🧭 The 11 Mental Skills That Make You Elite

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• Lao Tzu on Mindset

• The 11 Mental Skills That Make You Elite

• Great Posts of the Week

• TLDR of 11 Mental Skills That Make You Elite 👇

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The 11 Mental Skills That Make You Elite

Today, we are going to look at the 11 mental skills of elite athletes. These 11 skills may have been studied and written for athletes, but it applies to anyone in life looking to perform their best.

The 11 skills were defined in the Gold Medal Profile for Sport Psychology (GMP-SP), a framework designed to enhance the mental performance of Canadian athletes. The framework evaluated over 125 years of high-performance sport data to define these 11 mental performance competencies for high performance. The competencies are categorized into three main areas: fundamental, self-regulation, and interpersonal competencies, with mental health as a crucial overarching theme (Link to study here).

So what did they find?

1. They found the 11 mental competencies organized into 3 categories and ordered them in importance:

   • Fundamental (Gold) - Confidence, Motivation, and Resilience

   • Self-Regulation (Silver) - Self-Awareness, Stress Management, Emotion & Arousal Recognition, and Attentional Control.

   • Interpersonal (Bronze and Team-Specific) - Athlete-Coach Relationship, Leadership, Teamwork, and Communication

2. Mental health is considered pivotal, influencing both mental and athletic performance, and is integrated across the competencies.

3. The framework offers detailed guidance for assessing, developing, and integrating mental skills within high-performance settings.

4. The framework provides a practical and structured approach to the operationalization of mental performance systems in sports, lacking in previous models.

So what’s interesting about this?

A lot of these traits are often mentioned, but it furthers validates that what separates good from great performers in any field are:

DRIVE AND SELF-REGULATION.

• Drive is your ability to persistently move forward towards your goals with determination and enthusiasm. It’s the internal force that pushes you forward towards what you want. It’s not just the motivation and ambition, but the resilience and persistence to keep going.

• Self-Regulation is your ability to control your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in response to external demands and internal desires. It’s what helps you make better decisions and perform at your best when you feel the “pressure.” There is so much that goes into self-regulation, but if you look at any top performer, they are able to focus on what matters when it matters.

So why does this matter?

It always comes down to your mindset, self-awareness, and how you self-regulate your emotions, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. When you are aware of your thoughts and how you are being in the moment then you can start to make the changes that you need to make.

• Thoughts influence feelings and emotions.

• Thoughts, feelings, and emotions influence behaviors.

• Thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors influence performance.

The 3 exercises that best improve your self-awareness are mindfulness, journaling, and learning from the wise.

So how can you make any of these a habit and actionable for yourself?

Below is a table of each competency and 2 habits or questions to ask yourself. The key with any practice is to have a preparation list and reflect on how you are doing. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Note: Today, we are just going to dive into the top 7, but we will talk about the team dynamics in a future newsletter.

Great Posts from the Week

TLDR of 11 Mental Skills That Make You Elite 👇

1. Drive and Self-Regulation are what separate good from great performers.

2. Work on your self-regulation → Skills such as self-awareness, stress management, and attentional control are essential for managing your best days and emotional state.

3. Your mental health is pivotal, it influences all of these areas.

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