Winning the Mental Game
The Playbook for Building Championship Mindsets
- 2022 INDIES Winner
- Silver, Career (Adult Nonfiction)
The self-help guide Winning the Mental Game lays the foundation for top mental performance in any field.
Amber Selking’s self-help text Winning the Mental Game forwards clear-cut strategies for improving and maintaining high personal performances.
Eight strategies, or fundamental mental plays, are named in this text. They include steps like becoming self-aware, motivated, and able to push through adversity. Advice for maintaining confidence and managing intense circumstances is shared alongside tips for cultivating attention and emotional control. These strategies end in mental rehearsals and establishing routines—steps that unite the previous plays to establish a consistent trend toward top mental performance.
The book’s encouragements are bolstered by its scientific explanations of how the brain works, how thoughts affect performance, and about the distinctions and connections between the brain and the mind. Here, positive thinking is recast as a science-based mental strategy; heightened mental awareness, Selking suggests, allows for the quick processing of different possible options and fast decision-making. Though topically complex, these discussions are clear and accessible, in great part because of their incorporation of supporting anecdotes, as of an athlete who relies on affirmations to build a positive mindset, or of a person’s personality affecting their energy levels at work.
Also helpful are the book’s straightforward diagrams and graphs, which are used to clarify topics as of the four basic domains of preparation, or to demonstrate how internal confidence remains constant even as individual performances fluctuate. Though the book’s concepts draw upon sports psychology, they prove more widely applicable by the end, including in arenas like organizational leadership, education, and parenting.
Revelations abound, as where the book explains that confidence is a choice that people make, and that it’s one whose processes can be taught. And the support for such assertions is convincing: Selking explains the factors that affect confidence, showing how each might be enhanced. Also transformative are the book’s explanations of important aspects of mental training, like getting rid of all-or-nothing mindsets and identifying the optimal zone of performing a task.
Championship Mindset Training (CMT) exercises come at the end of each chapter, with easy-to-answer, open-ended reflection questions that help in the personal application of the book’s information. Further useful are its practice exercises, which cover topics like avoiding distractions and controlling one’s attention in a way that actualizes the book’s advice. Just like their associated mental plays, the exercises are sequential, further helping to cultivate right mindsets.
The self-help guide Winning the Mental Game lays the foundation for top mental performance in any field.
Reviewed by
Edith Wairimu
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
