What is Mental Performance?
The Secret to Winning at the Highest Levels
Mental performance is the combination of conscious and subconscious thoughts, feelings, and actions that dictate your ability to deliver results in any given situation. Whether you know it or not, mental performance is important to every aspect of your life. We all want to crush our goals and achieve personal bests but sometimes despite our best efforts, it all falls apart.
Have you ever noticed how some people rise to the occasion when things get tough and others tend to fold under adversity? Or how some people when given a task have laser focus, while others have scattered thoughts and lack follow through?
In life, unexpected things are going to come up, not go as planned or throw you off your game. Investing in your mental performance means you’ll be prepared so you have the ability to adapt and overcome whatever challenges come your way.
Mental performance is paramount to achieving your best because if you are unfocused, unconfident, and mentally weak, then you are not going to do well very often. You can spend all the time in the world preparing and training but if you don’t have the right attitude and mental skills to bring your best talents out when it matters the most, you will struggle to consistently perform well, and you will rarely perform your best.
6 Components Of Mental Performance
Everything that is happening consciously and subconsciously impacts your overall performance however we’ve identified 6 main components that make up your mental performance.
1. Grit / Mental Toughness
Mental toughness gives you resilience so you can confront and overcome difficult and competitive situations without losing confidence. This is critical because when things don’t go your way, you need to be able to rely on yourself to rise to the challenge instead of crumbling under the pressure. Inevitably, you will come up against a challenge that you cannot overcome, even after many failed attempts. You must persevere and redouble your efforts. Or you must rethink your strategy and try another approach despite how invested you were in the previous strategy. Ironically, It takes humility to be mentally tough.
2. Confidence
When you have complete faith in yourself, you know that you will succeed no matter what life throws at you. That is self-confidence. You won’t achieve much of anything if you don’t first believe that you can. Doubt kills the warrior. Peak performance requires that you have ultimate confidence in your skills and abilities, your identity, your purpose, and your mission. You may get a lucky win every once in a while and doubt yourself on other days, but consistent success requires persistent, unshakeable belief in yourself.
3. Intention
Intention is your ability to know who you are, what you want, and how you want to show up in the world. Once you get clear on your intentions, you can more easily put them into action. Having a clear intention and consistently doing what you set out to do is life-changing. This is key to your mental performance because it focuses on the purpose of your performance and sets a clear measure of what success would look like. When you set yourself up to get what you want out of your life, you will end up feeling fulfilled.
4. Focus
Being able to concentrate on the task at hand is a superpower in the modern culture of multitasking and instant gratification. Imagine if you could tap into that superpower whenever you wanted - harnessing all of your mental energy and directing it towards one goal at a time, one project within that goal, one task within that project, all of your attention on one task in that very moment. What could you do with that superpower? Strong mental performance allows you to laser in on whatever activity or goal you are working toward without distraction.
5. Mindset
Your mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. Your mindset is key to your mental performance because it influences how you think, feel, and react in any given situation. By consciously changing your mindset, you have control over how you see the world, how you perceive other people, how you interpret information and make decisions, as well as how you go about behaving and performing in your life. It’s not an easy task to switch from frustrated to focused or from assertive to empathetic, but it is the mark of a mature human to adapt one’s mindset to whatever the situation in which we find ourselves calls for.
6. Presence
Presence is your ability to be fully conscious of the moment and free from the noise of internal dialogue. It is often associated with feelings of stillness and peace. Being right here, right now, means you aren’t caught up in analyzing the past in order to make a better future, or anxious about the future that might come if we don’t change now.
These mental activities have their place in contemplative thought but many people bounce between these modes of thought incessantly. Rather than obsessively regurgitating thoughts, when you can live in the moment you can observe the world around you to see what is going on right now, listen to the people around you to hear what they mean to say, and trust your understanding of the world around you while being open to receiving new information.
Putting it all together
Working on your mental performance is a process but one worth investing in. When you take the first step towards your goals, you transform your mental performance into the physical world. But it doesn’t end there. What if your first step is a misstep? You can’t give up now, you’ve only just begun. Grit and mental toughness keep you on the path. So you charge ahead and try again. This time you succeed and it builds confidence because the hard work paid off. Fill your confidence bucket to the brim but don’t overfill it. Overconfidence puts unnecessary pressure on you to win next time which takes you out of the present moment.
A strategic mindset will facilitate the development of your intentions into a plan of action. Harnessing your focus magnifies the first step in your plan until it is all you can see and do when the time is right. Get present to only the task in front of you and allow your newfound confidence to fuel your enthusiasm but keep in mind that failure is possible, and failure is temporary.
You’ll need to clear your mind of the past so you can focus on the now and release worry and expectations from your future so you don’t cloud your judgment in this moment. When your mind is clear of negative thoughts and associations, you can direct its state of being towards more productive purposes. You can set intentions that are in alignment with your goals, dreams, aspirations, and higher purpose.
Since you can choose to have and embody the mindset of anyone, choose to become a champion. There is a level of joy that comes from doing things well, getting positive results, and achieving what you set out to accomplish. Having strong mental performance creates the opportunity to succeed in all aspects of life more often. What’s left is taking action, so go out there and do your best, be bold and do it already!
