By Mark Aoyagi
Performance Psychology: A Practitioner’s Guide, edited by Dave Collins, Angela Button, and Hugh Richards, may be the first textbook I have ever read cover to cover. That’s after 15 years in graduate school and academia. Perhaps more than anything else, this speaks to the utility and readability of this text. Yes, it is dense with information. However, for the reader motivated to learn about the topics covered, the information is presented in an accessible fashion with suggestions and examples for application throughout.
Although impossible to summarize an entire text, I’ll include one example here that I found particularly useful. As reader’s of this blog know, focus is a major theme of my work, and thus I was interested in the 5 principles of effective concentration in skilled performance presented in the book:
1) Decide to concentrate – it won’t just happen by chance
2) Focus on only one thought at a time
3) Your mind is “focused” when you are doing exactly what you are thinking
4) You “lose” your concentration when you focus on factors that are outside your control
5) Focus outwards when you get nervous
Filled with similarly useful and through provoking insights throughout, I would recommend this book for anyone interested in an in-depth examination of how current science can be applied to performance.
Tagged: concentration, focus, performance, psychology 
Source: The Performance of Your Life