Building a Better Mindset

Essential Skills

Mindset is a crucial part of outdoor sport. Growth depends on both physical and mental fitness. Building a better mindset not only helps you to progress in your chosen outdoor pursuits, but it also allows you to navigate the struggles, disappointments, successes, and failures that come with outdoor experiences. Although we spend significant time talking about mindset, sometimes it’s hard to get a handle on concrete ways to improve your mental fitness and build a better outlook. Here are a few takes on bettering your mindset in outdoor sports; some tips, strategies, and ideas to help get you and your outdoor community thinking about a positive and effective mental state during your outside time.

Embrace the Suck

Embracing the “suck” is an easy tenet to adopt in the pursuit of a better mindset. Without struggle, there can be no growth. So, at OSI, something we refer to when talking about learning a new skill is the idea that we have to be bad at something before we can be good at it. We have to “suck.” Not only is sucking at something part of the learning process, the struggle experienced when learning something new is absolutely critical to improvement. Sometimes it’s helpful to remember that even professional athletes sucked at some point.

Working with beginners, we all too often hear them say something like “I can’t/don’t/won’t do that. I’m not good at it.”  They’re right, of course, they are not good at it, but that’s the point. You need to struggle before you get good at something, and you have to take a chance and actually try new things before the learning process can begin.

As outdoor sport leaders, and even as outdoor sport participants ourselves, we have an opportunity to change the stigma surrounding this aversion to struggle. One effective approach is simply acknowledging the fact that sucking is part of the learning process. Just reminding people to “embrace the suck” helps change the narrative from “I suck and I can’t do this” to “I’m supposed to suck so I can get better.”

Get Uncomfortable

Being slightly (or extremely) uncomfortable is common in outdoor sport, and is actually an important part of the mental game involved in being an outdoor enthusiast. We like professional big wave surfer, Mark Healey’s, take on suffering. He was quoted in Surfer Magazine saying, “I don’t think there is actual growth without some discomfort. If you try to avoid it, you don’t really grow as a human.”

Discomfort is a fact of the outdoors – and learning to cope with it allows growth through the experience. Maybe I learn that bushwhacking through some slap-stick will eventually bring me to a great backcountry ski run. Sometimes these are the simplest lessons in tenacity and they will serve us well in our future endeavors.

Some people are total masochists. It’s not fun unless there’s some real suffering. Others enjoy the challenge of flirting with the edge and testing their resolve. While the way to get there is different for everyone, the experience of finding, embracing, and working through discomfort is a pathway to personal growth. It’s what keeps us coming back for more, even when we know it will be hard. If it were easy, if it were comfortable, wouldn’t it just be Netflix?

Change Your Mantra

What stories do we tell ourselves? Self-talk is an important part of building a mindset that will help us navigate our outdoor experiences. Mindset isn’t just helpful in making things go right, though. It can make all the difference when things go wrong.

Are you able to handle experiences if they don’t go well? Sometimes it’s hard to know until you start to push your limits. Being able to handle the struggle, disappointment, or “sucking,” is just as important in building a strong mindset as being confident in your ability. How do you practice keeping a positive mindset as you experience both success and failure?

As you find yourself either struggling or improving-- notice what you tell yourself. Are you surprised by your successes? What do you tell yourself as you try to psych yourself up? What if you have a really bad day? Do you treat each failed attempt as an opportunity to learn, or do you get down on your ability? Consider writing down the mental chatter in your head after a session and reading it out loud. If the narrative isn’t helping you improve, you can create a few specific statements or mantras that help you stay positive when you struggle.

We have all seen that person that loses patience with themselves during struggle, gets angry, and then quits. It’s important to remember that practicing how to talk and think our way through challenges is just as important as practicing physical skills themselves.

Visualize

Often in the outdoor sport world we try to “get in the zone,” but it’s easy for our heads to become filled with unproductive feelings. How can we develop mindset practices that allow us to shut out the noise?

The answer, unfortunately, isn’t cut and dry. Take a look at high-performing athletes in any sport and you’ll see that in addition to the incredible physical capacity, they’ve also developed and utilized personalized routines to help them find a focused performance mindset. Just like the physical components, good mindset is a skill that requires practice to develop and maintain.

Although there are many techniques that athletes use, a popular one is positive visualization. This involves mentally picturing the ideal execution of a given task. Imagine nailing every turn on the entire ski course. It’s important to remember that there are many mindset-developing methods and techniques out there. The concept of internal visualization is just one example, and it requires practice to teach the brain how to engage in effective thought patterns.

Find Mentors

Finally, look for solid mentors. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize when your own mindset is standing in your way, even if you do use the steps mentioned above. Having guidance from someone that can help you ask the right questions, give perspective that’s helpful, and is willing to share insights from their own experience without limiting your experience, can be powerful. It also helps build the kind of community that makes the outdoors such an incredible place to share.

Join in!

Embracing the suck, being uncomfortable, changing your mantra, and training your brain to visualize success all sound like a rocking good time, right? The truth is that these are all plausible and attainable steps to seeing improvement in your outdoor sport of choice. If you’re interested in learning more about how your brain can work with your body for success, check out the Building a Better Mindset for Outdoor Sport course available through OSI. Click the link for more information, and let us know what you are doing to improve your mental game.