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Episode Summary: 

Ian shows how meditation can improve focus, productivity, and relaxation. He emphasises that meditation is a skill that can be improved with practice, similar to sports training.

• Understand the importance of good sleep hygiene, including turning off devices well before bed and not having them in the bedroom.
• Learn about the prevalence of burnout, especially during the post-school holiday period, and its impact on sleep.
• Discover the benefits of meditation for calming the mind and improving focus, balance, and sleep.

About the Host: 

Ian Hawkins, host of "Sport Is Life," is dedicated to showing how sports can transform lives. With extensive experience as an athlete, a coach, PE teacher, community volunteer, and manager at Fox Sports, Ian brings a wealth of knowledge to the podcast. His journey began in his backyard, mentored by his older brother, and has since evolved into coaching elite athletes and business leaders. Ian's commitment to sports and personal development is evident in his roles as a performance coach and active community member. Through "Sport Is Life," Ian shares inspiring stories and valuable lessons to help listeners apply sports principles to all areas of life. 

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Theme Music Artist: 

One Day Kings  https://www.instagram.com/onedaykings/  

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It because, like football or tennis or any other sport, it's a practice.

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It's not about trying to be perfect immediately.

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It's about slowly building that muscle of improvement through practice. And this high performance meditation training is going to allow you to do that. Are there times where you know you need to be more focused, that you'd love to be more productive? And are there times where sometimes maybe you're not able to stay calm, and you react in a way that you wish you hadn't, not all the time, but something that pops up on occasions? This is where meditation can be so beneficial. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about how that can not only help you be more focused, more productive and more calm, but from a performance perspective, how it can allow you to take what it is that you do to a whole other level. I'm Ian Hawkins, and this is sport, is life. The purpose of sport, as I see it, is to see your vision become a reality, find your voice, create strong connections, and learn to trust your Body.

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hippies or I

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can't even remember, but I just remember just being a pretty out there concept at the time, and the only way it could have reached me in a way that I would have given it a crack, was through the sporting lens. And so I knew that some of those swans teams back then were getting better results, and perhaps their list would suggest they were capable of and they were doing some different things, and one of them was meditation. So I thought, well, if it's good enough for them, I'll give it a crack. And then I started seeing videos from people like Justin Langer, who was thinking might have finished up playing back then, or I can't remember. He'd certainly hadn't coached the Australian team. He might have been just starting and coaching, but I just remember him saying, the days that he meditated, he just felt so much better. And he couldn't necessarily put his finger on it, but he just knew that he was going to have a good day. And the days that he didn't meditate, it was something that was missing, and that's what I started to experience too.

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Interestingly,

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being calm was so much easier, the focus became so much stronger. I really was able to keep on task, get to task quicker, stay on task longer, and with that increase, increase focus becomes an increase in productivity. I'd already dabbled in visualization towards the end of my sporting career, I kind of say career, when I was playing at a decent level, in my late 20s, early 30s, I'd looked at visualization and I'd got good results. And visualization and meditation aren't. Uh, too much of a stretch between the two. I guess the difference for meditation that I found was the really focusing on the breath, really focusing on just relaxing and not having a set a set focus in terms of content, not having an agenda, necessarily, but just being able to learn to start to let my thoughts wander where they needed to wander, and start to process in a much more effortless way. And what I found was that, much like I described, what Justin Langer was saying was, on the days that I meditated, everything went better. I still find that now there are times where I won't get to meditation, if I've got a an early start, or, like recently, when I'm on holidays and I just want to switch off from everything, so I might not meditate every day, same thing happens. I'm not as on, I'm not as calm, I'm easily distracted when I'm not meditating.

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And if it's something that you

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have contemplated, or maybe you've tried and you didn't find that it was that successful. I'm a big believer that it's not saying that it doesn't work for you, but rather, is there another way? Because when I first started, I read lots of instructional information about meditation. I learned lots of I started reading as much as I could, and it was clear, like with a lot of people who coach or instruct, some are better than others, and the ones that were better actually gave you a clear process to follow. I'd liken it to learning to drive a manual car. When people used to say to me, I'd just let your foot off the clutch slowly. Now that didn't make any sense to me, because what defines slow and and how slowly and, but eventually, once I worked it out from trial and error, it was actually no, no, you've got to hit the friction point. You need to hold it there until the car starts moving forward, and then, and then you can let it out. So it's actually much more complicated process than than just letting your foot off the clutch slowly because that that might work sometimes, but it's not consistent, and meditation was the same. I needed to learn from people who could map it out in a way that gave me a process to follow. And so what I found is that the people that now that say they can't meditate, they've been given these instructions that just don't work. Like the worst instruction that I think you can receive, but I read it all the time, is you're just clearing your mind of thoughts, and it's like, Well, if that was that easy, we'd all be able to do it all the time. And the reality is, from what I've experienced, is it not about clearing your mind of thoughts, but allowing your thoughts just to run, whether they run, and it's the gap between those thoughts where you can start to find more clarity, start to find more focus, start to find more creativity, more ideas. And what I have also learned is that so much about people's inability to meditate is trying to control for those who grew up in my generation, and actually probably still exists for for younger people as well, is trying to be in control of a whole of external things, trying to control situations, control people growing up with controlling parents, again, through no fault of their own. It was the the environment they were born into as well. So we're all grasping for this sense of control, but in meditation, we get the best results when we let go of control, where we actually surrender, where we come back to focusing on allowing things to be so I've done a number of different meditation trainings over the years, and I've just completed a new one, high performance meditation. And this is for you, if you've already done a bit of meditating, but you want to be better. It's for you if you've tried it before and you haven't really got results. And maybe you think that, well, maybe it's not for you, and it's also for you. If you've never tried it before, but you've been curious. In this training, I map it out really simple, simple steps through a process, I explain all of that, and then I take you through a number of separate meditations to teach you some of those processes so that you can start introducing it to your meditation practice. Because like football or tennis or any other sport, it's a practice. It's not about trying to be perfect immediately. It's about slowly building that muscle of improvement through practice. And this high performance meditation training is going to allow you to do that. It's going to allow you to continue to practice, to get better every day, and then start to apply what you've learned and come up with your own way of doing it. Because, like with everything, people can give you a process that's going to step you in the right direction, the best results are going to come when you bring your own flavor to it, and that's in my intention with all of my training, to help you to find your own way through this, to help you find your own practice, and then maybe one day in the future, you'll be passing that on. I know that's something that I've taught both of my children. One of them, it really helped with sleep. Another one around performance and just day to day, calm and both, for both of them, their mental health. Interestingly, my wife's picked it up again recently, and that's one of the things that she's talked about, is just how much more focused she is getting better results, not reactive to different things in the workplace, that maybe she was in the past, not that she would have reacted in the moment where she was but she would have carried that frustration with her into other parts of her life, and would feel the weight of that. And I know I've had that experience as well, so I'll drop the details in the show notes. Welcome the dog just in the background for those watching on the video. I'm sure you can hear it through the mic. I'll drop the details below and yeah, check it out. It's going to be a really, really cheap entry price be less than $10 to get you started, but it's it's all I've learned over the last 10 plus years about meditation and particularly in that performance space. And you're going to get a heap out of it. So if you're curious, check it out. And yeah, hopefully that'll put you on the path to increase your focus, enhance your focus, your productivity, and of course, find more of that Khan you've taken the time to listen to this whole episode. Now it's time to take action, commit to one thing you've learned today and make it happen, and to avoid any obstructions, join the sport is life movement by clicking on the link in the show notes you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai