Book Review: 10 Minute Toughness by Jason Selk

Posted by Tim on Aug 16th, 2010 in Featured, Motivation, Product Reviews | 0 comments

10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins Is a great book by a sports psychologist named Jason Selk.

This book isn’t just for athletes. Everyone deals with performance issues: professional, personal, financial, social, whatever. With a little mental flexibility it’s not too hard to see how to utilize this simple behavioral approach to improve performance.

Here’s what Selk recommends as part of his “10-MT” training that he says should be done primarily BEFORE and AFTER practices and games (Hence the subtitle “The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins“:

Keep your arousal state under control with a “Centering Breath.”

1. We all experience arousal states when our heart starts to race due to anxiety of some kind. There are no conditions where we as humans function better in high arousal states as opposed to calm ones. Remember we’re not talking about being excited in a healthy way that actually helps performance, we’re talking about the arousal levels that hamper performance.

2. A Centering Breath isn’t some religious exercise, but a specific physical exercise that has an immediate impact on your heart rate putting it very quickly into a non-arousal state. The process is as simple as counting to 15:

a. Inhale for a count of “6″.
b. Then hold your breath through the counts of “7″ and “8″.
c. At “9″ begin exhaling for the rest of the count until you reach “15″.

Try it now and see how you feel. . . Calm as pie, right? I thought so.

Next is a Performance Statement.

Your Performance Statement is a statement that you tell yourself in order to get yourself to correctly execute the task at hand. Basically, it is a self coaching statement. So it’s also specific and customized to each individual. To develop your own Performance Statement you ask yourself “What would a GOOD coach be telling me to do to get the job done well, right now?”. A sprinter’s Performance Statement would be something like, “Head up, shoulders back, “grab” with the heals, explode off the toes.” It would not be something general like, “Run fast.” It must be the specific behaviors that instruct good performance.

Then comes the Personal Highlight Reels.

Here’s where you create 3 sixty second mental visions of your performance. The first one is of past successful performances. The second two are upcoming competitions or high stakes game situations. There are a lot of aspects to developing the Personal Highlight Reels, like the importance of them being from the 1st person perspective. Inquiring minds can discover all eight of the specifics of developing a good Personal Highlight Reel by clicking here.

After that comes the Identity Statement.

Remember when we said “Run fast” was a poor Performance Statement for our sprinter in the Performance Statement? Well “Run fast” might be a poor Performance Statement but it is a great start to an Identity Statement. A great Identity Statement for the sprinter might be “I am a fast runner, and train harder than my competition.”

Finish up with another Centering Breath.

The final Centering Breath is critical as the Personal Highlight Reels specifically can elevate the heart rate just by shear force of envisioning great performance. That in itself isn’t bad, but the objective is arousal control during competition so “calm” is the word.

This whole procedure is only the first half of the book. The balance is spent talking about Goal Setting. The bottom line is this is a great Sports Psychology book that could be utilized by ANY one that finds themselves in situations where good performance is important. In other words, this book is for every one.

By the way, it’s an easy read and less than two hundred pages. Purchase it here