Welcome to my blog. Mike Margolies The Athlete within You
This is my space for writing about all things in my world of sports, mental training and to be honest, anything that strikes me at the time. Some of these posts ended up in my book “The Athlete within You. Some are stories from any of my presentations. I hope you spend some time to explore my world. It’s about mental toughness, success and the fun involved in sports, business and life. There is also a bit about Mike Margolies and my journey working with athletes for close to 40 years. To learn more about how I work with people, please go to The Mental Game. To have me speak to your group, go to my Speaker page at MikeMargolies.com. Thank you for following Mike Margolies The Athlete within You. Be well.
Athlete within You published in Europe
The Athlete within You published in Europe Just wanted to announce that my book “The Athlete within You – a mental approach to sports and business” has been picked up and reformatted by Digilogit Ltd. It is being marketed by them all over Europe and the U.S.A. What is really cool as I have mentioned before is that the book is now illustrated. This is really great. Te illustrations add some humor and are on point. They help set the stage for what I want you to focus on in a chapter. My favorite is captioned “I was told by coach to talk to someone I can trust”. It’s a picture of an athlete on the bench talking to his teddy bear. To get your digital copy check out the d-book store by clicking on the...
He’s Back: Radio Show is ON
He’s Back: Radio Show is ON The Mental Game Radio Show Radio Show is ON: Check out the Mental Game Radio Show. This is the 3rd rendition and this one is all about the mental game and what you can do to reach optimal performance, get past issues and find happiness in sports. Come join in and discuss sports with author / sport psychology consultant/ certified mental trainer® Mike Margolies. Bring your “A” Game to play. The primary purpose of the mental game is to talk about the importance of mental training for athletes and people in business. Mental training is not a luxury. We need to stop thinking about it as such. While we work with issues in sport psychology most of my work is in helping athletes to the next level through mental training. If you have read my blog posts you know that mental training is strength training for the mind, only MORE IMPORTANT. If the mental game is 80% of performance, what are you doing right now to improve your game. So on the show I talk with people involved in sports. Some of those people are mental trainers / sport psychology Consultants like myself while others are coaches, athletes, personal trainers, and others associated with sports. Come listen into the conversations. Drop me an email with questions and I’ll address them on the next show if I can. We are always booking guests and of course looking for the right fit in sponsors. Go to the pages listed below this one in the menu to hear The Mental Game Radio...
Illustrations coming for TAWY
Illustrations coming for The Athlete within You Illustrations coming to my book. A group in the UK has asked to publish an electronic version of my book “The Athlete within You”. It is a great advantage for me. It will be in a different version than the already available Kindle. The coolest part are the illustrations. They are going to illustrate it for me. The draft is pretty cool. I copied a few of me, yes I am now a caricature or character in my own book. They drew them up from my picture in the book. It is an interesting thing from a psychological perspective to see oneself first on a book cover and then in illustrations. I am very particular about the photos used of me in print. I flat-out have a thing about them. Yes perhaps on this issue I could use some help. haha. A young friend corrected me on the ha thing as I was hyphenating each Ha. Live and learn. Anyway on to the illustrations. I don’t mind the illustrations. It’s a funny thing. Is it because it is art? Is it because it uses imagination to depict something, where a photograph (un-airbrushed) represents reality with all of our flaws? I don’t look 30 anymore. My friends just fell over laughing at my semi implying I should. So what is it. If you look at my picture it is pretty accurate It represents me differently perhaps. The thing is because it is art I don’t mind. If Picasso drew me I’d likely have three mouths and ten hands. That would be OK because it is or was Picasso. It would...
