Acceptance and Commitment Training builds the skill of distinguishing between the self-as-content (Self-stories), the self-as-process (Self-Story-Teller), and self-as-context (Where the story is told). Athletes and coaches can hook on the story as identity with catastrophic outcomes. I talk about how to notice the stories we tell ourselves so we can effectively navigate identity disrupting experiences such as injury or loss.

Mindfulness is becoming so ubiquitous it can be challenging to separate what the skill is and how to use it to an athlete’s advantage from the stereotypes of culturally appropriating hipsters and crunchy consumerism. Here are some trainable skills to build active and flexible attention in order to more easily induce broad present moment awareness experiences such as flow state.

I also work in research on clinical methods and have work published in research journals from time to time. This is one of those times.

This post is a companion piece to an education article appearing in the January-February 2019 Professional Skate Magazine entitled “Behavior Analysis for Popped Jumps.” We build off that article and go deeper on form versus function and fading techniques.