Mindset Monday - Terry Orlick: The 7 Commitments

Want to perform better and more confidently?

Train your mind and create better thoughts and habits.

Sports psychologist Terry Orlick once said, “Excellence is not a singular act but a way of thinking, feeling, and acting.”

He also wrote, “Human excellence in virtually all domains is guided by mental factors.”

Train your mind so that it thinks and acts like a high performer as often as possible.

Through his years of research, Orlick has found 7 critical elements that lead to personal excellence:

Commitment. To excel at anything you must have or develop an extremely high level of dedication, self-discipline, passion, joy or love for what you are doing. You must truly commit yourself to be the best you can be and continuously strive to make personal improvements and meaningful contributions.

Belief. Excellence is guided by belief in your potential, your goal, the meaningfulness of your goal, and trust in your capacity to reach that goal. To excel, you must believe that you are investing in something worthwhile and that you have a good chance of making it happen.

Focus is the single most important mental skill associated with performance excellence. Focusing refers to the ability to concentrate totally on what you are doing, seeing, reading, hearing, learning, feeling, observing or experiencing while you are engaged in the activity or performance.

Positive Imagery is useful for guiding your belief, focus, and performance, and for creating good feelings about yourself and your capacity. Through positive imagery you can pre-experience and re-experience feelings, sensations, skills or actions that are important for the successful execution of your task.

Mental Readiness refers to a positive state you carry into learning and performance situations. To have a realistic chance of excelling you must become highly proficient at mentally readying yourself to: learn essential mental, physical and technical skills, practice essential skills to perfection, and effectively perform those skills under competitive conditions.

Distraction Control refers to your ability to maintain or regain a positive, effective focus when faced with potential distractions, negative input, or setbacks.

Constructive Evaluation. Identify as closely as possible when and where you’ve messed up, and then work on that in practice to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Greatness is inside of you. Are you committed and do you believe in yourself? Do you have positive images of yourself? Are you focused, mentally ready, and able to ignore or remove distractions?

Are you able to give yourself feedback and make adjustments?

Something to Think About: Which component are you strong at, and how can you leverage it. Which component do you want to get better at, and how can you?