“I think we defeat ourselves sometimes mentally before we even hear ‘3, 2, 1 go!’ And just learning how to identify the stuff and get better would make a huge difference,” says HQ Seminar Staff member Miranda Oldroyd.
In this series on the mental aspects of performance, sports psychologist Dawn Fletcher evaluates Oldroyd’s mental performance through an exercise. In Part 1, she instructed Oldroyd to identify the trait that is holding her back from an optimal experience or performance during CrossFit workouts.
In Part 2, Fletcher asks two people who know Oldroyd well what they would choose as her trait. Games athlete Chris Spealler and HQ Director of Training Dave Castro choose traits for her and discuss their choices. From there, Fletcher digs deeper into Oldroyd’s self-chosen trait to see whether it’s actually the one that’s holding her back, and then she looks at how to shut down that trait.
Fletcher says that this is just one exercise of many “to help you realize maybe what’s keeping you from performing your best and having a really good experience.”
5min 57sec
Additional reading: Coaching the Mental Side of CrossFit by Greg Amundson, published July 7, 2010.