How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life - Softcover

Rotella, Dr. Bob

 
9781476788647: How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476788642 ISBN 13: 9781476788647
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

This New York Times bestselling, groundbreaking guide to success from America’s preeminent sports psychologist is “so good that this reviewer has recommended it to all, golfers and non-golfers alike” (Library Journal, starred review).

Acclaimed sports psychologist Bob Rotella has advised everyone from professional golfers to NBA superstars to business executives on how to flourish under pressure and overcome challenges. “Rotella’s philosophy is astonishingly simple…his success rate…is phenomenal” (The New York Times). Now, for the first time, he’s distilled his decades of in-depth research and practical experience into a potential-unlocking guide for everyone, from businesspeople to athletes to parents.

Most psychology is focused on trying to make abnormal people normal. Bob Rotella’s work is to make normal people exceptional. “Intriguing and persuasive” (Publishers Weekly), How Champions Think takes readers inside the minds of winners in many fields. It explores how to keep the mind from holding you back, whatever your physical gifts or other talents. It’s about how to make a commitment, how to persevere, how to deal with failure. It’s about how to train your mind to create a self-image that promotes confidence and accomplishment.

Any successful life starts with how you see yourself. And with these pearls of wisdom from the nation’s preeminent sports psychologist, you can learn to achieve the success of your dreams. “Straightforward and simple...Do the math. Read Rotella” (The Wall Street Journal).

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dr. Bob Rotella is the bestselling author of a dozen books, including Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, The Unstoppable Golfer, and How Champions Think. He was the director of sport psychology for twenty years at the University of Virginia, where his reputation grew as the expert champions talked to him about the mental aspects of their game. Rotella was a consultant multiple times to the United States Ryder Cup Team. His golf client list includes Hall of Famers Pat Bradley, Tom Kite, Davis Love III, and Nick Price, as well as many of today’s stars, such as Justin Thomas, Darren Clarke, Jim Furyk, Padraig Harrington, Brad Faxon, and Rory McIlroy. A long-time consultant to Golf Digest, he lives in Virginia with his wife, Darlene.

Bob Cullen is the coauthor, with Dr. Bob Rotella, of Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect and other bestselling works on the mental game. A former contributing editor at Travel & Leisure Golf, he has reported on courses from datelines as diverse as Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Iran.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

This New York Times bestselling, groundbreaking guide to success from America’s preeminent sports psychologist is “so good that this reviewer has recommended it to all, golfers and non-golfers alike” (Library Journal, starred review).

Acclaimed sports psychologist Bob Rotella has advised everyone from professional golfers to NBA superstars to business executives on how to flourish under pressure and overcome challenges. “Rotella’s philosophy is astonishingly simple…his success rate…is phenomenal” (The New York Times). Now, for the first time, he’s distilled his decades of in-depth research and practical experience into a potential-unlocking guide for everyone, from businesspeople to athletes to parents.

Most psychology is focused on trying to make abnormal people normal. Bob Rotella’s work is to make normal people exceptional. “Intriguing and persuasive” (Publishers Weekly), How Champions Think takes readers inside the minds of winners in many fields. It explores how to keep the mind from holding you back, whatever your physical gifts or other talents. It’s about how to make a commitment, how to persevere, how to deal with failure. It’s about how to train your mind to create a self-image that promotes confidence and accomplishment.

Any successful life starts with how you see yourself. And with these pearls of wisdom from the nation’s preeminent sports psychologist, you can learn to achieve the success of your dreams. “Straightforward and simple...Do the math. Read Rotella” (The Wall Street Journal).

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How Champions Think

1.

What LeBron James Has in Common with Pat Bradley

I HAVE BEEN privileged to spend my life helping people who want to be exceptional. A desire to be exceptional may not in itself strike you as unusual. Everyone, as a kid, has daydreams in which he catches the touchdown pass as time expires to win the Super Bowl, or she pole-vaults sixteen feet to win an Olympic gold medal. But I’m not talking about daydreams or about the unrealized fantasies of many adults. I’m talking about a desire so fierce that it changes a person’s life. Exceptional people begin with just such ambitions. From them, I’ve learned how a champion’s thoughts are different from the thoughts of most people. That difference is what this book is about.

I’ve worked with the winners of eighty-four major golf championships on the men’s, women’s, and senior tours. I’ve worked with Olympic gold medalists in the equestrian sports. I’ve worked with NCAA champions in track and field, soccer, lacrosse, and basketball. I’ve worked with winners of major tennis tournaments. Three of the five players in the history of the PGA Tour to shoot a competitive 59—Chip Beck, David Duval, and Jim Furyk—were working with me when they did it. I’ve worked with exceptionally successful people in the entertainment and business worlds. Each of them has taught me something about the minds of exceptional people.

