Alan is the owner of Ultimate Ventures Limited, an enthusiastic speaker and owns and operates one of the toughest cycling events in the world – Race Around Ireland. He works with entrepreneurs and managers of small to medium-sized businesses as they set goals, create action plans and develop the skills.  He also works with large companies including Microsoft, helping them build high-performance teams through shared goals, better communication, and resilience training while managing energy and wellness. He trains sportspeople and regularly delivers motivational and educational talks. 

Ultimate Ventures Limited has Sports Performance Programs and Business Performance Programs.

What is your background and how did you to where you are now? (01.31)

• Alan has been in the fitness industry since 1989. 
• He started weight training in school to avoid bullies and as he gained weight the bullies wanted to know how he was doing it so he designed a training plan.
• He went on to study recreation and leisure management and then fitness courses and started working in different gyms training athletes.
• He started his own gym at that time after attending a hypnosis show and took a side route into software development, developing a system where your computer could tell how stressed you were, by the way, you were using the mouse. This fell through as it was too early for a market.
• Alan sold his gym and went back to college for four years when he was 22 and then went to work at Sunshine Coast University.

How have you incorporated hypnotism and some of the principles from that into what you're doing? (08.00)

• Alan says that it's just one tool he can introduce as part of the mental skills training as the nervous system cannot tell the difference between something that is vividly imagined and reality.
• Hypnosis is really just a guided version of the visualization.

What were the challenges you faced in communicating the value of mental training to people on top of their current training? (11.19)

• Getting trainers and coaches to act on their belief that a large part of your performance is your mental game and skills training.
• The second issue is that it's seen as being separate to train.
• Alan says that the next issue was the nutritional part of training and that trainers were saying the nutrition was important but that they did not necessarily have a plan.
• The fourth challenge is training the psychological and the mental skills train, which he feels it's still seen on the outside and to help people understand how to simplify and integrate this into training.
• Eric and Alan discuss anxiety and how it relates to training.
• He maintains that it's how we perceive the situation that can make a massive difference to what we're actually doing. Your competitors are not there to beat you, they are there to make you better.

What other segments do you think that this would be of value? (26.26)

• Alan says they are using the same skill base they use in the sports sector and teaching it to the companies that he is working with, from a business point of view, whether it's an entrepreneur or major corporations.
• He also works with students, actors, and Directors. Basically anyone who deals with performance-based anxiety such as public speaking.

Who are some of the other people who are really pushing for in this field? (29.15)

• Meditation gurus, for example, are the people that Alan is looking at.
• From a fitness point of view the training peaks guys, are doing really well, and then a big part of that he is actually looking at, at the moment, is eSports
• What alan is interested in the most is integrated technologists.
• Eric and Alan discuss mental training for eSports and mental training in general.

Resources:

Connect with Alan Linkedin

Check out Ultimate Ventures Limited Website

Check out Alan’s Course Going into the Zone Website