You have the potential to do great things. You are capable of playing among the best. Believing otherwise means you’re creating mental barriers, setting limits, and making it harder to reach mastery. Getting from point A to B will take time and energy — but with consistent training and a willingness to hear feedback, you will break barriers and move to new challenges. You must know you can grow, learn, and improve at anything you practice. If they can do it, you can do it. In industry, we will identify athletes who train with mastery in mind as high-performance athletes. But all their decisions originate in the mind: So, high-performance training is a mindset to leads to the right action. 

The distinctive characteristic of high-performance thinking is that you learn to embrace failure and work through obstacles to improve your mental and physical skills. More importantly, you learn the skill of self-discipline which gives you immense power and confidence. Here are several key concepts that you must know to become a high-performance athlete:

1) Good training habits are learned, not inherited. The whining and excuses you make are also learned. You must therefore first accept your present skills and environment before you can change something about those elements. Instead of whining about deficiencies, you shift your mind to consider what needs to be done to improve. Without acceptance, you’re only creating resistance which will make it more difficult to change. Lastly, get rid of the "this is who I am thinking." Sure, you are unique from anybody else but don't get stuck. Roger Federer had a bad temper when he was a teenager. He would lash out and throw his racquet. But he changed for the better. You should also keep your mind open to changing yourself.

2) Your only natural limitations are time and the laws of physics. Those limits, especially time, are relatively the same for everyone -- you share the same 24 hours per day and the laws of physics don't change from household to household. For some, lack of funding is a limitation, but not a fatal one. Many without good financial resources achieved greatness and many with unlimited funding did not develop mastery.

3) Change the way you think about results. One of the most difficult barriers we must overcome is letting go of controlling outcomes. Much of that is driven by the need to feel accepted by our social environment. No one likes to admit that we care so much about what other people think and thus worry about winning and losing. We want to look great and get praised for our success. We also want to avoid being seen as failures. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is what makes it harder to become successful. Instead of concentrating on specific actions that lead to better outcomes, our mental resources are dedicated to wishing for a final outcome without going through the process. 

4) Train consistently. Can you become a good swimmer without swimming? What if Michael Phelps, a 28-medal Olympian, handed you all his knowledge of swimming, would you become a good swimmer without putting in the time and dedication? You may learn (e.g. by reading this blog), but you won't know how to perform well without repetitive training on a consistent basis.