Tru Athlete Event
Tru Athlete Event I am helping with a group here in the area called The Tru Athlete. A very cool idea. Competitors compete as a team in three sports. Soccer, Flag Football and Volleyball. It is Co-Ed. Ten players per team. Two female players on the field / court at all times. Champion is crowned by team that accumulates most points in all events. All in one day. I am doing pre-competition talk to get everyone ready. Not really a motivational talk, because as you know I don’t do that. I help others find their motivation. But none the less I will try to inspire a few teams and be there during the day to help with their frustrations, anxiety and focus. I am setting up in a booth. It will look something like this. I hope you know who doesn’t mind. I’d hate to have her pull the football away from me for taking her job. Yes I am charging a nickel that’s 5 Cents. Depending on the long lines (right) consultations will be five minutes or longer. Might give them some exercises to do or play some games. I could do a concentration / focus exercise for a time and give away a prize. That could be fun. Fastest time wins a book or 1 hr consultation. Say a $1 per entry. Who says Mental training can’t be fun? All money from consultations will be given to charity (not sure which one yet). I will also sell books and give some of the profits to the same charity. It should be a fun event. Not the usual event I work at....
Stress and a Glass of Water
Stress and a Glass of Water I want to run you through a demonstration I have used in workshops and with individual clients. It’s called Stress and a Glass of Water. I didn’t invent the analogy, but have used something like this to help people understand the concept of stress for a long time. If I were to ask you How heavy is this glass of water? What would your answer be? 8 oz? Maybe 12 oz? Absolute weight doesn’t matter really. It depends on how long you hold it. If you hold it for a minute, it’s not a problem. If you hold it for an hour, you’ll have an ache in your arm. If you hold it for a day, your arm will feel numb, it may feel paralyzed or it fall off (or so I’m told). In each case, the weight of the water doesn’t change, but the longer it’s held, the heavier it feels. Stress and anxiety are like the glass of water. Think about them for a short time and everything is fine. Think about them for a longer period of time and they begin to feel uncomfortable. And if you think about them all the time, you will feel paralyzed – incapable of doing anything or moving forward. I can add to this analogy for you as well. What happens when we add more water? What if you fill the glass to the top? Things tend to get shaky. You have difficulty focusing and water spills out. Now you worry about the water that has spilled too. If someone is talking to you now you have difficulty paying attention...
In Celebration of May book Giveaway
In Celebration of May book Giveaway It’s spring in Seattle. That means I’m looking out my office window looking at rain. We have had reasonable weather here, but it’s still wetter than dry. In Celebration of May book giveaway is so on. As the end of the month approaches I’ve joined in with a Kindle Promotion to give away as many copies of “The Athlete within You” as I can. The book “Kindle Version of course) is available directly from Amazon for the next 4 days. Just pass on the message so we can reach more athletes. Amazon.com Follow the amazon link directly to the site. Offer ends May 26,...
Is this your first time
Is this your first time? Welcome to The Athlete within You blog site. Is this your first time? I trust it won’t be your last and you will find these posts informative, entertaining at times and useful to you as you train for sports and life. I hope that as a first time of recent visitor that you will take the tour and check out more posts. It would be even cooler if you would share them with others. My intent is to reach as many as possible. I want people to know that mental training is for everyone. This site is all about mental training and how it helps you reach peak performance in sports and business. Many of the stories or antidotes are meant to give you a sense of understanding, that being an athlete is so much more than physical training. Certainly it is my belief that mental training is not a luxury, it is an essential – necessity. Sprinkled throughout these 100 or so posts are suggestions and exercises for mental training I have used over the last three decades to help athletes reach the highest levels in sports. I am pleased that some have made it to the world stage and even taken how the big prize. I perhaps get more satisfaction from the athletes who have moved up to the college level able to pursue their love of the game and a college education. If you read the story about my father (an elementary school teacher) , you’ll understand that I appreciate now the impact I have had on the lives of others. There have been over...
Sports Metaphors, Language of Business
Sports Metaphors, Language of Business Sports metaphors infuse the language of business. I bring this up because of some recent meetings with corporations. My approach to these corporations has been that mental training will help their employees (athletes) perform at a higher level. The reply was that while they believed in the concept, there doubt was that someone from the sports world could communicate with many of their highly technical employee’s (geeks and nerds). My answer was a smile. At first I subtly changed the subject to the Seattle Sounders FC because I had noticed something in this directors office that lead me to believe he was a Sounders fan. He explained that while he was a fan, not all of his team understood soccer, football or baseball. at this point I started interjecting, I hoped with some semblance of being shrewd, the language of business. I started asking about departmental issues. Where were projects off base. He had he said some team issue, not everyone was playing ball. He had to make some judgement calls about personnel soon. Dealing with such a diverse workforce meant working with some people that were just out in left field. I said exactly, he said WHAT? Here’s my pitch. You and your staff are immersed in the language of business and much of this involves sport metaphors. We can’t help but use it as it is so entrenched in our lexicon He stared at me still not getting that he had used 4 sports metaphors already. I asked him if he was ready for a curve ball. He said sure and at that he had an aha type of moment. now of course I had been slipping in metaphors into the...
