Chs. 3,4,5

Affirmations, Breathing, Meditation, Imagery

“The only difference between the best performance and the worst performance is the variation in our self-talk and the self-thoughts and attitudes we carry around with us.” (Harris qtd. 21)

How does one keep control of our self-talk? That inner story line that often seems beyond our control? I think that it is agreed that the quality and make-up of that inner libretto determines our reality to a large extent. I am reminded of a scene in Star Wars where Qui-Gon Jin tells a young Anikin to be careful because “your focus determines your reality.” I suppose this where the next chapter on breathing and meditation could help. If we can distance ourselves a bit from our thoughts, we could then consciously choose which thoughts we allow. This is important in one of the Buddha’s early sutras where he instructs the monks to foster good thoughts and disallow bad thoughts.

“One of the more positive long-term outcomes of learning meditation and the skill of being passively detached is carrying this skill into your sport.” (34)

If you can detach from all the mental and emotional “static” in your head through regular meditation practice, then it stands to reason that you could do the same to any negative self-talk during an event. How about a workout? Could you do this during the everyday grind of hard training to improve motivation?

“...imagery is the result of this two-way communication street. S o instead of processing visual information from the outside, a visual signal is processed from within.”(40-41)

“So if we practice... we are actually strengthening the memory of that database. And vice versa. W hen we practice our imagery and visualization work, we are also giving more access to that memory.” (42)

It appears that our brains do not really distinguish that much between images developed from observing the outside world and images that are developed from our own internal thinking. It all gets processed as memories. So our memories of past performances, good or bad, will affect our current feelings and confidence level. Past negative experiences perceived through memory will tend to cause new problems to occur. But past memories of success can give us confidence and improve performance. If images that we choose to focus on are perceived the same as, or similar to, the memories that we know can affect us in many ways, then we should be able to set ourselves up for success or failure through imagery. My question is: is there a different degree of potency to images generated internally compared to those we processed from the outside? It seems to me that external stimuli affect us more powerfully than our own thoughts. But their similarity cannot be ignored, but instead harnessed.