How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life

by Bob Rotella

the ideas people choose to have about themselves largely determine the quality of the lives they lead.

the subconscious areas of our minds do the best job of controlling motor skills. When the conscious brain gets involved, our bodies tend to become awkward.

Pessimism tends to rouse the conscious brain and get it engaged.

smile a little bit before each putt.

Optimism doesn’t guarantee anything in sports. It just improves your chances.

Misfortune happens to everyone. Champions just refuse to let it push them into doubtful, fearful thinking.

we are each the biggest influence on our own destiny.

The act of writing down a thought about a successful shot helps reinforce its importance in the subconscious registry.

He understood that there’s absolutely no reason to relive and remember a missed putt.

The champion doesn’t care about keeping an accurate record in his own mind. He thinks and remembers in ways that will help him achieve and maintain a confident self-image.

urge him to work to be emotionally detached from his bad shots, to shrug them off. It’s the opposite of what many people tend to do.

Thinking correctly will separate that individual from the average person.

Confidence is essential to patient, sustained effort, and patient, sustained effort is what leads to success.

All you needed to groove were the fundamental movements, and there weren’t so many of them. . . . My shot-making started to take on a new and more stable consistency.”

Work on needed skills. Work on confidence. But don’t make a confident self-image dependent on perfecting skills.

If you want to transform your life, if you want to grow, you have to change the way you see yourself and the way you respond to the world around you—just

“You have to be a legend in your own mind before you can be a legend in your own time.”

it’s usually mental qualities that separate champions from mere big hitters.

They’re brimming over with the character traits, like Ben Hogan’s, that promote patient, persistent, hard work.

it’s a convenient excuse for giving up on themselves. If you decide you don’t have Tiger Woods’s talent, it makes it so much more justifiable to settle for mediocrity.

Devise an improvement plan and commit yourself to it. Persevere.

We have to use our will to apply ourselves, instead, to the process.

“Train it and trust it,” which means “Learn the skill thoroughly, so it’s ingrained in your subconscious. Then, at the moment of performance, don’t think about it. Trust that your subconscious brain will do its job.”

Exceptional people seem to seek out cues that in most people would trigger a bad habit and use them as a tool to reinforce good habits.

As always with visualization, the more effort that goes into it, the greater the effect that comes out of it.

Giving up is the only true loss.

That ability to take a dream and use it to create a process is what separates exceptional people from mere dreamers.

it’s the process that’s most important, not the results.

Exceptional people immerse themselves in process goals. They care most about how well they follow their chosen process every day.

Exceptional people tend not to care too much about what most people would consider “balance” in their lives.

But there is a common element in the way players who have learned effectiveness react to a day when their games are off. They’re optimistic rather than pessimistic. They’re confident rather than uncertain about themselves.

They believe that they can play good golf even when their swings are off because they are confident about their minds.

golfers to strive to keep the conscious brain out of their golf games when they’re in competition.

He had to learn to quiet his conscious brain and not think when he was nervous. He had to shut the conscious brain down and let the subconscious system take over.

The point of a performance process in sports is to remove the mental barriers that prevent a player from letting his subconscious govern his movements,

I’ve been told by other players that they distract themselves by concentrating on their breathing or counting the different species of trees they see on the course, even thinking about someone ill or handicapped. They’ll resort to almost anything to avoid letting their thoughts drift toward the outcome of the round or the results they expect.

When a performer is process oriented (unless, of course, we’re talking about a singer or dancer) he tends to be quiet. He may have a small smile on his face, particularly when he makes a mistake. He’s like still water, lost in the process, minimizing the moment, underreacting to everything.

People who are trying to be the best get used to tough evaluations. They get used to high standards.

Exceptional people, in my experience, are almost always good at the tricky art of self-evaluation. Most people are not.

They compare their performance to the process standards they’ve set for themselves.

an exceptional person needs to learn to be resilient in the face of failure and adversity.

how an individual responds to the things that happen to him is more important than the actual happenings.

pay attention to it during their preparation, but they try to ignore it during their performance.

safety and security can become more important to an individual than being exceptional and doing fantastic things over the course of a life.

enthusiasm acts like a catalyst that makes all the other attributes of a champion’s mind work better.

They prefer to say they’ve fallen out of love, because that sounds better to them than saying they’ve chosen to dwell on the aspects of the spouse they don’t like.

exceptional people create their own reality.

Being what most people think is realistic is only a way of justifying negative thinking.

They know that the exceptional person is exceptional in large part because he doesn’t limit himself.

over the span of a lifetime, the only lasting failure is the failure to try.