The Roaring Heads Podcast

This week we have an interesting interview by Grant Giles with Shawn Smith, athlete manager and chief editor at Triathlon news website www.trizone.com.au.
In this podcast Shawn speaks openly about athlete management and shares the benefit of his experience.
We speak to the do's and dont's of building and maintaining athlete/sponsor relationships, and the importance of an effective coherent support team.
We also cover some ground from each stakeholders perspective, and the importance of gluing the whole thing together, so it becomes an add for all concerned, rather than a drain.
Shawn shares his advice for budding athletes and their support network, and we speak to the power of patience and resisting the temptation to bite off more than you can chew.
Many athletes rush the brass ring. There is often this propensity toward "making hay while the sun shines". We speak not only of the damage that this limited thinking can do to an athletic career, but also how that thinking and action can stunt your growth as an athlete. A stable financial career requires stability of mind and action, with a long haul overview being the path to longevity as an athlete.
Often the crush to make the bucks leads an athlete to a feast or famine mentality, that can mentally cloud an athletes path. This mindset often leads to rash decisions in the spur of the moment that make their development patterns messy and unsustainable.
Obviously an anxiety around the length of ones career leads to a perception of lack, however that perception is the same perception that rides an athletes back at races and makes it difficult for them to focus. Pressure wears many masks!
Shawn pulls the thing apart for you so you can get a bird's eye view into the blurry world of keeping everyone happy including yourself.
If you are an athlete, a coach, a supporter or part of an athletes family or support network, this one is aimed at you.
If you simply love the nature of sport, here is a view you don't often get to see from the sidelines.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/

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What is possible when we truly accept the outside world and ourselves as we are? What is possible if we drop all the judgement? All the names and shames that cloud our athletic trust.
We have to measure our goal against what the motivation is, and if the motivation is to simply add something to ourselves in terms of ego or reputation, then that motivation won’t be strong enough and the required faith and trust will be MIA when we need it most.
We need to anchor out trust inwards so we can draw on it in the heat of battle. Words, ideas, thoughts and belief are not enough for an athlete under pressure, stability is felt, not thought. Anchoring your motivation and trust in thought is like relying on a thief to not take your last 5 bucks.
Faith, will, desire, heart and guts are the key modalities to self trust, all of them are felt sense, not thought. You can try and think them but it will be a thin, weak hologram representation of the real thing. As a master, thinking makes a great servant. Don’t cower to your own thinking, most of it isn’t even original to you.
Over the coming months and hopefully years I plan on bringing a mix of interviews with athletes, coaches and psychology professionals, as well as touching the keys areas for all of us wanting to live a richer life.
Coming to itunes and Spotify soon, please listen via the link in the mean time!
The Roaring Heads Podcast Episode 1 November 2019
Music Credit: To The Mountain by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2016

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Grants Website

Doubtful, fearful, reactive, defensive, divisive, alienating, isolating, estranging, inharmonious, disingenuous, manipulative, repetitive, cynical, victimising, dishonest, deceitful, underhanded, duplicitous, insincere, calculating, scheming, devious and unscrupulous.
A bunch of words to describe the tip of the iceberg that we have all been witness too in Australia and around the world in the last few months.
What do they all have in common? They are words, mutations in truth and reality, states of mind that form thoughts, beliefs and ideology, actions that are born of this small group of words and thoughts fed in a matrix of chaos and confusion, that are met by the amygdala in our brain that alerts our nervous system that something is up and fires up the fight and flight response which takes our rational brain offline. It's an amygdala hijack that requires a mindful approach to solving.
Nothing gets solved by doubt, fear and panic. We each need to serve ourselves a healthy dose of mindful thought and action right now in the interest of keeping ourselves centered. Living life for the moment is the best way of keeping ourselves healthy in this stressful time.
There are always two ways to look at things, within the toughest of times, opportunity lies, growth waits, evolution patiently waits for the opportunity to leap and we never know the hidden reasons behind such discomfort and suffering. Perhaps Krishnamurti said it best when he said "man does not see the illusion in fear until he loses everything there is to lose and then realises there is nothing to fear".
Footnote: The content in this podcast is personal, one mans observed opinions, using words as a means of expression, is always fraught with misunderstandings and context issues so listen up with an open mind or switch it off.
Much love in trying times,
Gilesy.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/

