a wide ranging conversation with a true, cutting edge leader in Sports Psychology and Performance Enahancement, whose work has been adopted by the US army and used with tens of thousands of troops.
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Nate Zinsser Bio
Professional in the field of Sports Psychology,
Author Dear Dr. Psych; a sports Psychology Guide Book for Kids
author,
chapter on Confidence: in last five editions of the classic text:
Applied Sports Psychology, Personal growth to peak perfomance.
Director
of the Performance Enhancement Program at the United States Military
Academy at West Point.
Like what you hear in this free podcast? You can order these additional recordings: Mentoring
Winners   SKU# AG-P-111  Â
Futurehealth Plenary Talk by Nate Zinsser
Through many years of mentoring athletes and other performers three
vital lessons consistently surface as essential to success and
satisfaction.
These lessons will be will be explained and illustrated using examples
from the 2000 US Olympic Trials and the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.
In brief, the lessons are:
1) It's all about confidence
2) The higher the level at which you compete, the "lower" many things
become
3) The difference between victory and defeat is microscopically small
(Specifications: MP3)Â $7
Thriving
Under Pressure   SKU# AG-W2-115  Â
Futurehealth WinterBrain Workshop by Nathaniel Zinsser.
This is a workshop on bringing out one's best performance under highly
pressurized conditions based on 20 years of work with elite performers
and 30 years of study in meditation and martial arts. (Specifications:
MP3, 2 hours)Â $25
Coaching
Clients to Gain Confidence and Live Confidently in an Intimidating
Unfriendly World   SKU# AF-W2-021  Â
Zinsser, Nate. Futurehealth Workshop approximately 2 hours
(Specifications: MP3) $25
- optimal
functioning
- positive psychology
- coaching clients
Building
the Warrior Ethos; Mental Training for 21st Century Soldiers
  SKU# AF-P-040  Â
Zinsser, Nate. Futurehealth Plenary (Specifications: MP3, 20 mins)Â
$7
Program Designed to prepare
soldiers to be resistant to PTSD.
9 army centers for enhanced
performance.
Uses HRV breath biofeedback training-- two brands.
Responsibility
for teaching cadets mental skills that will help their pursuit of
excellence as athletes, students and officers.
soldier as
expeditionary athlete-- entering an endurance contest-- same demands as
on tri-athlete.
ACEP headquarters unit. doing study
Huge
study at Ft. Jackson how effective curriculum is with brand new recruits
in basic training.
Fitness test, markmanship scores, hesitation
time on obstacle courses.
Pilot study showed encouraging results
to date.
Full study with 3000 subjects
Probably largest study of
sports psychology interventions every conducted
Pilot study: new
recruits who were involved in our curriculum moved through obstracle
course were faster, shot grouping in marksmanship test was better-- more
consistent.
A lot of the principles that we're teaching to
soldiers are well known in the sports psychology field ... 8:00
You
have to have a certain kind of state of mind when you learn a skill,
then shift to a different state of mind when you have to perform.
Learning--
have to be aware of weakness, deliberately trying to correct
yourself...
Once it's time to actually do them, instead of breaking
it down, you have to see the whole same thing and let the training take
over without being analytic.
It's being able to filter...
Human
beings are wired to perform their best 11:00
Lance Armstrong
refers to dumb focus...Â
At West Point
two hour orientation
to our program for all cadets, then 500 get student success course.
13:00Â
Mental skills.
become a national champion, become an
all-american,
Rest Greed.
20:00 taught, "sleep is for
wimps" and "you're going to get all the sleep you need when you're
dead."
recovering physical and emotional energy
use yoga and
meditative approach, taking yoga and meditative language out.
Use
HR monitoring-- HR and HRV-- mentions brand
almost every elite
marksman has learned to be so..29:00
force of ventricular
contraction can affect aim, so elite marksmen become very sensitive to
position and breathing.
Best bi-athletes have learned how to
recognize how aroused they are... and they are firing between breaths.
It
is your responsibility-- you have to put yourself in a state that is
most helpful at the moment. 34:00
research equipment he
uses-- brand
Digital audio technology:
come up with a written
script that describes goals for semester, career-- detailed, with
priorities important to develop and pursue, then breaks priorities into
action steps...
mix as wave file with music choices of the cadets,
listen
to it to revisit their goals,
Working with confidence:
39:00
first mission is to get students to understand what confidence
is and what it is not.
That state of certainty that allows you to
do things without a lot of conscious interference.
You do them
automatically, like tying shoes.
THat's the state of certainty that
the football player, tennis player,marksman, surgeon wants to be in.
One
can only become confident once you have experienced success.
Always
flashing back to episodes that have not been successful. Even
though....
Selectively ignoring the episodes where it went right.
Confidence comes to not what happens to you, but how you think
about what happens to you.
Confidence is a function of how you
think. Think about confidence as nothing more that the total of your
thoughts about yourself relative to a particular activity.
THen it
becomes your responsibility to address that particular ... 44:00
monitor
that voice in the back of your head when.... but be able to cut it off
at the knees when it throws doubt and fear and worry at you.
Stop
Be
weilling and able to think about yourself the way you want to.
I
don't be believe there is such a thing as over-confidence, but there is
false confidence.
Top-down, Bottom-up
one thing to look
at a golf swing of Phil Nocholson or Tiger Woods-- an overwhelming
complex process. If you try to look at it from top down, it's very
complex and impossible to execute in the moment.
52: 00 If you
do it from the
bottom up-- two kinds of genius--
the kind
supported largely in the academic world-- look at all the different
things that go into it. That's academic genius-- ability to break things
down into every finer levels of detail.
To be that pilot you need a
different form of genius.
Yogi berra-- how can you think and hit a
baseball at the same time.
Bottom up Genius
ability to have
that dumb focus--
use of neurofeedback, biofeedback,
physiologicalal interventions.
cutting edges-- helping staff
connect to origins of these self regulation, mental skills processes
Just
read Bhagavad Gita-- advice to young warriors going into battle.
book:
Legend of Bagger Vance
at the heart of warriorship.
Over-achievement,
by John Elliot
old traditions:
The Unfettered mind
Zen
and the Art of Archery
25th anniversary edition of Inner Game of
Tennis , Tim Galway
Olympians he's trained:
worked with
members of army's world class athlete program back in 2000.
allowed
to train for olympic trials for their respective sports.
Mike
Cohn, Mike Holcolmb
Bobsledders.
warrior ethos
heroes
Tsutomu
Ohshima first high ranking karate expert to come to the United states.
Has stayed true.
a lot of my heroes are young men and women who
have learned to face themselves and embody that warrior ethos in their
own ways.
A young lady who as an alternet for the olympic track team
who's now an orthopedic surgeon,
an alternate for the olympics who
is now an army chaplain.
Because they've lived the most authentic
life possible.
Where you do the very best with whatever you are
given both in terms of physical talent and opportunity... and find
balance through all.
Authors Bio:One theme has run through my work for the past 40 plus years-- a desire to play a role in waking people up, raising their consciousness and empowering them.
I was the organizer founder of the Winter Brain, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology and StoryCon Meetings and president of Futurehealth, Inc., with interests in Positive Psychology as well as being involved in the field of biofeedback/neurofeedback since 1972.
see my more detailed bio, reflecting my work in biofeedback, here.
In 2003 I founded www.OpEdNews.com , where I've written over 1800 articles and have published over 100,000 other people's writings, with the goal of raising people's consciousness in political and activist ways.