Skills & Abilities
Lesson Summary: Skills & Ability
This lesson introduces the idea that high performance is built on more than physical ability. Using the TEA Model, athletes develop three categories of skills:
- T (Thoughts) = Mental Skills
- E (Emotions) = Emotional Skills
- A (Actions) = Physical Skills
While physical skills are commonly trained, elite performers also develop mental and emotional skills before, during, and after performance. The lesson emphasizes that these skills are measurable, behavior-based, and transferable to other areas of life such as family, academics, and social situations.
Learners are also introduced to two important concepts:
- Negative Bias (“the weeds”): Negative thoughts naturally appear and must be managed through mental and emotional skills.
- The 86,400 Rule: There are 86,400 seconds in a day, highlighting the importance of managing constant mental chatter and developing self-awareness.
Ultimately, the lesson focuses on building all three skill sets to improve performance, self-discipline, and the ability to perform under pressure
Skills and Ability. This course is an instructional guide to learning and developing your mental and emotional skills far beyond motivational speeches or pep rallies. Learning objectives.
Number one, redefine athletic skills and abilities.
Number two, introduce the TEA model.
Number three, Selfdiscipline. This will be one of the most difficult programs you’ll ever embrace.
Number four, understand skills are measurable and transferable. That’s big business, new business when it comes to mental and emotional skills.
Number five, negative bias. We’ve got to increase your knowledge and understand how this is a human factor that elite athletes learn to deal with.
All right, there’s modules and titles. This module’s entitled Skills and Ability. To help us better understand or illustrate that there’s mental and emotional skills along with your physical skills, right? Regardless of your sport, right? Basketball, you wanna be tall. Horseback riding, you wanna be small. You gotta have the right physical features and physical skills for your task. But what we’re gonna use is my TEA model. Now, we have a course all by ourselves on the TEA model. You’re going to learn a lot and hear a lot throughout our whole program about the TEA. This is an EWOD. This is a model we use for self checks, peer checks. We use the TEA a lot. For this short module on skills and abilities, what I want you to recognize is when we look at this, the A stands for your actions. In this case, our Physical abilities.
The A stands for our physical skills, right? So, again, depending on your skill, or excuse me, depending on your sport, that defines your task. And so, whether again, it doesn’t matter if it’s golf, it doesn’t matter if it’s soccer, it doesn’t matter the sport. What we focus in is on that task. What is the physical task? For example, as we would all agree, you’re walking through practice, the coach, there’s some fundamentals. Usually, physical fundamentals that we can see when we’re looking at you, and we might say Hey, make these corrections, right? That’s all under the A, physical skills, which by and large has been how we develop athletics. Usually it’s all in physical. What we’re seeing now with the new science, again, valid and reliable, is that there’s two other sets of skills for elite or high performers. So, what we’re seeing now is there’s the T, which we’ll learn later, stands for thoughts.
In our case, these are mental skills. And then there’s also the E which in the obvious stands for emotional states, or in our model here stands for emotional skills. So what you have is three different sets of skills that we’re going to develop in this program. You’re showing up already with the A. You have your physical fundamentals. What we’re trying to make sure you do, what we understand when we’re conditioning and developing elite athletes, is when you’re practicing. Your drills and your athletic physical activities, you bake in, you build in the same types of activities while you’re doing the physical.
Now, if you caught that, elite athletes are developing all three sets of skills before, during, and after. That’s what we’re referring to when we talk about skills and abilities. Now, I will say it’s too far easy, way too easy to bypass this as a motivational speech when you consider the self discipline of getting in your own head and regulating your own emotions. T and E. We treat these two separately throughout the whole program. Two different sets of skills. This is going to be the hardest program you’re ever going to develop or work on within yourself to develop within a lifestyle.
All those other activities that you thought were hard and enduring, they may be, but this one’s going to be more and far difficult than any program you’ve ever been through. Getting inside your own head and learning to regulate thoughts and emotions through developing skills. Now, a couple of different guiding principles here, some takeaways. Number one skills, they’re measurable, right? Scale from one to ten, one terrible, ten top, top profile. One to 10, one terrible, 10 top, top proficient. If the skill is weak, it’s deficient. Same thing applies here to mental and emotional skills. Just like running, for example, physical skill, that’s the right way to run.
