Ascent with Tom Foxley

McCoy Turner joins Tom on today’s Limitless Athlete Podcast to discuss the exact process he used to train his mindset.

Today, I’m going to give you the truth. Honestly, this isn’t the sexy stuff. I anticipate this blog will get way fewer views than most of my stuff, but it’s the truth behind strong mindset foundations.

If you’re going to push yourself, your mindset better be built on strong foundations.

Without strong mindset foundations, you’ll find yourself going round and round in circles; perpetually falling into the same old trap and wondering why you can’t change your mindset.

When I start working with athletes, they want to jump into the shiny stuff straight away: pre-lift routines and the like.

I’ll be honest with you for a moment - if you haven’t got a decent foundation of mindset, most of that will fall flat on its face.

Here are the foundational mindset requirements.

Get these right and you’ll close the gap between you and your potential.

Get them wrong and you’ll always be stagnated.

Whether you are proud of the athlete you become or not, depends entirely on your mindset. Not your physical capacity.

Think about your mindset as the thing which determines the gap between the level you perform at and your potential.

Someone else wrote this better than me:

Performance = potential - interference.

In my time coaching crossfit athletes mindset, I’ve located five extremely common problems which hold athletes back from their potential: the forbidden five.

Today, I’m going to help you figure out which one of these five is holding you back the most.

If you don’t know the belief holding you back, you will always be limited by it, but you probably won’t be able to see it.

“Until the unconscious becomes conscious, it will rule your life and you’ll call it fate.” C.G. Jung

Today we’re going to cover:

• Why you can’t meet the standards you set for yourself

I see 7 big reasons CrossFit athletes stay frustrated with poor performances.

If you consistently finish up comps or workouts second guessing your effort. Or look back at months of training and realise you haven’t come as far as you’d like. Or are just frustrated at how slowly you’re improving, this is for you.

Especially if you have a hunch that your body isn’t the limiting factor, it’s probably your mind.

Today, I’m going to let you know the 7 traps that I see athletes falling into time and again.

If you fall into one of these 7 traps, your mindset will suffer, and so will your performance.

If your mindset is an exhausting emotional rollercoaster, I wrote this for you.

Training like a full time athlete is exhausting enough. Combining it with not being able to live comfortably off sponsorship, running a full time & demanding job, or being a parent is infinitely harder.

You have other exhausting things in your life, and you still have lofty aims.

Yet the constant demands of everything stack up.

And there’s always the inner doubt of “is all this even worth it?”

Part of you wants to give up, but there’s a stronger part of you which desires a life well lived.

Most athletes never reach their potential because they let this emotional rollercoaster take away from what’s important, create self doubt and make them think that anything less than perfection is failure.

You don’t have to live that life. You don’t deserve that life.

Today, I am going to teach you:

1. How to drop the pressure when you need to perform

“I’ve tried to journal, but I don’t know how.”

If that sounds like you, this blog post is your answer. I’m going to give you an exact framework of the 4 most common journaling exercises I use with the athletes I work with.

If you’re like almost every athlete I have spoken to, you know you should be journaling, but you’re not sure how, you’re not sure it will even benefit you, or you struggle with it feeling like it’s working.

If you’re not journaling, you’re missing out on huge mindset gains because you’re just settling for what’s normal to you…

…not what’s best for you.

Most athletes never get the most out of journaling because they don’t know how to do it effectively.

I’m going to teach you how to journal for four main goals:

How to be more a more positive athlete

How to increase your self-knowledge

How to become mentally tougher (or any other character skill you want)

How to be more consistent, driven & disciplined

There are two types of comparison. One really is the thief of joy. If you compare in this way, you’ll always find proof you are not good enough. Your workouts will be filled with doubt and negativity. Your progress will stutter to a halt.

Whilst this form of comparison will hurt you, comparison’s lighter side will guide you to better performances. It will highlight your best path to growth. And it will provide fuel for your progress as an athlete.

So maybe you should be comparing yourself more, not less.

This week, I’ve had conversations with a handful of the athletes I work with about comparison. They have been struggling with comparing themselves to the athletes they either look up to or want to beat.

I told them they need to stop that way of thinking.

Yet I had a conversation with another athlete where I encouraged them to compare themselves more to those kinds of athletes. When they did that, their performance excelled, their motivation spiked, and they felt more positive.

Today, I’ll be explaining how I approach comparison with my athletes, and ensure that they’re using the correct type to fuel their process, not beat themselves up with.

We’ll be covering

1. The difference between the two types of comparison and what to avoid if you want to perform well

Today, I’m going to show you the anatomy of a confident athlete.

After reading this, you’ll know how to build your confidence and start performing like you believe in yourself.

Because right now, I’m guessing there’s a little too much self-doubt in your performances…

…not enough belief…

…and a whole bunch of unhelpful self-talk.

Which means that progress is slow and training has stopped being enjoyable.

Most athletes never discover their confidence for two main reasons:

1. They see confidence as a character trait which is set in stone, and not a trainable skill

Today, I’ll give you the first steps in changing that.

There’s so much BS out there when it comes to training your confidence. Most often we’re just told to be more confident… yes, but how?

“Just believe in yourself” does more harm than good to the unconfident athlete

I’m going to explain to you the four things confident athletes do, that you don’t do:

• Detaching from the problem