Dr. Jessica Bartley

You're looking at all the circumstances.

As Alex is saying is, am I actually in danger?

And I think that that's really important.

I mean, one of the things that I fall back on a lot is imagery and visualization.

I mean, there's actual science that says the more reps that you're getting in the brain, the more reps you're getting, period, the brain doesn't know the difference.

And so there's been a lot that's been done

on imagery and visualization that if you were to look and take an fMRI machine, the same neurons are firing.

And so if you are shooting a basketball or you're thinking about shooting a basketball.

So the more reps you can do, the better.

You're just getting more repetition.

The reality is you need the baseline physical skills, but you can get additional reps.

You can think, what am I going to do if my foot slips here?

What am I going to do here?

And what I've often said is the best of the best athletes, you know, take the hundred meter dash like you're running and you want to think about having the perfect race.

You also want to think about what happens if you stumble out of the blocks and how you would recover from that, because then your body doesn't have the reaction of like, oh, crap, I've never seen this before.

My body's never seen it.

I don't know what to do.

I've only been focused on having the perfect race.

And the reality is you need to think about the perfect race, maybe the not so perfect race.

There's a time to like really lock in, but the more you can imagine it in your mind, use imagery and visualization, just the more reps you're getting and the easier it's going to be on your body and your mind when you're actually executing the task.