Transform Your Mental Game With an Alter Ego

If you want a sure fire way to quickly transform your mental game - you need to develop a personalized Alter Ego. 

This strategy is not about putting fixed labels on who you are as a person.

Rather it is about creating a narrative about how you want to show up on the field of play. 

The Power of Simplicity and Creativity

Credit to my coach and mentor Todd Herman for writing the book: The Alter Ego Effect and helping bring more simplicity and creativity to the mental game. 

Unfortunately most sport psychology strategies are:

• Dry
• Boring
• Overcomplicated

As an athlete you don’t want to be out on the field of play trying to remember to use positive self talk, thought stopping, breathing exercises and re-framing situations.

These strategies won’t get you repeatable and reliable results, instead they just give you more things to think about, when what you need to do is think less.

You want to keep it simple and just play your game.

Therefore, you need practical and personalized strategies that work for you. 

That’s exactly what you get in our 1-2 punch of the Reset Routine and Alter Ego. 

Here are the 3 steps to creating a personalized Alter Ego:

STEP 1: Develop a Contrast 

Think of the Alter Ego strategy as creating two contrasting narratives.

On one side you have your worst self, your shadow self, or your comfortable self. This is the self that holds you back, that plays safe, and that worries about what other people think.

On the other side you have your heroic self, your best self, or your courageous self. This is the self that embraces the moment, that is confident in their capabilities, and attacks the game. 

STEP 2: Be Creative

The quickest way to get started is to think of your favorite superhero. If you don’t have one, then think of someone that inspires you - it could be a relative, famous athlete, public figure, or tv show character etc. 

You might even have two or more people you lean on to help create your Alter Ego. The more creative and playful you are in this process - the better. 

The person or people you pick should represent the traits you identified in step 1. 

For example a hockey goalie that resonates with Batman could see the overlap as such:

• Before the game/the battle - he is calm and collected

• Taking shots against/in the fight - he is agile and trusts himself

• After adversity/gets knocked down - he gets back up

STEP 3: Map It Out 

The last step in creating your personalized Alter Ego is literally drawing it out on a map.

This step is crucial to simplifying your Alter Ego. You want to be able to boil it down so it is easy to understand yet still holds a powerful narrative that clicks for you.

Drawing it out on a map helps add another layer of tangibility to the process.

You can see clearly how you want to show up in the various key moments of impact on your field of play. You can color code it and use it as a cheat sheet summary of your Alter Ego. 

The goal here is to keep it simple - it should not be over complicated or have too many words.