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Mindfulness and Performance 1St Edition Amy L Baltzell Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF
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e di t e d by
AMY L. BALTZELL
Boston University
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107074699
© Cambridge University Press 2016
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2016
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Mindfulness and performance / Amy L. Baltzell, editor.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-07469-9 (Hardback : alk. paper)
1. Mindfulness (Psychology) 2. Performance–Psychological aspects.
3. Meditation–Therapeutic use. I. Baltzell, Amy, editor.
bf637.m4m567 2016
158.1–dc23 2015027875
isbn 978-1-107-07469-9 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
vii
vi future directions
22 The Future of Mindfulness and Performance
across Disciplines 515
Amy L. Baltzell, Joshua Summers
Index 542
xi
xii
I have been a sport psychologist for the past fifteen years – primarily
running a graduate training program in sport psychology at Boston
University and working with athletes, teams, coaches, and musicians in
private practice. I became interested in mindfulness about ten years ago,
when I began teaching courses in positive psychology. Gratefully, I had the
opportunity to bring Joshua Summers into the classroom to teach my
students (and me) about mindfulness and mindfulness mediation.
I quickly began to understand that the concept of mindfulness had a
depth and offered great potential for helping one to become more fully
alive and optimize performance, if the individual could learn to cultivate a
mindful approach to living and performance. The challenge, of course,
is learning how to cultivate a mindful approach in one’s own life and
then learning how to bring the approach to others.
Parallel to my teaching, I began to realize that the athletes and musicians
who came to me for help were often wrestling with debilitative perform-
ance anxiety. I turned to the traditional cognitive behavioral interventions
offered by the field of sport psychology. Sometimes these strategies worked
for my clients – I would help them create phrases to bring to mind in the
predictably most difficult sport moments (being behind in a close game or
losing a foot race or boat race by inches and still needing to concentrate on
task relevant cues). Or I would help them create imagery scripts of coping
with difficulty and, at once, creating an optimal performance experience.
Yet, for some athletes, such strategies came up woefully short. And I had
nothing to offer but my instincts cultivated from my own experience as an
Olympian (rowing) and professional athlete (sailing).
However, I began to realize that it was not just my own experience
facing intense anxiety as an elite athlete that was helping me help my
clients. I began to realize that what I was doing with them was precisely
this: I was helping them learn to cultivate a mindful approach to their
competitive performance life. Instead of turning away from fear, I offered
xv
xvii
Mechanisms of Mindfulness
The core mechanism of the previously mentioned interventions is mind-
fulness meditation. Meditation is defined as ‘a family of techniques
which have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a non-
analytical way’ (Shapiro, 1980, p. 14). The goal of meditation practice is
‘the development of deep insight into the nature of mental processes,
consciousness, identity, and reality, and the development of optimal states
of psychological well-being and consciousness’ (Walsh, 1983, p. 19).
Olendzki (2009) emphasises that this is a deeper level of perception that
is exercised during meditation, a mode of being, that meditators aim to
bring into their daily lives.
The common meditative techniques can be divided into three main
types (Shapiro et al., 2005):
1
ACT does not integrate mindfulness meditation practice, but it is considered a mindfulness
intervention since it adheres to mindfulness principles of present-moment consciousness and
acceptance.
Conclusion
The lines of research reviewed here that utilise mindfulness meditation as
a key intervention have shown outstanding outcomes: improvements in a
range of physical and psychological symptoms, as well as increases in many
aspects of well-being. An examination of the mechanisms that operate in
mindfulness meditation revealed that it incorporates three metacognitive
and self-regulatory processes that work in concert: decentring, disidentifi-
cation, and reperceiving (Shapiro et al., 2006). Together they enable
meditators to monitor their own thoughts and emotions while adopting
an accepting attitude towards them. The aim of MBTs is to strengthen
meditators’ self-regulatory and metacognitive capacities, while its assertion
is that the development of these self-regulatory mechanisms can be best
achieved and habituated through the regular practice of mindfulness
meditation.
Conclusion
The studies reviewed here induced mindful states of consciousness mostly
through brief instructional interventions and have shown remarkable
results: improvements in a variety of cognitive functions, well-being and
health measures, as well as reductions in psychological distress symptoms.
To explore the cognitive mechanisms that operate in these interventions,
we drew on Kahneman’s dual information-processing system model and
on Baumeister’s work on self-regulation, which provide an explanation
as to how these interventions activate states of mindfulness, and how
mindfulness promotes psychological well-being through the enhancement
of self-regulatory capacities.
R E F E R EN C E S
Alexander, C. N., Druker, S. M., and Langer, E. J. (1990). Major issues in the
exploration of adult growth. In C. N. Alexander and E. J. Langer (Eds.),
Higher stages of human development: Perspectives on adult growth (pp. 3–32).
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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