Ever wondered how Ellyse Perry
and Sally Fitzgibbons became
such legends? Talent, yes –
but they also use these
strategies to get
to the top.
L
aura Geitz has her super defense
skills. Cate Campbell has her
stunning freestyle stroke. Ellyse
Perry has a bowling arm that
seriously scares her opponents...
and a kick that seriously scares her opponents
(yes, Ellyse is the dictionary definition of an
overachiever). And all of them have – their
brains. Yep. When it comes to competing
among the world’s most elite athletes, talent
and dedication are simply not enough. To win,
athletes turn to sports psychologists, who
train them to drown out negativity and switch
on a winning mindset. But it doesn’t have to
stop with sport – you can learn from their
techniques, too.WORDSLAUREN SAMSPHOTOGRAPHYGETTY IMAGESWinWin
winwin
win
no matter
what
IF YOU NEED HELP
FOCUSING
When you want to win, you need to focus. nd
there’s one thing that has been proven to help with
focus: meditation. It can really help with giving
a task your full attention. So if you’re the kind of
person who can’t finish their homework without
checking Insta 24 times an hour, it’s is for you.
Basketball great Michael Jordan was a meditator
and as the Australian Sports Commission explains,
meditation trains an athlete to relax and reduces
stimulation to the brain – you calm your nervous
system and get stress under control, handy if
you wanna be on top of your game. Get the
Headspace app from the App Store now.IF YOU NEED HELP WITH
YOUR ATTITUDE
So your birthday party got rained out. Your
mum was late to pick you up for ballet... again.
It’d be tempting to see these as setbacks, but be
real – you’ve got no control over any of these.
You do have control over how you respond.
Athletes are trained to focus their energy on
things they can control, and forget the rest. Dr
Jay P. Granat, a sports psychologist, says being
able to bounce back is one of the qualities of
a great champion – something you can learn to
master when you don’t do so well.IF YOU NEED HELP WITH GOALS
We often link happiness with goal-setting, so happiness can
be delayed until we reach our goals. Instead, athletes are
trained to enjoy the process which can be gruelling – think
5am starts and pushing themselves to the limit. There
might not always be a world-record or gold medal waiting
for them, so as performance consultant Jeffrey Hodges says,
they must learn to happily achieve, rather than achieve to
be happy. “Achievement is a process, not an end result.” So
they get happiness from a good training session or knowing
they were better than last time as well.IF YOU NEED HELP
WITH FAILURE
Sports psychologist Rob Polishook
trains athletes to prepare their minds for
competition – and they can’t win all the
time. Polishook says failure is inevitable,
but also “the breakfast of champions”. As
he explains; to learn, you need failure to
find better methods. Risks, experiments
and curiosity are all great and while they
can lead to failure, they can also lead to
success! With failure, you can find your
weakenesses and strengthen up.1
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