The Inside Edge: High Performance through Mental Fitness

C.E. (Kit) Lefroy is an associate professor in the School of Human
Movement at Laurentian University.

The purpose of the book is to provide practical knowledge and skills
that can help improve performance. The author is concerned with
developing six learnable mental awareness skills: positivism, active
awareness, energy management, attentional skills, imagery, and
visioneering. The book begins by describing and justifying several
themes—for example, mental preparation is fundamental to high
performance; nonlinear thinking is neglected; and mental preparation
skills can be learned. Anecdotes are used to illustrate each concept.

Positivism is a mindset in which one expects good things to happen. It
can be developed by defining negative situations as opportunities
(reframing), by making positive affirmations, and by using positive
self-talk. Jensen makes some suggestions about how our brains can be
programmed to create and communicate positive thinking skills to
ourselves and to others.

Chapter 4, “Active Awareness,” is esoteric and requires careful
reading. Indeed, ”active awareness” is never defined, although it
seems to be a process of self-discovery. The key concept is that an
individual is not his or her performance. From an operational
perspective, active awareness involves stepping back from oneself
(disidentification) and observing one’s thoughts, feelings, and body
before acting.

The chapters devoted to energy management and attention clearly outline
how arousal relates to attentional focus and performance. Jensen also
gives a clear explanation of Nideffer’s attentional paradigm, and
suggests how to recognize if one’s attentional focus is appropriate.
Methods for improving attentional skills are outlined.

Imagery is more than “seeing” an image, for it includes all the
sensory experience one would have in the real world. Jensen describes
how to use imagery and gives examples of interesting comprehensive
imagery exercises.

According to Jensen, “visioneering” is important because vision
sets limits and priorities, empowers, and motivates. Visioneering
includes dreaming, inventing a future, deciding (goal setting), and
aligning activities with goals and vision. Although Jensen’s chapter
on visioneering contains some valuable insights, it would have been more
readable had it been better organized.

Great performances are the result of total preparation, including
mental preparation. The last chapter provides a useful mental
preparation checklist; it also describes how to design a mental
preparation program.

Generally, Jensen’s prose is direct, humorous, and easy to read.
(Occasionally his meaning is obscured by his humor.) While his
personal-experience anecdotes lend credibility to the book, they
sometimes obscure the concepts they are supposed to illustrate.
Nevertheless, the book does provide many useful ideas on how to program
oneself for success. The appendixes contain excellent relaxation and
imagery scripts that can be tape-recorded by the reader.