The Courage to Win®
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My name is Lisa Lane Brown and I’m an athlete too (in the Canadian ice sport of ringette, similar to ice hockey). I love my sport, but for the first 14 years of competing I was what you’d call a mental marshmallow.
I had wild confidence swings from one game to the next…I never knew why, and it hurt me all the time. Even when I practiced and prepared with 100% intensity, I’d often find a way to choke in big events.
Other times, I’d start out totally confident, only to face problem after problem such as a poor start, an opponent who was on fire, or bad officiating. Pretty soon, I’d get a sinking feeling in my stomach that today wasn’t my day and it would go downhill from there.
My worst moment was losing the National Championship in 1991 with one second left on the clock. If you’ve ever worked hard to reach a goal–only to fail at the very end, you can guess how devastating this was. My coaches and friends said things like, You just need to believe in yourself, and Don’t worry about it. You’ll do better next time. But no matter what they said, these failures really ate me up inside.
Secretly, I knew that my failures had something to do with my mental game, and not just my circumstances. I seriously considered quitting for good.
Lisa On Ice
Fortunately, I was a very stubborn athlete, obsessed with finding the answer. After years of choking too often, I decided to do something about it and embarked on a mission to find answers.
These answers didn’t come overnight. I did all the traditional -sports psychology stuff (some of it was great, but some of wasn’t…and actually made me WORSE). I threw out the ideas that didn’t work and spent several years carefully researching and testing new (even radical) mental toughness strategies on myself and other National Team and Olympic athletes in Canada.
My stubbornness paid off. Through trial and error, I discovered mental toughness secrets I never would have thought about winning under pressure — even things that went against traditional sports psychology.
These are secrets that only superstar athletes have figured out and jealously guard from their competitors (not something a guy with a PhD read in a book). These secrets transformed my life as an athlete forever. By learning how to psyche up and infuse myself with unstoppable confidence before championship finals, I scored the winning goals in the dying minutes of three world championships. Later I was humbled to be named to the Who’s Who of Canadian Sport and inducted into the Hall of Fame for my efforts.
In the past 14 years I’ve worked with thousands of Olympic and National team athletes in North America, showing them the missing pieces of sport psychology that only superstar athletes know.
I would love to hear your Success Story and comments on The Courage to Win® in Sport. Please contact me at info@lisabrown.ca
Light it up out there,