Unlock the secrets to mastering your mental game with insights from Olympic gold medalist Lanny Basham.
Discover why mental skills are crucial in sports and how Lanny’s journey from a mental meltdown in the 1972 Olympics to triumph in 1976 can inspire your own path to success.
Learn the untapped potential of mental coaching for young athletes and the pivotal role parents play as their first mental coaches, as explored in Lanny’s book "Parenting Champions."
Key Points from the Episode:
From Lanny’s mental management system, cultivated over nearly five decades of coaching Olympic teams and top performers, this episode is loaded with actionable insights.
This episode brings you wisdom from an exceptional author, offering practical tools to enhance your mental game in sports, business, and personal development.
Tune in for a treasure trove of knowledge that promises to elevate your mindset and help you achieve peak performance.
Want to leave a review? Click here, and if we earned a five-star review from you **high five and knuckle bumps**, we appreciate it greatly, thank you so much!
Unlock the secrets to mastering your mental game with insights from Olympic gold medalist Lanny Basham.
Discover why mental skills are crucial in sports and how Lanny’s journey from a mental meltdown in the 1972 Olympics to triumph in 1976 can inspire your own path to success.
Learn the untapped potential of mental coaching for young athletes and the pivotal role parents play as their first mental coaches, as explored in Lanny’s book "Parenting Champions."
Key Points from the Episode:
From Lanny’s mental management system, cultivated over nearly five decades of coaching Olympic teams and top performers, this episode is loaded with actionable insights.
This episode brings you wisdom from an exceptional author, offering practical tools to enhance your mental game in sports, business, and personal development.
Tune in for a treasure trove of knowledge that promises to elevate your mindset and help you achieve peak performance.
Want to leave a review? Click here, and if we earned a five-star review from you **high five and knuckle bumps**, we appreciate it greatly, thank you so much!
Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.
Speaker 2:
Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute, just like I had said earlier this week, so often in these Mojo Minutes we come back to the good authors, those who are just crushing it in their thinking and in their writing, and so I explained earlier this week, we are doing this around two great authors. This week we are featuring Jason Selk and Lanny Basham. Now we covered Jason's work before in Mojo Minute 310 and 311. Be sure to check those out. And we covered Lenny Basham's work in Mojo Minute 86. So again, these two authors absolutely crushing it and we love covering their work. So with that, let's jump into our first poll quote. Ask any athlete what percentage of their sport is mental and you will get a huge number back. The statement I hear most often is my game is 90% mental. Now I ask the second question if your game is 90% mental, what percentage of your time and money have you spent learning mental skills? The answer I receive most often is between 5 and 10%. Now that just doesn't make sense. The thing that is most important is the thing we tend to ignore. If the mental game is so important, where are the mental coaches in our schools? There are plenty of technical coaches. On the football field, every team, from baseball to track, has a coach for technique. There are golf pros and tennis pros in every country club that can teach you to swing the club and the racket. But where are the mental coaches? They are hard to find and you might think. They are hard to find. You might think, but you would be mistaken. In fact they are everywhere. They are the first person the young athlete talks to after the game or practice. They are in the stands shouting encouragement. They share the joy in every win and the pain in each loss. The most important mental coach in every athlete's life is the parent that drives them home from the game. Parents are unprepared for the job and, though they love their children, they will likely do more harm than good as their mental coach. But that will not happen if you read on and implement the principles of this book. I plan to make you a skilled mental coach for the sake of your children. You can learn more about mental management, but prepare to be enlightened and empowered. Management, but prepare to be enlightened and empowered. And that was Lanny Basham from the fantastic book Parenting Champions. Now you might think it was a commercial by the end, but I assure you I chose the quote because it was that powerful.
Speaker 2:
Lanny Basham is a fantastic author and is quickly moving up my list to cover more of his stuff. Did you know? He's an Olympic gold medalist and world champion rifle shooter. Yep, in 1972, lanny experienced what he calls quote a mental meltdown, and he ended up with the silver medal. Determined to improve, he spent hours each day for the next few years talking with every gold medalist he could find about their mindset during the competition. Sounds like something I would do. Let's go learn from the people who have done what I want to do so I can learn from them. That's one of the sole reasons for my love of reading and then sharing these nuggets of wisdom with you all. But back to Lanny. All that hard work paid off when he won gold in the next Olympics in 1976. After that, lanny started teaching what he calls his mental management system Way back in 1977. Can you imagine? He's been teaching this stuff for close to 50 years. Since then, he's coached check this out Olympic teams from all over the world, including Great Britain, canada, india, japan, china, korea, australia and the US of A. He's also worked with Navy SEALs, fortune 500 businesses, pga players and other top performers in sports and business. Laney took all of his knowledge and put it into a great book called you guessed it, with Winning in Mind, and that is what we covered earlier this week. So be sure to check out. Go back and check out that podcast episode, if you haven't.
