The Roaring Heads Podcast

In sport, it comes and it goes. When we hang onto pain it comes and stays, instead of coming and going... We choose suffering in our mental resistance when we can't let go of what we don't want to feel. The sticky tentacles of our mind is constantly in judgment, analysing and assessing if this moment is too much. But that disconnect with your body is an energetic block. Energy can't flow freely. It gets trapped by a mind that is thinking it, instead of feeling it. The pain is inevitable...

Ive been punching away at blogs for many years. In many ways that writing has become my own teacher. Raw curiosity has dragged me headlong into a personal investigation of my own state, and the writing it spawned has held a mirror up to the world of performance. The curiosity brings the questions, how do we live our best life? How do we bring ourselves to the zenith of performance? The answer is we don't! We bring the performance to us. The simple answer I have lea...

Sport and indeed life, demand our attention, our presence and our focus. That focus is about retaining our personal integrity. It is to not speak against ourselves, or descend into self blame, self judgment or the self defeatist talk which can often lead to a fracture in an athletes focus. It's about remaining self possessed and free from the internal agitation that deregulates our nervous systems and send us into a stress response when we need the full force of our own power.&n...

This week we had a chat with Mark Jansen about the challenges an athlete faces being an elite level age group triathlete and cyclist while working full-time in the corporate world. Mark is a super strong willed athlete, racing successfully in 70.3 and Ironman. A twice top 5 finisher in Hawaii and a multiple sub-9 hour Ironman, he is well positioned to speak about the balance of work, life and sport. We talk about the gift and the curse of the type A personality and the management...

I suspect that a warrior hides in the DNA of all athletes. Many of us are disempowered in these times though. We are so busy trying to be an athlete on an outer level and not quite coming to terms with what that means. So, in this podcast Im covering a few specific questions: When does the warrior become the worrier? Where do we leak power in our sessions? What are the implications of that for our racing and performances? How do we lose connection to purpose, enthusiasm and mo...

People have ideas about mental strength which are not entirely true, often thinking they need to be ruthless with themselves. They tend to think they need to have an Ironclad will that shows no vulnerability, no mercy, no leniency. But that which does not bend, often breaks. The problem is, it is weak as it is projected outwards towards the world, and strong as it’s projected inwards towards ourselves. Like a tracker on a scent or footprints in sand , he has to use an element of intuition or...

Most of our problems as athletes are bound up not in the way we physically train but in the way we think and react to the stimulus. No point in training like a champion and thinking like you have already lost. To make any real change we first have to understand what it is we are thinking. Importantly we can change the way we think, feel and react, creating a positive, supporting mindset for performance at the very same time. In this podcast Grant gives you an overview of a winning...

When we get what we want, we want what we don’t have!! It’s a slippery slope, sometimes getting what we want is the worst thing that can happen to us. If it comes easy, it comes greasy, slips through our fingers and then the more we have the less we feel like we’ve got. This concept we are sold of fame and fortune is an empty promise, a void with no real substance, people who arrive there quickly learn that it is not made of what they thought it would be made of. The void c...

There is nothing like race day pain and suffering to test our mettle. The deals we make with ourselves in the smoky backrooms of our minds, the tenuous connections that we make to our own internal strength, often frayed at the edges by the experiences of the past and the doubts of the future. That incredible day before a big event where the mental pain at times often feels overwhelming, only an athlete or anyone who risks much knows that feeling, that low drawn feeling of ambiguity to a...

The advent of Instagram and the body image sales pitch that has created influencers and so called successful movers and shakers, pushing us to look a certain way by targeting our unconscious need to fit and consume, can at times be a very destructive force which separates us from the deeper truth of our potential if we are not using a high degree of self awareness. The dangers are obvious. Disordered eating, body dysmorphia, unrealistic body shape goals, self judgment, anxiety and depressio...

What we often don't talk about is our journey as ex-athletes. It is a subject that we need to bring out into the open. Ex-athletes often feel like they have been swept under the carpet or put out to pasture in some way, but this projection lacks a basic truth, in that most of the discomfort in retiring from sport, or anything else for that matter, is in fact self driven in the way that the individual has defined who they were in sport and the way they define themselves now in the return jour...

Intentional Resilience is power made of many aspects. No athletic goal moves anywhere without desire and intention. The power of dreams is an internal process that drives a physical outcome. That internal drive can look a little like this- Desire, inception, intention, inspiration, enjoyment, motivation, enthusiasm, heart, guts, will, acceptance, non resistance, and the ultimate outcome of resilience and trust. Without these critical drivers our goals and dreams are little more than ...