Mental Moment-Be Careful of Great Advice

As an elite performer you have to rely on many people to help support you. For example, most elite athletes need a manager, coach,  nutritionist, mental training coach, body worker, physician, sponsors, publicist, etc. There are a lot of necessary components involved in making an elite performer great but who do you trust and with what great information?

Who do you trust

In my experience with elite performers many of them don’t make a lot of money. It’s seems contrary but its true. Given that, the support team is sometimes comprised of people who are willing to get the job done in the most affordable way. What this means is that these people are not always the best at what they do and they do not always have the clients best interest at heart.

Here is where I get radical. Since this is the case it is important for the elite performer to be involved in the ‘hiring’ process and know what they want from each of their support team. I am not suggesting that you are BFF’s with all of your crew but knowing that someone can do more harm than good should be incentive enough to have good people.

What information do you trust

The next step in this process is your ability to decipher good information from bad information. This is very difficult. You have a support crew because of their expertise which means you have to trust (one of many good reasons to be involved in the hiring of them) them. Sometimes tho you get information that is questionable or doesn’t resonate with you. It is important to honor that. We have intuition for a reason. Don’t be afraid. They work for you.

Professional golfer

My golfer did amazingly well last year. Her physical game was advancing but her mental game took her places she never knew existed. She was playing the best she’d ever played.

While she was on tour our commutation waned a bit. We would Skype occasionally but mostly kept up via text messages. I didn’t have a great idea about everything that was going on, saw her rankings continue to rise and figured she was doing OK.

When she came back to regular sessions it quickly became apparent that she was not ok. [There are a lot of lessons in her story which I might tell in another blog but for this blog here is the story.] 6 months ago a nutritionist had put her on a gluten and dairy free diet. She was put on this diet because she was feeling crabby and irritable. After assessing the situation we realized that the diet did initially work (any diet will) but that over the past 6 months she was playing in other countries struggling to find gluten and dairy free foods, she was isolating, irritated, negative and was not playing her best.

I could get up on my soapbox about why anyone would put a 21 year old who practices and trains for 6-8 hours a day on a gluten and dairy free diet is freaking nuts, but I won’t! That conversation was her turning point back to healthy, regular food and back to stabilized emotions.

Advocate for yourself and trust your intuition. You have a sense of what you like and need.

Dr. Michelle

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