Sports for the Soul

We all know that too much stress is bad for us. It leads to poor health, poor decision-making, and, poor results. But what do you do if you’ve chosen a high-stakes, high-pressure, always-changing profession? Is stress unavoidable for the coach, athlete, entrepreneur, or parent?

The truth is, regardless of your profession, there are proven techniques for eliminating stress. They take discipline to implement, but the stress-reducing results are more than worth it.

Here are five simple ways to deal with stress from someone who knows plenty about it, writer/director/actor/entrepreneur (and member of the Boxing Hall of Fame) Sylvester Stallone… [continue reading…]

What Bill Snyder did at Kansas State is almost inconceivable. In 1989, Snyder took over the worst program in all of college football and turned the Wildcats into a top-10 team within just seven seasons.

The Hall-of-Fame coach has led K-State to more than 200 wins, 18 bowl games, nine seasons with 10 or more wins, six Top-10 finishes, and two Big 12 championships. Shocking success for a school that considered dropping its football program altogether just before Snyder arrived.

Bill Snyder’s turnaround at Kansas State is unequivocally the greatest turnaround in college football history.

How did he do it? What was the foundation for this unprecedented turnaround?

Snyder built his program on what he calls the 16 Goals for Success… [continue reading…]

There are many things we don’t control in life. That’s a sometimes painful fact we all have to accept.

But, as Yogi Berra points out, it’s the things we DO have control over that determine our success or failure… [continue reading…]

Want to know what your life will look like a year from now? Listen to what you’re saying when you talk to yourself. Your self-talk determines your future.

The above passage is from my book, Relentless Optimism, and it concisely sums up exactly why the way you talk to yourself is so important.

Self-talk determines your future results and, unfortunately, most of us have an inner voice that is way too negative. We tend to beat ourselves up when something bad happens and it only makes things worse—it only leads to more negative consequences.

But, there is a way to quickly defeat that negative voice and replace it with positive, empowering self-talk, which leads to positive results.

Here’s the simple three-step method as described in Relentless Optimism… [continue reading…]

I’m excited to announce that Relentless Optimism, my latest book in the Sports for the Soul series, is here! This book addresses an important topic that affects every area of a person’s life: attitude.

Specifically, this book tackles the topic of positive thinking…

– How can you use “positive thinking” to change your life for the better?

– Why is so much of what you’ve heard about positive thinking wrong?

– And, what specific positive-thinking techniques have been proven to deliver results in a person’s life?

Positive thinking leads to positive outcomes. Study after study proves this. Researchers have found that optimistic people live longer, live healthier, have more energy, have more successful careers, make better decisions, are more productive, are less stressed, have healthier relationships, and (not surprisingly) are much happier than pessimists.

However, a lot has been misunderstood about what it means to be a positive thinker and what it takes to maintain an optimistic outlook. [continue reading…]