Thought watching can be tricky. You may wonder if it’s worth the effort. You may wonder exactly how it can help you. If so, you aren’t alone. One morning, I was guiding some students through the thought-watching practice. It was a class where most of the boys had been quite skeptical of mindfulness. Some of the boys were on the basketball team, and that morning they noticed that almost all of their thoughts were about the game they’d be playing that afternoon. They’d lost the previous game, and now they were up against a team they thought was better than they were. Many of them had thoughts or worries about losing, playing poorly, and letting their teammates down. All of them had thoughts about wanting to win.
During our previous sessions, a boy I’ll call Jonathan had made it clear that he had doubts about this whole mindfulness thing. (By the way, doubts are absolutely fine, and I encourage you to not take my word about the benefits of mindfulness. Rather, give it an honest try, do the practices in the book, and decide for yourself if you find it useful.) Anyway, after Jonathan had shared his thoughts, I asked him, “If you’re thinking about winning and losing, and how good the other team is, and letting your teammates down, is your head really in the game? Is it really in what’s happening right here, right now?” His eyes got big. His mouth opened. He had that “aha” look. He got it! He understood that if, while playing, he was busy thinking about winning and losing, or about how good the other team is, or about letting his teammates down, he wasn’t actually playing the game 100 percent.
It helped to be able to tell the class that two of the most successful teams ever in the history of professional basketball, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Chicago Bulls, used mindfulness skills to bring their full attention to actually playing the game—to the ball, the hoop, their teammates, and their opponents. In fact, many successful athletes and teams use mindfulness to improve their performance, including the USA BMX cycling team, three-time beach volleyball Olympic gold medalists Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor, the San Francisco Giants’ World Series pitcher Tim Lincecum, US national soccer team member Clint Dempsey, 2006 Olympic silver medalist and three-time world champion figure skater Sasha Cohen, and recent Super Bowl champions the Seattle Seahawks. One of my greatest joys as an athlete and a person who practices mindfulness is helping athletes learn mindfulness.
The next exercise will help you become aware of the thoughts that appear when you face a new challenge; being aware of your thoughts will help you face daily challenges like these elite athletes do.