Techniques

Champion's Flow uses a variety of techniques to encourage the flow state. Performers can use mindfulness and meditation to get into a state of flow to achieve optimal performance.

These Include: Psychological Skills Training (PST) in three phases:

Education Phase: The idea here is for the athletes/performer to become familiar with Psychological Skills Training (PST) and to understand how mental training can help their performance. In addition, the “coach” becomes familiar with the individual’s problem, goals, and needs.

Acquisition Phase: The athlete or performer and the coach select mental training strategies from the PST and practice the techniques for learning these strategies.

Practice Phase – Here the athlete/performer learns to automate the mental training skills, apply these skills to practice settings, and simulate actual competition settings.

Benefits

Mindfulness and Meditation helps athletes to get in the state of flow to achieve optimal performance. Mindfulness enhances performance in the following ways.

• Reduction of stress - Use Positive Self-Talk to boost confidence and remove persistent negative self-talk - Focus on Now, Grounding Techniques

• Maintaining focus - Have a clear vision of what you want to focus on, this will contribute to performance and success. Control the controllable, Stay relaxed under pressure by using words to focus your mind on what you want to achieve

• Stabilizing emotions - To remain “in the zone” and achieve peak performance it is important that athletes and performers control their emotions, and control their thought process how they think about a bad play, not doing their job or failure to execute. Controlling emotions requires the ability to remain calm under pressure.

• Enhancing endurance - To remain in the zone it is important for an athlete or performer to be mentally tough. This can be achieved by training the mind to consistently raise the level of their performance, for peak performance

• Improving sleep patterns and recovery time after performance - Successful athletes pay a lot of attention to their physical health, what they eat and also the quality and quantify of sleep they get. Good restorative sleep increases athletic performance and competitive results and good sleep is also important to remain in “the Zone” for peak performance.

• Helping to address fear - During competition lack of adequate training, preparation, focus and doing your job (fulfilling your role) can lead to fear which In simple terms means - “I doubt I can do it.” Mindfulness is an effective tool to put the athlete “in the zone.”

• Helping cope with pain recovery from injury - It has been said that there are two types of athletes, one recovering from injury and one who has not been injured as yet. Most athletes have to deal with pain at one time or another in their career. Mindfulness can help athletes take the edge of pain and injury - help with eventual recovery and return to peak performance.