They have confirmed my belief that the ideas people choose to have about themselves largely determine the quality of the lives they lead. We can choose to believe in ourselves, and thus to strive, to risk, to persevere, and to achieve. Or we can choose to cling to security and mediocrity. We can choose to set no limits on ourselves, to set high goals and dream big dreams. We can use those dreams to fuel our spirits with passion. Or we can become philosophers of the worst kind, inventing ways to rationalize our failures, inventing excuses for mediocrity. We can fall in love with our own abilities and our own potential, then choose to maximize those abilities. Or we can decide that we have no special talents or abilities and try to be happy being safe and comfortable.

As I’ve worked, I’ve been troubled at times by the realization that the champions I know are becoming more atypical—too exceptional, if you will. Our grandparents and great-grandparents migrated and struggled for many years to give us the freedom we now have, a precious birthright. We’re free to choose what we’re going to think about ourselves. No one can stop us from chasing our dreams. Yet many people today choose to squander this birthright. They choose to believe that because of where they were born or who their parents are, they don’t have a fair chance in life. They’re choosing to believe that the competition—from America and around the world—is just too tough. They’re choosing to believe in someone else’s talent more than their own. They’re choosing to be mediocre.

I’m always telling people that I don’t care what their families or their schools or their communities said or thought about them. I tell them, “You’re an adult now, and you get to decide.” So what’s the decision going to be? You get to write your life story. Will you be heroic or just someone trying to get by? Will you be the star or someone sitting on the end of the bench?

I have no trouble with someone who strives to be the best and finishes in the middle of the pack. There’s honor in that. I don’t see that person as a failure. To the contrary, he will come to the end of his days with a smile on his face, because he spent the time and talent God gave him having a ball, finding out how good he could get. He will not be the person who goes to the grave thinking, “If only I’d been as talented as, say, LeBron James! My life would have been great!”

In fact, such a person doesn’t have an inkling of the most important talent LeBron James has. Nor does he know he could have chosen to have that talent himself. I know, because I’ve heard about it from the source.

Some years ago, I got a call from Lance Blanks, who was then the assistant general manager of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. I’d known Lance since his days as a basketball player for the University of Virginia, where I taught and helped the athletic program as a sports psychologist. Lance wanted to know if I would spend a day talking with LeBron, then (and now again) the cornerstone of Cleveland’s franchise. I was happy to say yes.

I knew something about LeBron, of course. I knew the outer dimensions. He was six-eight, weighed two hundred fifty chiseled pounds, and had explosive speed. I knew he had been perhaps the most publicized high school basketball player since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was known as Lew Alcindor. I knew he’d been the NBA’s number one draft choice the year he finished high school and I knew he’d been a very successful professional for the Cavaliers. But until I had a chance to talk to him, I didn’t know the most important thing about LeBron.

“I want to be the greatest basketball player in history,” he told me.

“Beautiful,” I thought. “This is a truly talented guy.”

It was not that he had the physical gifts. It was LeBron’s mind.

I’ve been encountering his kind of attitude on occasion for more than three decades, and when I have encountered it, I have almost always had the pleasure of working with someone truly exceptional. One of my first clients in this category was someone who could hardly have been physically more different from LeBron, professional golfer Pat Bradley. Pat had average size and average clubhead speed; nothing about her initial appearance would suggest athletic ability to most people. And that was not even the most significant difference. LeBron had been a prodigy of whom much was expected from the time he was maybe fourteen years old. Pat had grown up in golfing obscurity. She was a girl from New England, which is not a cradle of golfers because of the short golf season up north. She hadn’t gone to one of the colleges that traditionally has a strong women’s golf team. LeBron would have disappointed a lot of people if he hadn’t made himself into a great basketball player. Pat, had she been mediocre, would only have confirmed people’s expectations. When I met her, she’d been a professional golfer for eleven years, and she’d won one tournament.

I asked her about her dreams and goals.

Almost diffidently, Pat said she wanted to win the LPGA Player of the Year award. She wanted to have the tour’s lowest scoring average. She wanted to win all of the women’s major championships. And she wanted to make the LPGA Hall of Fame. At the time, an LPGA player had to win thirty tournaments, including two majors, to be eligible for the Hall of Fame. It was the highest Hall of Fame hurdle in sports.

She asked me if I thought she could do these things.

I said, “I don’t know if you can do them, but I’m excited to work with someone who has your dreams.”

In the next ten years or so, Pat achieved all of those goals. So I certainly didn’t discourage LeBron from thinking he could be the greatest. I just asked him where he thought he stood with regard to that goal.

Sometimes, when I...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476788642
ISBN 13 
9781476788647
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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