Someone’s running flatfooted we’d look at that and say, Hold up, man. There’s some physical skills. You gotta run on the forward, balls of your feet,” we would say, for example, right? Same thing here. That’s what I want you to catch, is these skills, mental and emotional, when you think of skill, think of behavior. In the same way we think of a physical skill and we see a behavior, mental and emotional skills. Anytime you think of skill, I want you to think measurable. The two, I want you to think as a behavior. There’s something you’re doing with your mental thought processes with mental skills.
With the emotional skill, there’s something you’re doing. Again, a behavior with the emotional skills when you are proficient. So we want to study what those behaviors are. We want to map that. We want to develop all three sets of skills. What’s this all about? It’s about clutch, it’s about delivering in the moment. It’s about summoning your talent at will. It’s about getting back to sleep at night, delivering on a deadline. The big playmakers. All three sets of skills. Okay? Again, back to your guiding principles here. One skill is measurable. Two, these skills I want you to recognize are transferable.
You may not be able to transfer your physical activity and your physical routine or that skill. Golf, for example, you may not be able to take that into your family life per se. And I’m talking about the physical activity. What I want to point out to you here is the mental and the emotional skills, they are measurable. We have the assessments and it’s behavior based, but they’re also transferable. The mental and emotional skills, and I’ll go over here to my six cylinder model career is where you’re athletics are at, even if you’re in your academics and athletics career.
So, as you develop your mental and emotional skills here with your athletic activity, your mental and emotional skills can go with you. They are what we say transferable. So, you can take them into your family, your family situations, your family life, take them into your peer groups and your social life. So, again, it’s very important when you recognize skills and abilities in the mental and the emotional domain. All right. One other guiding principle here, two more actually, I want you to recognize. One is the weeds. And I say the weeds. This is a way for us to better understand the negative bias.
Now, the negative bias is a human factor. You know all about it, but we need to learn more about it. And that is the negative bias is again, is a human factor that has everything from the negative just keep popping up. Kind of like weeds in the garden. You don’t have to nourish the weeds, they just grow. So we use weeds as an example. What you need to understand is weeds are the negative bias, the negative thoughts. When you dropped it, when you messed it up, the clock keeps moving forward, but yet that play, those thoughts stay with us.
You need to better understand that that’s where these skills, the mental and emotional, that’s really where they’re going to play out for us. When those weeds are popping, when that negative bias is working against us, top athletes learn how to regulate those too. So, what you recognize, I’m going to talk more about the negative bias or what we call the weeds. And then the next one and the last one really is what we call the 86 4 rule 86 4. What that stands for is the seconds on your clock 86400 seconds. Now, you know, if we were on the wall here, I’d come here and I’d say, look, one hour a day, how many hours in a day, right? That’s 24 hours. Okay, same day, measure it differently. Different metrics. See, that’s what I like about sports. There’s always metrics, always measuring, right? Stats. Same day, instead of hours, go minutes. It’s 1440 Now, where’s my point? Where am I going? Same day, different metrics. So you talk about what you want to measure. In this case, we want to measure by seconds. Same day, 86470 86400 seconds in this day. Why do I bring that to your attention?
In other classes, in other courses, I’m going to teach you about just how much is going on in that head of yours. Very important, right? Your heart beats, your lungs breathe, your mind thinksthat’s what it does. But there’s something critical, critical about your chatter, and you understand chatter. Chatter is nothing but words and pictures, and you got a lot of chatter going on. Every second of the day, and what we’re learning are highperforming athletes are flexing these skills. Or high performing athletes are flexing these skills at the 86 4 level. You’re developing a whole new level of awareness, self awareness, which is your emotional intelligence skills. Just focus on chatter right now. We’re going to focus on the mental skills in this program, but you need to recognize we’re building emotional skills at the same time. In the end, you are developing all three to get you to your next level of performance.
All right? So here we go. We’re going to wrap up this module here on skills and abilities. You’ve got some guiding principles as we move forward. Let’s jump into the first mental skill the mental skill of communication.