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AASP Newsletter - March 2019

Book Review: “Train Your Mind for Athletic Success”

Sydney Querfurth

Sydney Querfurth, PhD, asp/BISp, University of Muenster, Germany

Jim Taylor’s (2017) book “Train Your Mind for Athletic Success” offers insight into how to achieve what he calls “prime sports," that is, how to achieve consistency in competing at a “high level in the most challenging conditions." Dr. Taylor, a psychologist with experience in sport psychology, counseling, and child and developmental psychology, as well as an active AASP member and AASP Fellow, shares his broad knowledge, expertise, and experience of working with athletes at various levels and thus provides a guide for consultants, athletes, coaches, and parents alike.

Using simple and clear language, the book describes sport psychology theories, concepts and models in a way accessible to the non-expert. Besides describing and explaining theories and models, “Train Your Mind for Athletic Success” provides many practical examples, catchphrases, exercises, and reflection points, challenging the reader to engage with his/her own mental game.

What did I like about the book?

Overall, the book has a very clear structure, making it easy to read and follow the author’s thoughts. In the first chapter, the concept of “prime sports” is introduced and explained. After that, the author goes on to describe five components of how to achieve prime sports: 1 – “attitudes” 2 – “obstacles” 3 – “mental muscles” 4 – “mental tools” and 5 – “quality training." The last chapters offer general overviews, bringing the topics together to describe “athletic success” and “the payoff." Each of the five components of “prime sports” is offered an individual chapter. The components are structured through individual facets which are described and discussed in detail. For example, the attitudes to achieve prime sports are further described through the facets of “ownership," “process," “challenge," “long-term perspective,” and “risk" which are elaborated in detail.

Each chapter starts with an overview and an invitation to rate yourself from one to ten on the described facets. After that, each facet is described in detail, with vivid examples and quotes from popular athletes, along with a “tip from the top” and an exercise to train that facet. This clear structure repeated throughout the book makes it easy to follow and easy for readers to either read the book from cover to cover, or else cherry-pick those topics that are immediately relevant.

Other positive aspects about the book are clear language, vivid examples, and motivational quotes. Throughout the book, quotes by well-known athletes can be found, helping to inspire the reader. Additionally, catchphrases such as 'every day is a good day for training' and 'remove the word perfection from your vocabulary' challenge the reader/athlete and offer opportunities to change one’s perspective.

Finally, highlighting similarities between mental and physical training and comparing the brain to muscles that must be exercised makes the mental training aspect easily accessible and understandable to athletes and coaches. In this book, Jim Taylor speaks the language of athletes by using phrases such as training or practicing to describe working on the mental performance.

What did I not like about the book?

The simple language used, while often being one of the assets, can sometimes also be misleading. Occasionally, some complex processes seem over-simplified. For example, the process of dealing with fear of failure is described as follows: “In sum, to let go of fear of failure and free yourself to pursue your athletic goals (…) you must embrace the following: "To achieve total success you must be willing to accept total failure. By doing so, you will have nothing to fear about failure (…).”

Thus, the book suggests that dealing with fear of failure is as simple as changing your attitude. However, changing attitudes is in fact one of the hardest things to do. If it was so easy, we wouldn’t need a book about it.

To be fair, the book provides exercises on how to achieve this mindset and change of perspective, and repeatedly states that a new mindset must be trained and practiced like any other aspect of sport performance. Nonetheless, novices to mental training or the less experienced readers of this book might become frustrated, if they do not achieve this change of mindset as easily as it seems to be described. Overall, the challenges of changing attitudes and the struggles many athletes face could be better validated. After all, as we all know, there are no easy solutions or quick fixes in sport psychology. Plus: What may work for one athlete, might not help another. While the book emphasizes the importance of working on your mental performance, it does not always fully validate the struggles many athletes have in finding mental routines that work for them.

Who will benefit from the book?

While “Train Your Mind for Athletic Success” can be beneficial to many different audiences, it feels like a book addressed toward athletes or coaches. Incorporating reflective questions, the book immediately challenges the readers to train their mind and attitude. By inviting the readers to reflect on their own performance, Jim Taylor is immediately engaging readers to work on and improve their own mental game. Therefore, it can be helpful for athletes struggling with their mental performance in competition and could be used by them as a “self-help” book.

By providing clear, easy to understand language and offering vivid examples, “Train Your Mind for Athletic Success” allows the readers to engage with general aspects of sport psychology. We can only truly comprehend the concepts for which we have a common language for. By having words to describe experiences, we can make them more accessible to ourselves and others and learn to deal with them. This book provides many words, phrases, and examples to help readers understand their lived experiences. Therefore, it can be very beneficial to coaches or parents to find a common language and words to talk about the mental side of sports performance.

In this way, the book can also be very helpful to new sport psychology consultants or students in the field, who are still searching for their own language, style, or philosophy. Consultants who already found their philosophy and counseling style will either find the book very helpful, if it matches their own, or else struggle with integrating the concepts if it does not match align with their own philosophy. The book does not go in-depth about counseling philosophy, nor does it describe the stance it holds. It is up to the readers to delineate this for themselves. 

Nonetheless, even though the more experienced consultants are probably not the main audience of this book, they can still benefit from the exercises described in “Train Your Mind for Athletic Success." Regardless of a performance consultant’s level of experience, it can always be helpful to learn new exercises or integrate new experiences.

Summary

Overall, “Train Your Mind for Athletic Success” is a hands-on book offering a basic introduction to sport psychology, which is particularly beneficial to the novice consultants in this field. The book provides examples, quotes, reflective questions, and exercises to change attitudes and perspectives, with sometimes an oversimplification of the complex and difficult processes required to work on your mental game. Yet, the likening to physical training and exercise as well as the use of common sport language makes it easy to grasp and accessible to athletes and coaches.

References

Taylor, J. (2017). Train Your Mind for Athletic Success: Mental Preparation to Achieve Your Sports Goals. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

About the Author: Sydney Querfurth has been working as a certified sport psychology consultant in Germany for five years, mostly working with youth athletes in track and field, volleyball and most recently soccer. She completed her PhD on trust within the coach-athlete relationship in December 2018 at the University of Muenster. Aside from this, her research focus is on effectiveness evaluation of mental skills training and sport psychology interventions.

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