The Personal Highlight Reel

imagine what it must be like to wake up in the morning and turn on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” to see highlights of yourself playing on national television. For some of my clients, this is a daily reality. As for the rest of us, we need to keep using our imaginations to experience this claim to fame. The personal highlight reel is an advanced form of visualization in which you create your own mental “SportsCenter” highlight reel. The upside for the not-so-famous souls is that creating mental videos is actually more helpful than watching a video clip of one’s success. There is an inherent benefit to generating the mental focus yourself: people learn faster by visualizing success rather than by watching it on tape. Of course, there is considerable value in watching success on tape. In fact, during film sessions, Bear Bryant, the famous football coach at Alabama, showed his players only footage of themselves playing well.Coach Bryant contended that showing his players what they did well helped them repeat the performance, whereas showing them what they did wrong would only increase the likelihood of their exhibiting more poor play in the future.1 Research backs up what Bryant suspected. It is much more helpful to have players think about success rather than failure. An asset of visualization is that by creating mental videos of success, the mind is more engaged than when merely watching a tape of previous success. Visualization helps athletes create a tighter focus on the variables needed for success. A world-class, tae-kwon-do athlete with whom I work devised a personal highlight reel that included a sixtysecond mental video of herself competing in the upcoming Olympic Trials and another sixty-second clip of herself competing in the 2008 Olympic Games and winning the gold medal. She uses her reel to accent her impressive power, speed, and strength. She watches it daily as part of her mental workout, and while doing so, she strives to feel the “relaxed confidence” that she wants to feel in competition. The more frequently she completes the personal highlight reel in her mental workouts, the more apt she is to use visualization during practices and competitions to perform at her best. Completing her mental workouts strengthens her mind to a point at which she’s using visualization throughout training and competition to achieve the level of performance needed to make her Olympic dreams come true. When I first met Tyler McIlwraith, she had just begun her senior basketball season at St. Louis University. Tyler had hopes of playing in the WNBA, but because of an earlyseason slump, she was beginning to wonder if a professional basketball career was realistic. Even her coaches had become concerned with her “nonaggressive” play. Although Tyler was trying, she was having trouble playing with the competitive fire that once came so naturally to her. On offense, she was shooting more and more from the perimeter. Her shot was a little off because of a wrist injury, so she began passing up shots and giving the ball to her teammates rather than driving and creating offensive opportunities. Defensively, she had been moved into a new role because of an injury to a teammate. She felt awkward and uncertain in her new assignment, leaving her opponents one step ahead of her. All in all, Tyler was feeling less and less like the dominant player she was. She often thought about her mistakes and began questioning her ability to compete, which contributed to her being a less confident and aggressive player. Fourteen games into her senior season, Tyler took up the 10-MT mental-training program. She began telling herself she was an aggressive, dominant player and replacing all self-doubt and negativity with mental images of herself as a dominant player playing with aggressiveness and intensity. Specifically, Tyler created a personal highlight reel that incorporated the following five scenarios: Offensively 1. When an opponent comes from the help side, I jumpstop, draw contact, and then shoot. (The “help side” is the side of the court without the ball. A defender coming from the help side typically forms a double team. Tyler hoped to exploit the extra body defending her by drawing a foul call.) 2. When receiving a pass, I catch and immediately shoot. (No hesitation or stutter step.) When I’m outside the three-point line with a player defending, I fake a shot and aggressively drive to the hoop. (Her goal is to create contact and, again, draw a foul.) Defensively 1. When an opponent has the ball, I apply ball pressure in my stance with active hands. 2. When an opponent goes for the middle, I jump to her high foot and force her to the baseline. (In other words, Tyler wanted to use her body to cut off her opponent’s angle to the basket or draw a charging foul.) Every time Tyler would go through her mental workout, she would use her personal highlight reel to visualize herself performing the specified actions. Almost immediately, she started practicing with more determination and intensity. Her practice intensity began to carry into the games with her. Her coaches could not believe the turnaround. One of Tyler’s coaches had this to say about her improvements: “Ty is back. Whatever she is doing, it’s working. It is somewhat unbelievable, but she is once again playing like we know she can. She is driving and scoring more; other teams are having to double up on her, and that is opening up more offensive opportunities for the whole team. She has really done a great job of leading this team.” Tyler finished her collegiate career stronger than ever. In addition to being named Practice Player of the Year and most valuable player of her team, Tyler was selected to the 2006–2007 ESPN the Magazine Academic All-American team and was named the Scholar-Athlete of the Year by the Division I-AAA Athletics Directors Association. With Tyler’s work ethic and fresh mental approach to the game, she is well on her way to realizing her dreams of play-ing professional basketball. Tyler got herself on the right track by using her personal highlight reel to underscore the points of strength that help make her an intense and aggressive player. She cultivated a vision of what she could become by telling herself she was a dominant player and visualizing herself playing well on the basketball court.