Psychology of Champions: How to Win at Sports and Life with the Focus Edge of Super-Athletes

The first book to gather first-hand accounts of successful practices, and thinking habits, of sports legends and super-athletes - from across sports including football, baseball, and basketball to boxing, golf, car-racing, and swimming - this work holds lessons that can power not only athletic success, but winning in any daily challenges of life or work. The result of years of research, Psychology of Champions offers the very personal words of stellar athletes who explain how they overcame such obstacles as fear, discouragement, and anxiety, and were able to move on to success. Each story - from those of baseball great Ted Williams, basketball star Michael Jordan, football's famed Deion Sanders, NASCAR's, and dozens more from across sports - is unique, but the authors determine when all is said and done the overriding variables accounting for the greatest success fall into three categories - motivation, confidence, and concentration. Barrell and Ryback spell out the "rules" for such success after each section in this absorbing book. The result is a book that not only entertains and educates us with first-hand accounts of ever-popular sports heroes, but also instructs atheletes, amateur or professional, and arguably anyone with a goal to achieve in work or life. In-the-moment accounts reveal just what to do in various critical periods of sports competition - from being at bat in baseball, to making an instantaneous decision as a quarterback, firing the winning basket in the dying moments of a game, or launching the winning move in boxing or judo. Barrell and Ryback draw the lessons together in what they term "The Focus Edge" mindset. It is a mindset, and this is a book, that "takesgreatness and makes it accessible to you and me," declared one former Olympian.