On this week's episode of the Building Championship Mindsets podcast, Dr. Amber Selking shares how repeated thoughts create protein patterns that shape our brain's wiring, akin to the way lifting weights builds muscle. She draws parallels between scientific principles and scripture, highlighting that setting our minds on positive, spirit-driven thoughts can lead to life and peace, while negative thinking can result in anxiety and confusion. Listen this week as Dr. Selking discusses the power of examining mindsets, distinguishing between those that support their goals and those that undermine them. 

About Building Championship Mindsets

Welcome to “Building Championship Mindsets. | the Podcast!” From the LockerRoom to the BoardRoom, our purpose is to help individuals, teams, and organizations understand and leverage the power of Mindset and Leadership to drive results and achieve sustainable performance excellence. 

As a leader in the field of sport and performance psychology, Dr. Amber Selking has been fiercely devoted to optimizing human performance in people and systems throughout her entire career.

Dr. Selking is the founder of Selking Performance Group, a leading performance consulting practice that helps individuals, companies, and sports teams achieve sustainable results. She has served as the Mental Performance Coach for professional & collegiate sport programs across the country including the Denver Broncos, LSU Football, ND Softball, and Notre Dame Football during the winningest five years in program history! She is the Chief Culture & Leadership Development Officer for Lippert, a global, publicly traded manufacturing company whose corporate vision is to change the model of work, demonstrating that business can and should Be a Force for Good in our World. She has also served as an adjunct professor in the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame. Dr. Selking holds a Ph.D. in Educational and Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri, a master’s degree in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Denver, and an undergraduate degree in Management Consulting from the University of Notre Dame. At ND, Amber played soccer for the Fighting Irish before an injury ended her career, after which she founded Notre Dame Christian Athletes (NDCA) in the ND Athletic Department. She currently resides in South Bend, Indiana, with her husband, Aaron, daughter Elleeanna Belle, and their Doberman Pinscher, Rockne.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to building championship mindsets, the podcast.

This is your host, Doctor Amber Selking.

Where we are in season 15 entitled Sports Psych in Scripture at the Selkie Performance Group, we are really about helping individuals who are trying to be their absolute best, right, deliver their excellence on a more consistent basis, working with sport teams or business organizations to understand two things, mindset and leadership.

Now, if you know anything about mindset or you know anything about leadership, those are very complex elements.

But we believe that that's what drives consistent high performance excellence mindsets of individuals and leadership of individuals, teams and organizations.

And so we have the opportunity to work with clients all over the world, really, and helping to bring this to life, to unleash performance excellence on a more consistent basis.

And so if there's any way that we could serve you again through one on one performance coaching, we have a team of incredible performance coaches, or through keynote speaking, please reach out Doctor Selkien at selkind performance.com.

but again, in this season, we are exploring the intersection of science and faith.

And listen, if your faith isn't important to you, take a different angle and really try to stretch yourself and grow.

And this is going to be through the lens of Christianity.

And if your faith is really important to you, but you've never really sought how to really magnify or put a deeper anchor in your faith, in the conversations that you have with people, then really lean into the science side of this.

Again, the purpose of this season is to just help us all expand our ways of understanding the world around us through multiple lenses.

And, you know, my faith is, my christian faith is really important to me, and it really informs how I do my work.

I certainly never push that on anyone, on any of my clients, because, again, we work with a range of individuals and organizations, but it does inform my way of thinking and my way of being.

And I've had a lot of people ask me about that.

So I'm excited to bring this season to life.

You know, in the last several episodes, we've looked at everything from neuroplasticity to our thought sequence.

But in this episode, we're going to be looking at mindsets, right?

Which is what I said, fundamentally, Selkien performance group is here to do is help people understand the power of mindset.

And so the first thing that we need to know from a scientific standpoint about mindsets is mindsets are not just buzzwords that you see on social media, where people put these little gifts together or these images together and talk about mindset.

Mindsets are a scientific construct in the human brain, right?

They're actual protein patterns that get wired together based on repeated thoughts.

And so, if you've listened to episodes in the past, you've heard me talk about mindsets, I.

You know, thoughts are like bicep curls for your brain when we lift weights, when we do a bicep curl, right?

Our bicep muscles get bigger when we repeat certain thoughts.

It's like doing a mental rep, and it starts to change the form and function of your brain.

And as we repeat certain thoughts over and over and over and over again, it builds protein patterns that get wired into your brain and therefore change the form and function of how your brain actually operates.

An analogy that I use, again, if you've listened to past seasons, you've heard this before, but a mindset is like an insta, like a filter on a picture, right?