Speaker 2:
Now let's turn to our second pull quote, concerning your kids. I have just one question for you what is more important to you? What your children accomplish or who they become? Is that not a fantastic question to you parents? What is most important to you about your children, what they will accomplish or who they will become? Go ahead and think on that. We will wait Again. The question is what is most important to you about your children, what they accomplish or who they become? Let's play some Jeopardy music. Did you think about it? Do you have an answer? Hold that answer and let's go back to the book. I have asked that question to thousands of parents, always receiving the same answer. Probably the answer that you thought of it is who they become. This response is interesting because in our world, becoming is rarely rewarded.
Speaker 2:
While accomplishment reigns supreme, accomplishment is being named a starter on the team. It is the valedictorian, the all-American, the MVP and the world champion. It is your grade in school. If you have an A, you're outstanding, while a C means your average. It is gold, silver and bronze in the Olympic Games. It is how much money you earn. Accomplishment is the measure of your results. I believe accomplishment is so often rewarded because it always has a number associated with it. It's easy to measure something if it has a value that is comparable to another value. Score decides grades. Score wins games, times or points award Olympic medals. Vote count determines elections. Success is often measured by sales figures or profits earned. Accomplishment is rewarded so often because it is easy to measure, not because it's more important than becoming.
Speaker 2:
Becoming is often overlooked because it's hard to measure. Becoming is who you are. There's no easy way to put a number on it. Here's an example Two men accomplish earning a million dollars in a calendar year, but they make money in different ways. One bought a business, made mistakes but, learning from them, made better decisions and finally sold his business for a million dollars. The other man bought a winning lottery ticket. Both of them accomplished earning a million dollars, but only one of them became anything in the process.
Speaker 2:
What are the chances of the business owner doing it again. Pretty good, I'd say. Is that not fantastic? I mean, lanny is nailing it, so much so that I was getting scared for him. Was he going to go down the values route? We need values. Was he going to turn around and water everything down, as he just said, by saying the rubbish that we need to instill values and not virtues? I was hoping not praying not as I read these pages in the book, because all of this was sounding an awful lot like building character and building specific virtues and building a life of virtue. So you can take values and you can take values and you can just insert them anywhere. What does the value mean? Anything can be inserted into values. Values are not virtues.
Speaker 2:
People often confuse that in our corrupt, post-modern, post-christian culture nowadays. You want to be a Satanist? There's a value for that. Don't doubt me on that. Do your own research. We have covered the occult from this very microphone. We have covered those books and indeed there is a value for that. It's not a good value, but there is a value. You want to murder babies in the name of compassion with abortion? There's a value for that too. It's called reproductive rights.
Speaker 2:
You see, values are different from virtues. Virtues have precise meaning to them. Virtues, virtues have precise meaning to them. There is an implicit goodness to it, a natural law of goodness to it. Value is a vague concept, neutral Value can be good or bad. Remember, in our postmodern world, the darkness in the world tells us there is no truth. There is no truth. There is only your truth and my truth, but there is no objective truth. And furthermore, the Satanists would say my value is truthful and your virtue is demeaning, it's offensive. It's what do they say now? It's a microaggression. What rubbish microaggression. What rubbish. Folks, we need to have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Let's choose virtues over values every day of the week.
Speaker 2:
Going back to the book, the businessman became something. He became a successful entrepreneur. Becoming is acquiring knowledge, implementing it and knowing why and how it works to apply it. Again. Becoming is integrity, character and confidence. Try to put a number on that. Ah, yes, amen. Lanny gets it so proud of him and of his writing he doesn't water it down. He knows that character means something. Integrity is one of Lanny's book Parenting Champions Fantastic stuff, mojo Academy stuff, flourishing stuff. So in today's Mojo Minute, if you want to truly parent champions if you want to truly set your children on the right path.
Speaker 2:
Know that virtues are far better than values. In effect, values are just placeholders, values in the end effect. The end effect of values, rather, is a watering down of our culture towards the truth. And words matter, and consistently living a life in pursuit of virtue is indeed living a flourishing life. And living a flourishing life will allow you to see and seek and pursue that truth, that objective truth, but only if you have eyes to see and ears to hear. Let us be such persons, let us be the example to our children of pursuing and always seeking the truth. And that starts with living a life built on the virtues. As always, let's keep fighting the good fight and keep seeking the flourishing life.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on. Thank you.