Hi, I’m Rick Sessinghaus. So the last few videos and today, I’m gonna be talking about influencing. What has influenced you in your life, both positive and negative? And I’ve been sharing things that have influenced me in a positive way to perform for success. So one is that has been crucial in my upbringing was sports, playing sports, alright? Now at the time, my dad would put me in baseball, basketball, football, tennis, and golf. I had swimming, and certainly, the activity of that helped me physically grow. However, now looking back at it, sports was so important to how it helped me in my life later on.
So just a few insights from it, when I played team sports. It was always interesting because you had to now work together as a team. You needed to know what your role was. You needed to listen to a coach. You needed to be able to be competitive. You needed to be able to understand that the game is, won or lost, a team concept. And I played a lot of team sports when I was a kid. And again, working together and practicing together, that was a new skill. As I went into individual sports, like tennis and golf, then I had a lot of learning happening.
One was you got to take sole responsibility for your results. So golf, I hit the shot, not my teammate. I hit the shot. Now, if it went poorly, guess whose fault it was? It was mine. That was a big shift for me because I couldn’t blame anybody else. I couldn’t blame my coach. I couldn’t blame my teammates. It was on me. So I started taking more responsibility when I started playing individual sports, in knowing that my work ethic would not equal an improved performance. If I didn’t practice, guess what? I didn’t get better. And golf, in and of itself, was a huge influencer on now later in life.
Now, all that shifted then, into something we call sports psychology. So sports, playing it was a big influencer for sure, but now as you coach it, and you learn from the field of sports psychology, which is basically, how do you get athletes to be at their best when it matters most? And through my education stuff, I learned a lot of that influenced me to say, “Wait a second. In any given moment, I can focus on whatever I want. I can respond any way I want. I can have a goal to where I can work towards.” And there are strategies to now be able to work with that. So when I was playing the sport, I didn’t have a sports psychology coach. I just went about it. But now, being a performance coach, I understand the importance of having strategies that are built on sports. They’re built on having a target. They’re built on visualizing. They’re built on self-taught. They’re built on breathing, all these different techniques that have been researched in the sports psychology research.
So when we look at influencing, it can be “doing it”, right? It can be looking at it in a completely different way as a coach, read it, all these different ways that will influence your belief systems, your attitudes, and your behaviors. So sports was a huge influencer on me. I’d like to if sports has been a huge influencer on you also, to perform for success.