Using Sports Psychology to Improve Your Love Life.
Sports psychologists and performance coaches help professional athletes fine tune their state of mind to reach the highest level of their chosen sport. What’s interesting to know is that the things that work in sports can work in other aspects of your life as well.
I know this is a bit of an odd combination, even for me. Although, what might you expect from a dating expert who brings you tips on how to use car sales tactics to get your guy to propose, or inside tips on why women lust over vampires a la Robert Pattinson / Edward Cullen?
Yes, in my case, weird really is in the eye of the beholder. But I digress.
I met Garret Kramer, founder of Inner-Sports recently, and I was completely blown away by what he had to say. This doesn’t happen to me very often — as a relationships correspondent on a national TV show, I am frequently inundated with pitches for self-help books and services, and to be honest, a great many of them are crap.
Kramer worked with my niece, a high school softball player with lots of talent, who was having trouble getting her groove back after a prior season injury and an extended time off the field.
Kramer works with high school and college athletes, as well as professional teams. Many consider him to be the top guy in his field.
What I was most intrigued by with Kramer is his unwavering belief that the challenges we face, whether a batting slump or a dating slump, are pretty much going on inside our heads.
He gives his relationship with his wife as an example.
Say you’re having a horrible day at work and you go home to find your wife or girlfriend sitting on the couch watching Real Housewives of Atlanta, surrounded by a mountain of dirty laundry and a pile of microwave burrito wrappers.
If you were having a bad day, you might go home and think, “what has she been doing all day? Here I go off to work all day to provide for the family, and she can’t even get it together enough to put dinner on the table and clean up the house.”
But now let’s say you had a great day at work. You got a promotion. And a raise. How would you view the couch/dirty laundry/ burrito scenario then?
Kramer says that coming off a great day, you’d probably be really concerned, rather than angry, about why your wife might be in her pajamas pigging out on convenience store fare at 4 o’ clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
You’d probably ask your wife if something terrible happened that day, and how you could help.
Same scenario, different reactions.
The core of Garret’s philosophy is operating from a place of well-being, whether in your relationships, or on the field.
Below you’ll find more on my interview with performance coach Garret Kramer, including why sports psychology may be just what you need to improve your dating game as well.
Lisa: How are sports psychology and success in personal relationships related?
Garret Kramer: If applied properly, they both have to do with an understanding of how the mind works and how life is designed. That is, when we our minds are cloudy we won’t see the game or our partner for what they truly are. When are minds are clear and unencumbered the game and our relationships just flow.
Lisa: Other performance coaches use tools such as hypnosis….
Kramer: They don’t work because you’re depending on some outside force.
Enduring answers only lie within (and not in external tools or techniques)
At Inner-Sports, the main tool they use is an analogy — imagine your mind is a glass of cloudy water. If you try to base decisions on what you can see, your vision will be clouded. What’s the best way to clear up the murky water in your mind? “Let it settle.”
Lisa: What is finding a place of “well-being” all about?
Kramer: It’s all about the understanding in question 1. This understanding takes the focus off of “behavior” where it should never be, and places it on one’s state of mind. Remember ‘behavior” is always after the fact thus coaching “behavior” does not work!
Lisa: How should you deal with negative thoughts that pop up, even when you’re trying to turn your love life around?
Kramer: That’s just it, you can’t deal with them. If you try—-the murky glass! Just understand that everyone has negative or errant thoughts at times so in truth there is nothing that you need to fix. Go with the feeling. The lousy feeling, that follows lousy thoughts, is a sign that you are about to step on the gas with your tires in mud, if you act. Hang in there, the opportunity to create the proper path from the current situation is right in front of you. You might not see it yet, but I can promise you…it’s there!
For more information on Garret Kramer, or to read his very cool blog, visit www.innersports.com and if you want to see the DAYTIME clip, you can view it here.
XO,
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