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Grants Website

Your second chance is being served to you on a plate. What are you going to do, survive or thrive?
Athletes often tend to miss the importance of moments that contain opportunity. Often in hindsight we identify moments that provided key opportunity’s that we missed, because we were too busy sitting in judgement and making ourselves victims of the situation.
This moment is calling for a key decision, perhaps one of the biggest in your athletic career, what are you going to do with this time? Make yourself a victim of the situation or find a hidden opportunity?
So this weeks podcast is devoted to using this time to develop a strength and a skill that has been hidden from your view in all the noise. The unlimited potential of your own internal focus provided to you courtesy of your own awareness.
The mind is a narrow corridor of your awareness, you have an opportunity to vastly expand its capacity for focus and clarity in a time where the world has vastly slowed down.
Self awareness in athletic terms can take you far beyond the limitations of mind and thought into the twilight zones of becoming one with what you do. You move from self judgment to self awareness.
Awareness is always present, it’s level of effectiveness depends on how much attention you are able to pay to what’s really happening in your experience, rather than what the mind is projecting onto your experience.
When we talk about mindset we pay very little attention to the fact that what we are really talking about is taking away the layers of mind based illusion that covers and clouds our awareness, a virtual removal of the rubbish to expose the real.
An effective “mindset” is in fact a lack thereof, a subtraction of the weight and the noise to allow the innate intelligence to flow into your direct experience. You can’t increase awareness with more thinking, the word mindset is an oxymoron.
So here’s the skinny, not just in terms of sport but also life.
Our identification with the mind is the root of the problem. We believe our thoughts before we believe our experience, it is utterly backwards!
We fail to realise that our eyes are like projectors onto this world. We need to raise our awareness of what we project, because we don’t realise that we are the creators of this reality. I don’t take this lightly, this is not a small opportunity for athletes, it is hands down the greatest. Nothing you can think about or do physically even gets close.
Don’t overlook the power of the awareness In the heart. Your heart is a muscle. With awareness you can learn how to harness its power, It’s not just a physical point in your body that pushes out blood. It’s the centre of who you are and when we are unaware we don’t see or feel its ability to overcome adversity and challenge.
The world is giving you a pause in your crazy world to find something new about yourself that could revolutionise the way you train and race.
Try and see now before it becomes hindsight, this is your chance to work the mental edge hard. If you can get through this, you can get through anything!
You’ll never get an opportunity like this again, you make a choice to endure it or thrive as a consequence of it. Seriously this time is giving you the quiet reflection needed to make substantial gains, don’t piss it away filling it with noise.
Gilesy.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/

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Grants Website

There is nothing like race day pain and suffering to test our mettle. The deals we make with ourselves in the smoky backrooms of our minds, the tenuous connections that we make to our own internal strength, often frayed at the edges by the experiences of the past and the doubts of the future.

That incredible day before a big event where the mental pain at times often feels overwhelming, only an athlete or anyone who risks much knows that feeling, that low drawn feeling of ambiguity to a future that isn’t here yet, and yet close enough to make us suffer.

o But what if there is another way?
o What if the answer is nowhere near as complex as the stories our minds create?
o What is the truth?
o What is the reality?
o What is the possibility in all of this?

If you have ever experienced what I am talking about here, you may want to listen to this one. We never arrive at clarity without investigation and enquiry.

As athletes and humans, we tend to investigate everything for an advantage, and hey, athletes are opportunists, but they tend to overlook the one area that can leverage the greatest of all advantage, the space between our own two ears.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/

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Grants Website