If you.

If you have Instagram and you've ever posted a picture and you've chosen to put a filter over it, you know that different filters change what the same picture could look like dramatically.

And mindsets do the same thing for the human brain.

Depending on how we have thought about things over and over and over and over again depends on how our brain is wired.

And one situation could look, quote, unquote, very differently to one person than it does another person based on their mindsets.

And so we need to be very careful about what we think about, because, again, repeated thoughts build mindsets.

In our first episode, again, we talked about neuroplasticity.

And then how in Romans, it says that you can be transformed by the renewing of your mind, right?

Neuroplasticity says the brain can change, and so does scripture.

But how do you change that?

Well, then in the second episode, we looked at how our thoughts affect our emotions, that affect our physiological response, that drives our performance.

So thoughts are really important because they set that process up for success.

Just like in Philippians, it says, to fix your mind on things that are excellent, and the peace of God will be with you.

Well, now we know that mindsets, we take this, the next step of this conversation, okay?

We believe the brain can change.

We know that thoughts are really important.

Now we know that thoughts are really, really important because repeated thoughts build these mindsets or these Instagram filters in our brain that when we encounter certain moments or certain experiences, those Instagram filters get slapped over the brain, and we see that situation or that moment through that lens.

And so romans eight six tells us that for to set the mind on the flesh is death.

But to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace.

So mindset, set the mind.

Think about over and over.

When we think about things of the flesh, right?

When it says of the flesh, it just means things of this world.

So as you consume social media and news outlets over and over, if that is predominantly negative, pessimistic, anxious, hateful ways of thinking, right.

We're setting our mind on things of the flesh, of this world of negativity, of pessimism, of hate and fear and anxiety and stress that leads to death, not just for ourselves.

Right?

Eventually, because that's gonna catch up with you from a health and stress standpoint, but it's gonna change how you start to see the world around you.

Whereas when we set our mind on things of the spirit, right, we see things of a higher order, things that are excellent, things that are noble, things that are praiseworthy.

All of a sudden, it gives you life, because your mindset, you start to see the world around you.

The Instagram filter that changes how you see the world is that of hope and peace and joy and fruitfulness.

And what does that give us?

Invigoration.

Life.

Right.

And so this is why it's so important that the mindsets that we, the thoughts we think over and over and over and over again are right thoughts, our true thoughts, are ways of operating at the spiritual realm, because that will change how we see and interact with the world around us, which brings us life and peace versus death.

And so, again, we see the intersection here of how mindsets, right?

Scientific principle of protein patterns that get wired into our brain, parallel with scripture, and how those things align to show how do we deliver consistent, high performance when it matters most.

Set your mind on things of the spirit, because that will bring us life.

And when I say, just like I said, of the flesh, right.

Means worldly things, of the spirit, means higher ways of thinking, right?

I just had a conversation.

I have such an honor and privilege of serving in two really incredible roles, as a mental performance coach for LSU football and with coach Kelly as his performance consultant and then as the chief culture and leadership development officer at Lippert, which is a global, publicly traded manufacturing company.

And I was having a conversation with one of our senior leaders today and just talking about a specific situation that she was going through.

But how do we zoom out and see more of the variables at play so we can understand this in a broader perspective and therefore have a sense of peace that allows us to show up and deliver our greatness in a better way?

That's what it means of things of the spirit, right?

Be set your mind on the spirit.

Higher ways of thinking, different levels of perspective, things that are excellent and noble and true.

And that's why mentors are so helpful, because they help us see situations in a different way, give us different ways of thinking about maybe this immediate moment from a broader lens, which helps build our mindset to operate more fully as the individual, as the leader, as the athlete, as the coach that we're intended to do.

And when we do that, when we can set our mind and build mindsets of higher ways of thinking and being and operating and seeing the world around us, now, all of a sudden, we can show up differently, because our mindset, our repeated ways of thinking, or the Instagram filter that we have in our brain is one that sees the world for what it actually is, versus the fear and confusion and anxiety that often gets created when we set our minds on things of the flesh or things of social media or things of pop culture that might be in this moment, right.

What we're seeing and consuming, but what not might not be true on a higher order.

And therefore, we get distracted on who we're trying to be and what we're trying to accomplish the other way.

I like to think about mindsets from a spiritual perspective.

Comes out of Psalm.

And so this is why memorizing scripture is actually really helpful and important.

I.

When I was growing up, I was in awanas, which is a christian youth group type thing, and I was uber competitive in everything, including my faith.

