Mindset: A Mental Guide for Sport

by Jackie Reardon

Learn to deal with pressure and enjoy challenges

This book teaches you how to deal with pressure and enjoy challenges. It guides you through the exact same exercises professional athletes, world-class performers and business leaders have done to perform at their very best when it matters most. You’ll get all the practical tools to train how to stay relaxed and focused at the same time under all circumstances.

Mindset describes a new way of thinking in sport. It is written for athletes of all playing levels, coaches and parents of children engaged in (competitive) sports. You will be able to convert anger, impatience, tension and frustration into self-confidence, better focus and more pleasure, transforming your perception of sport and competition forever.

Elite performance coach and former professional tennis player Jackie Reardon has trained Olympic gold medallists and world champions using unorthodox mindfulness exercises with sport as a metaphor to improve their focus and awareness. Combining her expertise in professional sports and mindfulness she developed a hands-on philosophy called Friendly Eyes to guide athletes of all levels to reach their best. Friendly Eyes means: being kind to ourselves, being kind to others and to observe without judgment. Because by being friendly to yourself, you can make the progress you want.

Genres: Sports

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Martí Sala Perramon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a really good ready. I will recommend it to all the people who love sport and to how I will recommend it more is to people who love tennis because most of the examples are base in tennis.
They are really good exercise to learn how to listen to your mind and calm it down when there is the need.
How to focus on what you are doing in this moment and don’t think with anything else.
It’s not just a book to read and leave in a side, you can do all the exercises more than one.

[Kate McKinney · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is marketed as a guide to mental strength for athletes, business-people & others; but my high hopes for the book are somewhat diminished by its presentation, which comes across amateurish, low-budget & unprofessional. A little bit cheesy. The training philosophy seems overcomplicated, w/strange paradigms (ie; "Pillars" "Instruments" "Concentrations") & terms ("Friendly Eyes" "Consumerism" "Story Thinking" "Zooming"), which often seem obscure & inaccessible. The vocabulary isn't particularly intuitive & it's not the terminology that I would use. Eccentric at times. Although there are some interesting references to professional athletes & their habits, the book at times seems prone to excessive name-dropping (ie; Zidane, Materazzi, Federer, van Basten, McEnroe, Borg, Navratilova, the Williams sisters, etc.), which is offputting & confusing, esp for readers who aren't avid pro-sports followers. Love the cover art & concept. She generously provides a structured assignment rubric at the end of the book, w/weekly worksheets. There are some useful takeaways here ("Visualization" "Curiosity" "Good Mistakes" "Rituals" "Trigger Words" "Flow") & I appreciate the references to Breathing (& Andrew Weil), as well as the proposition that the mental game is equally as important as the physical game; but these many assets are obscured by the odd presentation of the book. Instead of this guide, I'd recommend Timothy Gallway's "Inner Game of Tennis" (& other volumes in the Inner Game series), for their simplicity & direct, intuitive, effective presentation of methods.

[Heleen]

interesting, realistic, fresh

[Jeffrey Strunks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book

[Vanessa Kings · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few years ago, I had read a lot about coaching and how businesses were looking towards techniques used in sports to improve performance. The main question was "how is it that athletes keep breaking world records year after year?"

Just when we think we've reached the limit of human capacity, another athlete comes along and breaks another record. With the Olympics coming up, this will surely happen again.

In "Mindset: Mental Toughness in sport", you will find the key elements that world class athletes apply to obtain confidence, focus and just enjoy what they are doing. Although there are several examples from tennis, it applies to any sport, and most importantly, even to everyday life.

Through the Mindset method, you will learn how to apply action thinking instead of story thinking, obtain better self-knowledge, and eventually reach a state of mindfulness.

The bottom line is that we always have a choice on how to approach events, and it is up to us to decide. So, whether you are an athlete or not, you will surely find this guide useful to make that change happen, starting from within.

[Edwina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tennis book about sports psychology and I am NO tennis player. I read it because of the recommendation of a professional opera singer and a professional french horn player on the web series, Horn Hangouts, to improve the mental game of my french horn playing.
Anyone who wants to increase their "flow"/"action thinking"/"being in the zone" without that voice of doubt in your head getting in your way and messing you up, would benefit from this book.
It provided many strategies and useful tips that could be translated to a variety of activities besides tennis. So I would recommend reading it. It could have been organized better because it felt redundant at times (the charts helped). The last two chapters encouraging the reader to explore Buddhist meditation seemed to come out of left field. I wish it was mentioned at least in the introduction rather than hastily added in at the end.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good ideas, poor organization and writing.