Habits of Strengths – Choose Your Chapter

“When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.”

Dalai Lama

Professional athletes like yourself have to have discipline and focus to form the habits to attend training and perform at your peak. But what about off the field? Fortunately, when growing up you may have had a strong network of family, friends, and coaches to form great training and playing habits.

What about your general habits of life?

Most elite athletes achieve success because they think, feel and behave differently. In sport this can be a huge advantage, however, in life, this can be a hindrance. To excel, often your behaviors are driven by Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that increases motivation, focus, and productivity. During your sporting career, your Dopamine levels will naturally be high. A competitive sport will give you a feeling of fulfillment and that natural winning desire. You will set sporting goals which will give you the Dopamine boost to achieve them. However, when your Dopamine levels are too low you become uninspired, lack motivation, tire easily and even head toward depression, anxiety, and stress.

Low Dopamine levels are commonly found in injured or retiring athletes and add to the pressure and dilute a zest for life outside of sport. Similarly, low Dopamine levels mirror the symptoms of depression such as lacking motivation, laziness, procrastination, low libido, sleep deprivation, mood swings etc. Symptoms often found in retired athletes.

Often athletes turn to less resourceful habits to increase their Dopamine levels. Unhealthy habits commonly used as supplements are drugs, alcohol and gambling which all mask the problem and provide doses of Dopamine to feed that pleasure-reward stimulus. Habits current athletes turn to through boredom and having extra time on their hands.

During your sporting career, your coaches will maintain your Dopamine levels through diet and exercise, however often it’s not enough. You need to consider how you emotionally and psychologically perform and create stronger habits of how you think and feel. Because once your career is over managing your Dopamine levels will be up to you. Imagine, if you currently suffer from low Dopamine levels, it’s a problem you should be addressing during your career and not just after it. Although it’s never too late.

What’s the solution?

First of all, admitting this might be a problem for you now, or in the future is a great start. Knowing you’re not alone should be comforting and finding other like-minded athletes to overcome these issues is rather simple. It all depends on how much you’re committed to developing resourceful habits and increasing your Dopamine levels naturally.

This is what the Habits Of Strengths live 10 week, interactive group online program will offer you. If you want to maximise your Dopamine levels to transition from your sport to enjoy life more, then this course is for you.

Course Objectives – To identify what you’re great at, what gives you energy and will naturally increase your Dopamine levels by understanding your innate talents and developing them into strengths. The aim of the course is to recognise your unresourceful habits and begin to form better habits, Habits of Strength. By listening to coaches, leaders and industry experts, you will gain a great awareness of how to form habits by focusing on your top 5 talents according to the Clifton StrengthsFinder®.

Course Outcomes – Identify and understand your purpose and implement the four disciplines of execution to achieve your wildly important goals in sports and life outside of sport. Upon completion of this course, you will have a set of healthy, empowering habits which will bring you more clarity and direction to:

Express your purpose with confidence
Plan your time with precision to execute organisational strategies
Improve team engagement
Build stronger relationships
Maximise Operational Plans
Inspire yourself and others
Develop your talent
Execute Wildly Important Goals and Achieve Success
Naturally, increase Dopamine levels
Prevent and avoid depression, anxiety and stress

And as a result, you will strengthen your communication and become who you want to BE, by building stronger relationships, thinking more resourcefully and inspiring those around you. And do you know what that will leave you with? A healthy habit for life, your strengths habit.

At Choose Your Chapter we don’t want to leave your life to chance and as professionals can imagine neither do you. We’re consistently searching for excellence and the ability to provide a successful pathway for professional athletes and life after sport – so, how can we help…

If you’re an elite athlete or coach and this is a concern of yours, we’d like to hear from you. We’re currently accepting applications from professional sports men and women to complete a pilot program, Habits of Strengths. This group program is designed to help athletes avoid depression, stress and anxiety and increase Dopamine levels outside sport. We’re looking for athletes in rugby league, union, AFL, football (soccer), golf, cricket, athletics, swimming, netball and basketball. Please apply if you’re one of these and:

a retired professional athlete over 30 years of age
a current full time professional athlete between 22-27 years old
a junior contracted athlete between 15-18 years old

Simply contact us at info@chooseyourchapter.com.au or call Danny on +61 (0) 412 136 062

*Disclaimer – This content and programs are entirely developed by Choose Your Chapter and are NOT products of Gallup nor the Clifton StrengthsFinder. We would like to acknowledge Gallup and the CSF for their data and research tool which allows us to help spread the word to focus on our strengths. Clifton StrengthsFinder ® and StrengthsFinder ® and each of the Clifton StrengthsFinder theme names are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. Choose Your Chapter are not affiliated with Gallup, Inc or its subsidiaries.

Email: info@chooseyourchapter.com.au