have you recently taken notice of how you spend your mental energy? Focusing on events, circumstances and conditions beyond your control makes you feel powerless and helpless—your mind gets busy obsessing about the problem and fails to consider the possibilities.
By default, it chooses the path of least effort which is to blame it on someone or something else and absolve itself from its responsibility. Shifting your default response to act constructively requires a conscious effort. Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.
Bennett, The Light in the Heart. You build mental agility. When you believe that your personality is fixed and no amount of effort can change it, you already accept defeat. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist calls it a fixed mindset. As I explain in my book Upgrade Your Mindset , a person with a fixed mindset believes that people are born with special talents and every person has different abilities and intelligence that cannot get better with time, effort, and determination.
Your personality is nothing but a result of this mindset. Growth mindset on the other hand keeps you learning and growing by giving you the power to shape yourself into the person you wish to become.
Research from Carol Dweck and multiple other psychologists has shown that even our deepest psychological traits can change over time with deliberate interventions.
For more strategies on growth mindset, check out my book Upgrade Your Mindset which provides practical strategies to build a growth mindset for life. Cultivate kindness and strength in the face of difficulty and foster a new, more gentle and loving perspective on your struggles.
Mindset Matters By Gemma Leigh Roberts. The Art of Clear Thinking By Patrick King. My mission is to help people succeed at work. While most agility training focuses on methods and processes, mental agility is critical for success.
Mental agility is the ability to quickly shift between having laser-focus and seeing the bigger picture. Laser-focus zooming in and seeing the bigger picture zooming out are needed for high performance in uncertain environments.
When zooming in, we remain present, engaged with our tasks, and efficient. We are focused on critical details and our important priorities. We can execute our tasks with precision and excellence. When zooming out, we identify our larger priorities and find comfort with complexity.
We can see what new skills are needed to survive and maintain an openness to learning them. We can better strategize and make fresh connections between different things. Unfortunately, our brains are not naturally wired for agility.
We have a difficult time zooming in and finding laser-focus. The average employee loses 2. We also have a difficult time zooming out to grasp the bigger picture.
Research shows that as the brain experiences distraction, it loses the ability to solve problems flexibly and set priorities.
And in addition to our own natural inclinations, stress makes things worse. We have a negativity bias that routinely scans for bad news, which the brain fixates on with tunnel vision, losing our sense of overview. Zooming out has become increasingly difficult in a pandemic age where life is fraught with uncertainties and the unknown.
The good news is that mental agility can be trained. It is a critical building block for success as we move into this next chapter of business and life.
Cultivating a habit of mental agility can help you:. There are both short- and long-term strategies for enhancing focus and seeing the bigger picture, which can lead to gains in performance, innovation, and resilience. For example, in the short-term, we can block out time in our calendar to zoom in on our priorities without interruption and to zoom out by taking a walk or exercise break which research shows enhances creativity and holistic thinking.
In the long-term, we can develop mental agility by formally training the mind. So how mentally agile are you, your people, and your organization? Do you have the practices in place to help you not only get laser-focused, but to also keep the bigger picture in mind? As we march forward into this new world of work, devoting time to the development of your own mental agility just may be the key to thriving in a post-pandemic world filled with constant change and increasing complexity.
Learn how Potential Project helps individuals and teams build the mindsets for success.
How long is the qthletes Is agiltiy program and exam atthletes What makes ACE's program different? Call Mdntal Mental agility for athletes now! Anxiety support groups training is crucial to helping increase awareness and decision-making on the field or court. Think of it this way: Agility is the ability to move quickly and change direction with ease, which is just one of the outcomes of cognitive awareness drills. Here are five great cognitive awareness drills that will help your athletes enhance their performance during competition.
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