Mindfulness Training In Sports By Vision Pursue

Here is a really cool article on the Mindfulness Movement that is starting to spread into sports.  Financial businessman Russ Rausch was looking for more meaning in life, despite his business and financial success, and discovered the power of mindfulness through reading and studying The Master Key System by Charles F. Hannel.

He then went on to create Vision Pursue, a company focused on improving the way that people experience life by improving their mindset.

He worked with now Dartmouth assistant athletic director Ian Cannole and former NFL player Jon McGraw to create the business and an app to help athletes improve their mindset through mindfulness and meditation.

One of the pillars of this training gets at the reason Rausch started Vision Pursue in the first place. Most people, Rausch explains, don’t abide by an “expanding A” view of the world, meaning they derive their sense of self-worth from their accomplishments, leading to an existence in which they can never truly be satisfied. According to this rationale, any person driven by the rewards that come with moving from Point A to Point B is bound to be unhappy because Point B is always changing, whereas the focus should be on getting all that’s possible from an expanding Point A.

Another pillar of this program is attempting to understand the idea of the “automatic brain,” or the notion that people are wired to react to stimuli in different ways as a means of self-preservation. The key is to understand why a particular reaction occurs, rather than succumbing to the emotion brought on by any given situation. 

As stated in the article, athletes are always working on their game, but there is so much more to success in sports than talent.  Much of success is what is going on in your mind and how you handle pressure, how you deal with success, and how you move on from failure.  Mindfulness and programs like Vision Pursue help athletes with the mental part of their games and lives.