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The Basketball Podcast: EP364 with Lindsey Wilson on Belief as a Skill
In this week’s coaching conversation, mindset and mental performance coach Lindsey Wilson joins the Basketball Podcast to discuss belief as a skill.
Lindsey Wilson is a mindset and mental performance coach best known as The Sports Hypnotist™. With a professional basketball career spanning close to a decade, Lindsey took her knowledge of the mental game to work with collegiate athletes, professional athletes from Olympians and players in the NFL and WNBA, all the way to youth athletes.
She is the founder of Positive Performance™ and The Mindset Coach Academy™ where she helps aspiring mental performance coaches start their dream business and impact lives. She’s also the author of the upcoming book Think Like an Athlete which teaches the critical and undertrained skill of belief and how to build it to be successful on the playing field and off.
Lindsey’s exposure to mental performance came at age 16 and completely changed her perspective on how to navigate physical training with her mental barriers. She also learned the power of belief and importance of consistently training it to achieve the highest goals. Despite a successful career, she did fall short of her ultimate athletic goals but is using that experience and message to create and surpass her professional goals! Her mission is to teach mental performance tools so that coaches can have a massive impact on athletes’ performance, enjoyment of competing and life.
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Lindsey Wilson Quotes:
“I really believe in the transformational power of sports . . it is this amazing opportunity to teach life skills to youth. And sometimes people walk away with these amazing skills, and sometimes maybe they don’t.”
“I had an amazing collegiate and professional career, and that was really because of the mental game. You need a little bit of talent and you definitely need hard work, and I had those. But until I got the mental game, I was going nowhere fast. And that [mental game] really changed my life.”
“When you look at elite athletes, . . the thing they really have to do that is so hard . . is they have to keep belief alive. In psychology terms you might call this self-efficacy, the ability to believe that you are able to accomplish something.”
“One thing we know about the brain is, it doesn’t want to waste energy and it doesn’t want to move towards discomfort . . Anytime you’re pushing yourself, you’re getting out of your comfort zone, which is really the antithesis of what the brain wants. And it’s not going to do that unless it really believes that it is possible to accomplish the goal.”
“You’re not getting up at 5am if you don’t believe that it is going to pay off at some point . . And so, keeping that belief alive when it takes longer than you think it’s going to. And then, you have the belief during failure . . we call this resilience. We look at the evidence in front of us. I just lost a game, I just missed a game winning shot. To keep belief alive then is a skill and then finally to be able to believe under pressure.”
“The two things that we teach a lot are subconscious work. I teach a lot of hypnosis principles, but really anything like visualization, meditation, anything that’s really getting into our deep limiting thoughts is going to be really great, important work.”
“We all are preprogrammed to pay more attention to negativity . . we have 50 to 70,000 thoughts in our brain every day. A lot of times that’s rumination, a lot of times that’s repeating the negative. To offset that, we really have to be intentional about the positive.”
“We think our thoughts are facts. A real world example is, you’re overwhelmed and you think you don’t have enough time to do everything in your day . . That feels like an absolute fact . . And yet, that’s not actual fact. It is a thought about your day . . when you realize that your thoughts are not facts, you then start to question their validity and it opens your brain up to finding creative solutions. So, I might say, ‘I feel like I have too much to do today.’ What can I do? Can I ask for help? Can I take something off my plate? Can I ask for a favor? Can I put something off till tomorrow versus there is nothing I can do.”
“So it’s a deep breath, it’s a word or phrase, it’s a hand signal. And this really anchors the body in that moment . . essentially what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to stop your brain from taking off. You’re trying to get it to this moment. Right here is the only moment that matters. And I have something to do because, given nothing to do, it [your brain] is going to get on the negative train . . Having an anchor in that moment with a reset ritual is, I think, one of the most valuable things that you can teach your athletes.”
“Do you show up every day, even when you don’t want to, and push yourself? There is a huge psychological stress. It’s a good thing because it ends up making you a very resilient individual, but it is massively uncomfortable. It takes a lot of work. I think the piece that people really need to acknowledge and recognize is that it can be trained.”
“One of the funnest things as a mental performance coach is helping them take the good parts of being hard on themselves and turning it into boosting themselves up with love and toughness and maintaining standards and being excellent but not with that heaviness of nothing’s ever good enough.”
“We teach something called ‘critiquing versus criticizing.’ It’s the balance of being able to look at yourself or hear feedback from someone else in a way that is not emotional. This takes practice because it is hard, even for adults.”
Lindsey Wilson Breakdown:
Lindsey Wilson Selected Links from the Podcast:
Lindsey Wilson
Bill Fennelly
Edwina Brown
Diana Taurasi
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