The Pitch Pipe - January 2009 - (Page 25) equipment and the opportunity to compete and you might have the right recipe for winning. However, just as with any recipe, if you leave out any ingredient the outcome just doesn’t taste good. I had almost all of the ingredients in Munich for my first Olympics. The missing one cost me the Gold Medal. I did not have mental control in the competition and came home with the Silver instead. Frustrated, I began my search for the secrets of the mental game. It made sense that the Gold Medalists must be thinking differently than the rest of us so I decided to survey as many of them as I could to gain insight. What they taught me was truly amazing. It formed the basis of a mental system I call Mental Management®. In the next Olympics, the Gold Medal was mine because I used a mental system to win. For the past 30 years I have been studying and coaching mental control to all sorts of performers from Olympians (including the US Olympic Shooting team), Fortune 500 companies to the United States Secret Service, US Navy SEALS and PGA pros. My Mental Management® System is used by the Olympic teams of nine nations and countless national, world and Olympic champions. I am not a sport psychologist and the basis of my system does not originate from psychology. I am a competitor and Mental Management® comes from the study of winners and what works for them under the stress of competition. Why should a competitive singer read a series of articles from an exOlympic rifle shooter, especially since I can’t tell you a thing about breath control, reading music or singing in general? I can tell you how to win in competition! The First Mistake Most Performers Make I have talked to hundreds of winners and find that almost all of them made the same first mistake concerning mental control. We began to study the mental game much too late in our careers. The comment that is made too “Do not wait until you have technique down before studying the mental skills.” often is, “You don’t need to worry about the mental game until you have a high level of technical skill.” Nothing could be further from the truth. You need mental control in the beginning. In fact, if you have a grasp of some of the Principles of Mental Management® before you begin competing you will learn proper technique faster and with greater precision. I tested this theory during the 12 years I owned and operated the International Shooting School. Most of the students had little time and money and needed to maximize the training. I found that by teaching mental skills prior to beginning technical training we were able to cut the time in half from beginning shooting to placing an athlete on the National Team. This is not how we are taught normally. We begin by attempting to control the body/voice with little regard to controlling the mind. As time passes we develop bad habits. They become imbedded and become very difficult to dislodge later on when we finally get around to being concerned about mental performance. Most performers lose points and placement because of preventable mental errors. If you are just beginning to learn to sing, this might be the most important thing anyone will ever say to you. “Learn the mental skills in the beginning. Do not wait until you have technique down before studying the mental skills. You cannot begin too early.” If you have been performing for a while it’s not too late to learn. It just may take more time to reverse your old habits. In the next issue we will look at additional ways winners differ in their thinking from the majority of competitors and learn how to master the mental skills of a winning performance. (Lanny Bassham is an Olympic Coach and an Olympic Gold Medalist. He is a member of the Olympic Shooting Hall of Fame, ranks third among all shooters in total international medal count for the USA and is one of the most respected mental trainers in the world. His book With Winning in Mind and his Mental Management® concepts are used and endorsed by athletes and stage performers worldwide. You can reach him at 1-800-879-5079, info@mentalmanagement.com or at www.mentalmanagement.com. He has a free monthly e-mail newsletter that you can join on his Web site, which include articles like the one above on mental training. Mental Management is a registered term, owned by Lanny Bassham. It is a violation of federal law to use the term in any form without permission from the owner. All rights are reserved.) January 2009 25 http://www.mentalmanagement.com http://www.mentalmanagement.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.