Getting past shame
Mental Training to get past shame in sports A while back I wrote a post on shame. It is one of the areas that we rarely address in sports. It got a lot of hits back when I originally posted it. It was uploaded to a site in the UK this month for a new audience and again it’s garnered a good deal of attention. I thought perhaps I would talk about a few exercises people can use to get over issues were they feel shame. For some it is a feeling of failure associated with letting team or family down by not performing to their own or others expectations. In many ways it is associated with fear of failure. In other ways it goes perhaps deeper. Shame affects confidence, motivation and so much more. From an emotional intelligence point of view, along with guilt, it is certainly one of our more useless emotions. Please keep in mind, as usual; I am not talking about people who have really deep seated issues, as I only work with healthy people. There are times when we all have trouble dealing with something however, and these exercises can help. Using CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy type exercises can help athletes reduce this feeling and perform at higher levels. Some are very simple. Some will take a bit of work. Some come from what are known as Shame Attacking exercises. My new favorite one however comes from Clown School. Don’t discount this technique because of its unusual origins. I picked this one up from a friend, Leif Hansen, who runs a group called Spark Interactions [ SPARK ]. A...
The Mental Game is here to Stay
The Mental Game Since 1983 my practice has been called Sport Psychology Consultants. Not very creative, but back then it seemed to fit what I wanted to do. In 2009 when I transitioned into the current century and built a website, my practice became, Sport Psychology Consultants @The Mental Game.com For the last few weeks I have been posting about how mental training needs to be thought of as a necessity and not a luxury. I even wrote about how those of us who are applied sport psychology consultants are in fact part of the problem. I started talking about using mental trainer instead of sport psychology consultant. Last week traveling with a friend we were discussing business and I had an epiphany. We were discussing my blog posts and it occurred to me that I was being hypocritical (well maybe not hypocritical, but perhaps stubborn). I was referring to an applied sport psychology consultant as a mental trainer, then how can I keep referring to my practice as Sport Psychology Consultants. Why not do business as The Mental Game? So here I am making the paradigm shift. Back in the late 70’s I was considered a Sport Psychologist and my practice was Inner Sports. 1983 rolls around and it changes. I was a Sport Psychology Consultant doing business as Sport Psychology Consultants. Brilliant! Ha. So beginning this March I am a Mental Trainer and the practice is called The Mental Game. Website is being changed. Logo being worked on. Will it make a difference? Will this help bring about a change in the way people think about sport psychology? I hope so. I so desperately want athletes and coaches to understand that we who...Mike Margolies
Mike Margolies: Sport Psychology Consultants ; TheMental-Game.com
Mike Margolies is a Sport Psychology Consultant, Certified Mental Trainer® (CMT), Author, and Professional Speaker. When you want to be the best that you can be and the one thing you might be missing is the right mental game - what can you do? Well, athletes from all over the country have been seeking out Mike Margolies for over three decades to help them reach their potential. His clients include professional, elite, colligate and youth athletes in every sport. They have sought his counsel and unique teaching style to learn about the game within the game, or what mental training can do to help them become the athlete they want to be. He has trained professional and elite athletes and helped guide many to world championships and even the Super Bowl. Mike has trained more than 2000+ athletes. He has taught at four Universities and completed research at the United States Olympic Training Center. His new book is called The Athlete within You- A Mental Approach to Sports and Business. He currently works with individual athletes, teams and businesses around the world, both in person and via SKYPE. Mike is based out of the Pacific Northwest. Let him encourage you to play the game within the game. The Athlete within You is waiting to come out play. Learn the rules to the mental game to help realize your potential.