Improve your skiing - part 1
Performance Breakthrough
How can I become a better skier?
How can I become a better skier?
That's a great question.
Attempting to answer it involves discussing:
the nature of performance itself,
the factors that affect it,
how we can influence those factors and
how we can manage ourselves to improve our chances of success.
So the next series of articles will suggest ways in which we can improve our performance.
We'll start with addressing the issues of how we learn and how we can go about improving that process. Those are enormous topics, so it will take a few articles to begin to address those issues.
These articles draw on the chapter "Learning how to learn” from the book "Ski performance breakthrough.”
Most of the rest of that book is now available as a series of e-books, but I’ve reserved the information in this chapter for these articles.
I hope you enjoy them.
Learning how to learn
This chapter helps you to become a more effective learner, so that you can achieve maximum results from the energy and care that you give to your skiing development.
We’ll continue to collect Golden opportunities for your development, a process we that began in the previous chapter.
Learning how to learn is the key skill.
If you make progress with this, everything else will change.
The first point to make here, is that it’s helpful to identify the common ways in which people can obstruct their own learning.
You can use that knowledge to turn the tables, which will help you to get out of your own way.
Overcoming obstacles to learning
Learning can be challenging and uncomfortable. Some people take to it more easily than others.
For example, denial is a natural reflex that’s designed to save us the trouble of changing. But, if we want to learn and develop, we need to change.
Sometimes people feel threatened and insecure when facing up to the need for change. Learning means changing, however.
So we need to change.
How can you manage this process better?
For example, develop the habit of receiving a new idea with the response:
“That’s different, what does that mean? What are the consequences? How can I use it?”
If you actively collect these opportunities, you’ll overcome your denial reflex and, in it’s place, you’ll develop a new reflex:
“That’s new, that makes it interesting.”
Of course, in general life, the denial reflex saves us from the chaos of changing everything we do, all of the time. But in the context of your performance development,
you need to learn to switch off your denial reflex
to get the most from your skiing.
Will you be held back by what you think you know, or will you be open to realizing that, perhaps, you only have part of the picture?
So here it is:
Golden opportunity 5:
Welcome change
That's enough for this article!
We’ll continue with this theme over the next few editions of this newsletter.
Best Regards,
Hugh
