text: was based on the story of Shawn Johnson. She is a retired gymnast that won Gold and Silver in the 2008 Olympics for the USA. Pretty awesome!
  I even had a photo opp (who knows what I was looking on the ceiling! LOL), which made ME look tall, and I come in at about 5'-4-1/2"...
  But I did want to come back and talk a little more about America's Sweetheart to talk briefly about mindset. In fact, in the Q&A portion of the evening... I asked about that! My question was: Did you have a particular morning routine? What did you do for mindset and do you continue with that today?
  She said she didn't have a particular morning routine, but keep in mind she competed until age 16 - so she was very young. Shawn went to public school through her junior year in high school and was in multiple sports in addition to gymnastics.
  Liang Chow of Chow's Gymnastics and Dance Institute in West Des Moines, Iowa was her coach for almost all of her gynmastics training and career. Shawn said he was very focused on mindset, adding that he told her training was
  Chow trained much differently than many in the industry - typically, gymnast's will train 45-50 hours a week at Shawn's level. Although she did train for that amount of time at competitions, when at home training in Iowa, she trained about 25 hours a week.
  He was all about the mental game. Shawn mentioned that some days at the gym were purely mental days. She would go in and Coach Chow would tell her to go sit on the beam and imagine 10-15 perfect routines in a row - then to come back to him. She would do that, and then a similar exercise, but on the floor. Then, on the bars. This mental training would go on for 4 hours.
  Our minds want to insert mistakes into even our mental routines But it's even more important to have control over our minds than our bodies.
  Do each of us take that time every morning to imagine our day/action/activity going exactly as planned, down to the minute detail? This is called Meditation and we should begin every day by doing this mindset exercise.
  In response, Shawn said she doesn't do mindset as much anymore (but that she probably should!). Her goals are smaller these days, but she has already accomplished a LOT in her life!!
  Below is the floor exercise Shawn performed after being liberated of expectations from others and truly just competed for herself (check out the story in yesterday's blog post).
  She received a silver after competing on the floor, and then her confidence was knocked down to nothing. Nothing left to lose... then Shawn competed on the beam.