PDP Co-Founder Dave Wright & Positive Psychology expert Lara Mossman discussing how to control emotions in sports. We can’t expect youth soccer players to show great emotional control all of the time. It’s sometimes easy to forget, but they’re not mini-adults — they don’t have the same capacity to control their emotions as we do, and we shouldn’t expect them to. But that doesn’t mean we can’t help. We can still teach our young players how to understand and manage their emotions. And this education…
mindfulness
Aidan Moran The Big Idea When it comes to research in cognitive psychology, until fairly recently there had been little interest in studying sport-related mentality. In its early history, the typical cognitive psychology researcher was quite comfortable interpreting human mental activity as information processing, as something computer-like. By implication, motor behaviour (the body) was considered to be independent of thinking. The consequence was to reduce motor skills such as sports to a rather uninteresting research status. And which in turn helped to trivialise sport actions and…
Susan Salzbrenner, founder of Fit Across Cultures discusses mindfulness and its benefits to athlete performance. Dennis was concentrating. “This is it. You got this! Stay focused. Just like in practice. Don’t miss this. It will cost us the game”. With the last seconds on the clock, he takes the last free throw. The score is 79-79. He shoots and …misses. A routine situation like a free throw in basketball, a serve in volleyball, or a penalty in football or hockey are habits that you have practiced…
There is a wave rising, about to crest, and the best in the world are already riding it. This wave is mindfulness – a simple, but by no means easy, mental practice. The practice of mindfulness is not new; in fact, it has been around for centuries and is most commonly associated with Buddhism. What is new, however, is the attention it is garnering from science, business, education and sport. AC Milan were football’s trailblazers in this area, creating a mysterious ‘Mind Room’ in the mid-2000s. They…