And in Awana, you got to, like, memorize these verses.

And then as you worked through different levels, you know, you had these little pins and badges and all this stuff.

And so I memorized a ton of scripture growing up because I could win at it, and I would get my little pins, which I was really proud of.

But now looking back and now knowing the scientific aspect of this, it was critically important to the mindsets that I have today and the stability that I can approach life, because I have all this scripture, right, your words.

When it says your words, I have hidden in my heart.

It's your scripture, right?

In the Bible that you memorize in your mind, it gets embedded in your heart.

And then when situations arise, you operate, right?

The mindsets that you've built, you operate out of that scriptural truth versus things of the world, right?

So some of the, you know, my life verse is Jeremiah 20, 911.

For I know the plans that I have for your life, says the Lord.

Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a hope and a future.

And so when I've gone through really hard seasons in life and I question, like, oh, my gosh, is that mistake I made going to come back and haunt me and ruin the plans that I have for God has for my life?

No.

I'm going to choose to believe the scripture of, I know the plans and their plans to prosper you, not to harm you.

Like, I have to hold on to that.

But in those moments, if I have not hidden those words in my heart, if they have not become my mindset or my patterned way of thinking about who I am today and what my future is to behold, then, and, man, I can get off track really quickly, right?

Then the flesh can get in me and it leads to death.

That leads to stress, anxiety, maybe more compounded bad decisions, right?

But because I've set my mind on the spirit at a young age, those words that were hidden in my heart can then come out when I intersect these challenging experiences in life and I can think right about them.

I can choose to have a mindset of the spirit that will lead to life and peace in my life versus getting caught up and down some emotional rabbit hole that leads me to different places other than who I'm trying to be and what I'm trying to accomplish in this world.

And so again, mindsets, patterned ways of thinking, protein patterns that get wired in based on the thoughts that we think.

My challenge, right, so every episode, we have a championship mindset training.

Well, your championship mindset training for this week is to write down what are some of the mindsets that you have.

I want you to make one list of mindsets that you think, help you be who you want to be and accomplish what you want to accomplish.

And then I want you to make a list of mindsets that you think maybe undermine who you want to be in this world or what you want to accomplish.

And then you got to check yourself.

How do you want to think differently?

How has the world informed that negative or unproductive or pessimistic mindset that you have?

And how can you inform that on things of the spirit instead things that can lead to life for you, that can lead to peace for you?

And then every time you go to think that wrong thought or that that negative, pessimistic, unhealthy mindset, stop yourself and replace it with the new mindset that you're trying to build, the one that is of the spirit that will bring you life and peace.

That's your mindset training for this week.

And you got to be diligent about it, because when you come into these hard moments and you want to have that old mindset that's been wired into your brain, right?

Mindsets basically are like the mental habits that you've wired into your brain.

People say, you know, it's muscle memory, it's not muscle memory, it's neuron memory.

And mindsets are neuron memory of the brain, habits of the brain.

And so it's easy to default to these habits or these unhealthy, unproductive ways of thinking.

And so we have to be diligent about rewiring our brain.

Again, neuroplasticity tells us that we can rewire our brain, and so we want to rewire our brain in alignment with ways of operating for the spirit, right?

Higher orders of thinking, things that are excellent and noble and praiseworthy.

And little by little, as we build those mindsets, it changes how we see the world around us and positions us to be who we want to be and accomplish what we want to accomplish in the moment.

Oh, I am so pumped about this season.

Thank you so much for tuning in again.

If there's anything I can do for you.

Keynote speaking, one on one performance coaching, organizational consulting reach out.

Doctor Selkien@selkienperformance.com we have an incredible team.

We'd love to come alongside of you on your journey of high performance excellence.

If this podcast really resonates with you and you'd like to actually be a sponsor and join us financially on this journey from your company's lens, but give us a chance to, to celebrate your organization and promote you.

We've got, you know, millions of listeners all over the world, and you feel like you're in alignment with us.

And that's of interest to you.

Again.

Doctor Selkien@selkienperformance.com dot you can check out our book wherever you purchase your books.

Winning the mental game, the playbook for building championship mindsets.

And then we've got a lot of free content on our website as well.

Doctor Selkien ww dot sulkingperformance.com.

you can find us there and we'd love to just equip you with all the things to help you continue to win your mental game and to bring all of your greatness to the world around you.

Thank you so much for tuning in.

You've been listening to building championship mindsets.

The podcast this is your host, Doctor Amber Selking.

And from the locker room to the boardroom, I just want to challenge you to continue building your championship mindset.