A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to have an exchange with Greg Chappell about cricket. Greg suggested that the next frontier in performance would be in mental skills. I've been reflecting on that exchange recently. Through the prism of my two favourite sports, golf and cricket, the article below discusses the value of accepting imperfection while pursuing mastery. As usual, I encourage you to share your thoughts.

Like Golf, Cricket is definitely not a game of Perfect.

Dr Bob Rotella’s book, Golf is not a game of Perfect, contains numerous gold nuggets of wisdom for anyone serious about improving their sporting performance.

https://www.cricconnect.com/profile/946/peter-procopis/blog/2194/like-golf-cricket-is-definitely-not-a-game-of-perfect

The subconscious mind is the most important part in an athletes sporting performance and is grossly neglected and misunderstood. The elite of all athletes have mastered it but a majority of those don't know why or how they did. As a self sabotage coach that specialises in sub conscious reprogramming it is important to remember that there is only three ways to change the subconscious mind..extreme trauma eg an event, repetition and self/external hypnosis. In cricket terms most players (especially batsmen) develop negative, repetitive patterns of behaviour by being taught these by poor coaching and mentoring from people that don't understand the subconscious mind. Modern coaches focus and are trained to focus on the conscious mind (technique). As this article referred to Bob Rotella who is an expert in sporting psychology the most important thing an athlete can focus on is developing and training their sub conscious mind. It is a record/playback system so under pressure players need to practice the art of accessing the subconscious mind (the zone) by simple techniques such as breathing and focusing on the smallest target possible as that is what the sub conscious brain orientates to. The trick is to have the subconscious mind trained well so so when an athlete accesses this under pressure he has positive repetitive patterns of behaviour to call on. Much like NEO in the Matrix when he is programmed with Kung Fu. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I would completely retrain my thinking processes of when I played. I got back into golf at 40 and using Rotella's techniques and my own studies of the sub conscious mind and self hypnosis I got myself playing golf off plus 2 with zero technical coaching whatsoever. Anyone can do it.