Mindfulness 101 with St Kilda Football Club
To support brokers and introducers mental wellbeing, we partnered with St Kilda FC to bring you ‘Your Mind Matters’.
Hear from St Kilda's Sports Psychologist Dr Ben Robbins, on the tactics they use to manage the team's mental health. ‘Your Mind Matters’ shares practical tools and strategies you can use to take care of your wellbeing, as well as how to apply them to everyday situations
During the event, Robbins shared practical tips and techniques to manage focus and shift negative thoughts, including:
Mindfulness is a skill of attention control.
Training in mindfulness helps us to become more aware of our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. It helps us shift states of negative thought patterns and mind wandering, to being more present and focused on the task at hand. This self-awareness helps us manage stress, improve focus and ultimately leads to better performance.
Bend don’t break.
By practising mindfulness, we can build ‘psychological flexibility’ so that we bend, not break in challenging situations. As you learn to stay in contact with the present moment, psychological flexibility helps us choose our behaviour based on the situation, regardless of unpleasant thoughts. In other words, it is not the presence of negative thoughts or emotions such as anxiety or anger that predict performance; it is the degree to which we can accept these experiences and maintain our attention on the task at hand.
The benefit of practicing mindfulness daily.
While mindfulness is a habit that you must develop over time, meditation can be a simple way to become familiar with the practice. Start by dedicating a few moments each day to focus on your breathing, be it through taking a walk or finding a place to sit that feels calm and quiet to you. If you notice your mind has wandered, try to return your attention to your breath. There are also a number of resources available to help you practice mindfulness, including apps, websites and podcasts. By regularly implementing these practices, you can develop the ability to be present throughout the day, every day.
