4-Week Mindfulness Fundamentals
Online Course
JULY 28th-AUGUST 23rd, 2024
4:00-5:30 pm Pacific
You spend hours training your body.
It is just as important to train your mind and spirit.
Learn how to use mindfulness to find flow in sports and in life.
Mindfulness can enhance athletic, and academic or work performance by:
- Strengthening mental focus.
- Enhancing emotional resilience.
- Refining physical awareness and fine tuning technique.
- Providing specific ways of working with distracting or negative thoughts and feelings.
- Increasing the ability to persevere during periods of challenge, plateau, set-back, and injury.
- Developing systems of self-care.
- Intensifying your natural love of your sport.
- Intentionally creating a positive, collaborative team culture.
Here’s a short list of some of well known athletes and teams that have used, or are using, mindfulness to enhance performance:
- The 2015 NFL Champions Seattle Seahawks
- Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles and Aly Raisman
- The 2016 World Series winning Chicago Cubs
- Olympic Gold Medalist, FIFA World Cup Champion, and USWNT team member Alex Morgan
- Olympic beach volleyball gold medalist Kerri Walsh-Jennings
- Mountain Bike World Champion Kate Courtney
- The US national BMX team, including 2016 Olympic gold medalist Connor Fields
- 2015 and 2017 NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, .
In fact, the Warriors’ core values are joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition.
Coaches: Prepare yourself, your athletes, and your team for competition.
Mindfulness is an ideal tool to allow you to bring out the best in yourself, your athletes and your team. In the heat of the moment it is easy to loose sight of our intentions and to coach in ways that are, at best ineffective, and at worst actually prevent our athletes and teams from performing optimally. With practice, mindfulness can help you keep your cool, create a supportive team culture, see clearly what is called for in a pivotal moment, diffuse negative team dynamics, and inspire your athletes to give their best in practice, competition, and life.
When you and your athletes learn mindfulness together, you have a common language for dealing with the up and downs of training and competition. Sharing these essential skills with your athletes will allow them to make the most of your coaching and their natural talent, and ultimately achieve peak performance.
My work with athletes and coaches is informed by:
- being a young gymnast with minimal natural talent and unwavering commitment
- having surgery on my right shoulder in 7th grade and my left shoulder in 8th grade
- coaching young gymnasts as a teen
- earning a walk-on spot as a varsity gymnast at Stanford
- becoming a competitive cyclist
- being hit by a car while riding (which synchronistically led me to mindfulness)
- establishing a long standing passionate mindfulness practice
- coaching 5-8 year olds in youth soccer
- mindfully learning to snowboard at the age of 40, and surf at the age of 56
- being a parent of one professional athlete, and one performing artist
- sharing mindfulness with many athletes from very young youth soccer players to Division 1 varsity athletes to national champions and professionals
