Heartstance over Mindset

Mindset is so 2024

In the sports world you hear a lot about ‘mindset’

Every big time athlete has a sports psychologist, pro teams employ ‘mindset performance coaches, heck even the amateur weekend warrior trains to craft an ‘indomitable’ mindset.

That’s all well and good.  Paying attention to how our minds impact our bodies, the way they perform under pressure, and how to overcome adversity is a great development in the broad world of athletics.

But there’s a limit to how far ‘mindset’ can take you in sports if you want to use them for their deepest and true purpose; spiritual transcendence.

“Hold it professor, are you saying we shouldn’t care about mindset? What about the ‘Mamba Mentality’ of Kobe Bryant, or the famous Yogi’ism “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical”

Listen, if you’re reading this you aren’t a pro athlete most likely and you’re not aiming to perform at the top of the world. So yes, mindset is a limiting feature.

Mindset sets you up for failure in a lot of ways. Too rigid, too demanding, to harsh, too much grinding. To much ‘savage’ not enough ‘gentleman’

How the mind works to delude you

Here’s another thing to consider, the mind is a shortcut machine. Settling on mindset, especially if you’re an overly analytical, type A, right brained person, is setting you up for the fall.

Your mind will turn the mindset into the absolute solution for all types of athletic adversity. And inevitably that closed attitude will become anger, frustration, negative thought patterns, leading to failed training, bad performance results, and a miserable experience in sports.

The pros who rely on ‘mindset’ effectively brainwash themselves into a delusion. Michael Jordan famously never let himself accept that he was responsible for any loss his team ever experienced. This allowed him to achieve incredible athletic feats, but he’s also known as a miserable SOB who will come after you for a 20 dollar bet even though he’s a billionaire.

I’m not interested in winning at all costs and you shouldn’t either. Mindset might help you do that, but will it make you a better person through the athletic endeavour? No a chance!

Enter Heartstance

“Ok professor, tell me then, what’s a better way to utilize mind and body in sports if mindset isn’t going to help me?”

Glad you asked!

Through coaching athletes, not the pro kind, but the everyday athlete I’ve figure out a more useful frame.

Thr people I coach are normal folks, working regular jobs, holding down family responsibilities, and trying to use training, competition, and sports to become their best selves.

Here’s the answer for them; heartstance.

Is your heart open or closed?

Think closed or open mind but deeper.

Many of these people are high achieving, rationally based, analytical performers. But this means their mind tends to run them around in circles, swirling through negative thought patterns or backwards reasoning into settling and making excuses. Effectively they are brainwashing themselves like the pro athletes, applying an ‘all or nothing’ mentality and getting nothing out of it.

Tell them to ‘open their minds’ and it’s like a toilet bowl opening up (not in the sense of what goes in but in the sense that it’s just gonna swirl itself downward)

Heartstance is courageous.

If I tell you that your heart is closed it’s going to hurt in way a closed mind isn’t.

It means you’re shutting off compassion, grace, understanding, and love.

You’re closing the door on creation, curiosity, imagination, and passion.

Opening the heart is the only way

If our aim together is self transcendence through sport, to know ourselves truthfully through the struggle, to become heroic through athletics; the mind can only take us so far.

Believe me on this.

I have a PhD, I’ve written an academic book with 70+ pages of citations alone, I get the power of the analytical mind. It didn’t help me find meaning, purpose, and a sense of self understanding.

It was ego, hubris, status, mind tricks.

The ancient Greeks, the ones who invented competitive athletics, believed them to be religious in nature. Their best use to reach towards individual becoming, to strive forward to the greatest virtues and potential. To know oneself truthfully.

The mind tricks you into wanting truth but it doesn’t. That’s what ‘mindset’ does. It actively blinds you from truth in order to maximize performance. Again, good for some times and places. But not the panacea you think it is.

To live your best life through sports DEMANDS the open heart. To see the truth for what it is and move through it to the other side of growth.

So when someone asks about your mindset when it comes to your exercise, sports, or heck life in general stop them dead and say ‘ask me about my heart instead’

If you’re interested in exploring fitness coaching through the heart, send me a message using the button below and let’s start the journey together.

Happy training team!