Mental performance and you: 10 things you need to know

Institute Editorial Team 08/02/2021

woman looking up at sky thinking, showing mental performance

Our mental performance, how we think, analyze, and perceive the world, influences how we work, tackle challenges, relate to others, manage stress and more. Where we choose to put our focus has a tremendous impact on how we feel and perform in our day-to-day lives. Julie Jones, Mental Performance Coach and Institute instructor, specializes in helping people boost their mental game, and in teaching them how mental training, positivity and self-awareness can help us do better in our jobs, our personal lives, as leaders, as athletes, and as members of the community. As a former Division I softball coach, Julie specializes in training athletes in mental performance techniques. The same brain strategies that can help a softball player improve her swing can help us all…

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Categories: Longevity, Personal Energy Management, Self-care, Wellness & Personal Growth

Tags: Brain Health, health, memory, Mental performance, optimism, PEM, Personal Energy Management, self-awareness, wellness

Institute Editorial Team

A Simple 4-Step Approach to Building a Grateful and Empowered Environment

As we look forward to family, food and a little break from our regularly scheduled programs this week, I find it hard not to shine a light on the benefits of being grateful. Since most things you read this week will be focused on gratitude, my thoughts leading up to this Tip threw me back to the post-training practice ritual we used for years with our teams. This is a simple, yet powerful way to end any training session or meeting and send the participants, no matter what their age, off with a shot of positive emotion. Each day, our practice plan included a “quote of the day.” Each day’s quote was chosen intentionally to fit the time of the season, the goal of the…

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Julie Jones 11/21/2022

How to care for yourself while taking care of others

Caregivers, this is for you. Even before the pandemic, more than 16% of the US population was providing unpaid care to an adult 18 years or older, including family members with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Women make up about 75% of those caregivers, and they put in the work while juggling jobs, children, and ongoing domestic-task overload. With COVID back on the rise, caregivers are under additional pressure to care for and protect their loved ones. If you’re a caregiver, the stress may seem relentless, and you may be: having trouble sleeping under/over-eating self-medicating with alcohol or drugs canceling (or not even booking) your own doctors’ appointments That’s because when you’re a caregiver, caring for yourself tends to happen only after everyone else’s needs have been…

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Institute Editorial Team 09/26/2023

The Power of Focus

The Power of Focus and How it Affects Our Performance. I have been fortunate to work with a lot of coaches around the country, but one of the most interesting is Coach Wilson, a colleague who coaches biathlon in Alaska and works with the US Biathlon Team. What is biathlon you ask? It is the sport of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. Coach Wilson spent a month with me last summer going through mental performance basics and building a plan for his athletes. The sport lends itself to all kinds of mental challenges – fatigue, focus, emotional control, breathing proficiency, a necessity for precision…just to name a few. I am amazed by the athletes (and coaches) in this sport, so when I get an email…

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Institute Editorial Team 10/31/2022

How To Recognize and Handle Burnout

What Is Burnout? Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion that comes from stress exposure (Schaufeli & Greenglass, 2001). Generally, the stress that leads to burnout is consistent and ongoing for an extended period. A single stressful event usually isn’t enough to cause burnout. When you are burned out you may feel constantly exhausted or anxious and on edge. You may feel irritable and angry. You may feel like you are living in a fog and unable to think clearly. You may be unable to relax or get to sleep. Burnout Syndrome Burnout syndrome was first formally defined in the 1970s to describe a collection of symptoms often seen in people working as medical professionals, teachers, social workers, and others in helping…

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Institute Editorial Team 03/08/2023

Mistakes Happen. It’s What We Do Next That Matters Most

March Madness is certainly living up to its name this year! Who doesn’t love watching mid-majors get their time in the spotlight! St. Peters, Creighton, South Dakota are all battling schools whose budgets probably match the “supplies” line in most BCS budgets. Even though watching the underdog is fun, we know winning and losing is so much more than the haves and the have nots. As I remind the teams I work with, if we already knew who was going to win the game based on analytics, stats or budget, we could save a lot of time and money and just crown the winner based on predictions. But stats and predictions lie! We play the game to see who is best on that day. That…

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Julie Jones 03/29/2022

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