Parenting Outdoors

In this behind-the-scenes look at the making of a champion, the coach of the Villanova University men's basketball team shares his competitive and cooperative philosophy along with lessons from his coaching career and the story of his personal road to success.

Preparation is easy to praise but very hard to master. No modern coach, in any sport, understands that better than NFL veteran Tom Coughlin. He led the New York Giants to two Super Bowl victories with his system of relentless preparation and old-school tough-mindedness. He teaches his players that you can never guarantee a win, but you can always earn the right to win - with focus, consistency, hard work, and anticipation of obstacles. And if you’ve earned the right to win, you can sleep soundly before a big game....

When Pat Cummins unexpectedly became Australia's 47th Test captain at age 28, he inherited a team with a long and storied history, but also one on the cusp of reinvention. It was the beginning of a personal leadership journey for him, a unique moment of challenge and pressure that would see him become a seasoned captain and, in his private life, become a father and husband but also lose his mother to cancer.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents - her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father - and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.

Coaches search for it. Parents dream of it. Fans love it. Athletes want it. The Playmaker on any sports team possesses it: an elusive, intangible quality combining anticipation, perception, and decision-making skills. This quality raises their game above the competition and allows them to pass when no one else can, anticipate the movement of opponents, and avoid costly mental mistakes, thus holding the team together. Using today's technology and tools, it is now possible to understand, assess, and train this sixth sense rather than just hope it magically appears.

In Life as Sport, sport psychologist Dr. Jonathan Fader shares the skills that he teaches professional athletes - to enhance motivation, set productive goals, sharpen routines, manage stress, and clarify thought processes - and applies them to real-world situations. Dr. Fader's audiobook is the product of thousands of hours of conversations with athletes from various teams and sports.

You can accomplish what you want. You can reach your dreams. Visualize a goal often enough and it will be yours. You have the innate capacity to transform your life. You have the power to achieve amazing results. And this audiobook will help you harness the power that is already within you. This audiobook will help you get what you want in an effortless, pleasant, and relaxing way. All you have to do is to surrender yourself to the potent guided visualization program and enjoy the comforting, soothing music in the background.

In September 2015, Shane Watson, one of cricket's greatest allrounders, was contemplating retirement. At 34, he was still in great physical shape, but his form had deteriorated following a tragedy the year before. Mentally, he was in the darkest hole of his life. A chance meeting with IndyCar champion Will Power changed everything, prompting Shane to work with world-renowned mental performance coach Dr Jacques Dallaire. It was a decision that would reshape his life. Watson discovered the keys to a consistent mental process that gave him access to his skillset once more.

Award-winning author and celebrated neurosurgeon Allan J. Hamilton, MD, combines his understanding of the human brain with nearly 30 years' experience training horses to offer wisdom on such universal themes as leadership, motivation, ambition, and humility. The results are showcased in more than 100 thoughtful essays that treat working with horses as a metaphor for personal, professional, and spiritual growth.

Until five years ago, Alexandra Heminsley was decidedly not a runner. Nor was she athletic in any sense of the word. She was an ordinary, curvy woman who was convinced that sports of any kind, especially running, were beyond her. But she's made running part of her life, and gets to reap the rewards: not just the obvious things, like a touch of weight loss, health and glowing skin, but self-belief, and immeasurable daily pleasure.

Elizabeth Clor wanted nothing more than to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon. Dead-set on achieving this goal, she found herself bound up in a vicious cycle of perfectionism and anxiety that thwarted her at every turn, despite making significant gains in her physical abilities over seven years. Boston Bound is the story of how Elizabeth discovered that her own brain was the culprit, and explains the steps she took to completely overhaul her mindset about her running and her life.

In his quest to define ‘sporting greatness’, double Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee has spent nearly four years interviewing and training with some of the greatest minds in sport to discover what it takes to become—and remain—a champion.

The transformative mind-model for performing under stress and making pressure your advantage. Used by the planet’s top performers. In Performance Under Pressure, forensic psychiatrist Dr Ceri Evans gives you the tools to take control of the moment. Beat doubt, worry, regret and burnout with simple mind techniques and discover the secret of how to be ‘comfortable being uncomfortable’. No one is immune to pressure. We all fall victim to its effects in the same ways. But pressure is misunderstood.

As a therapist, physician, and mental coach, Dr. Michael Lardon has dedicated his career to helping athletes understand and better achieve peak performance. In Finding Your Zone, he shares with listeners what he's discovered about reaching the state in which "thoughts and actions are occurring in complete synchronicity" and how this state is accessible to all, not just the few. In 10 key lessons - illustrated by personal anecdotes from his clients - Lardon teaches listeners how to access the zone not only in sports but in all aspects of their lives.

The benefits of mindfulness for general well-being have been discussed extensively, but little has been written about how mindfulness can be applied to running. In this book, leading health and fitness journalist Mackenzie L. Havey explores how combining mindfulness with running can not only improve sporting performance but can also enhance overall health.

Long before he became manager of the St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals, Mike Matheny grasped the core values of what really mattered when it came to playing baseball. It wasn't attention from fans or the trophy at the end of a season that guided his morals, but the hard-won discipline, labor, and humility that he incorporated into every game he played. Now, in The Dad Coach, Matheny puts his philosophy into action and provides a step-by-step template for coaches and parents to develop solid fundamentals and a strong sense of character in their players.

Fishing was Mark Hume’s passion since he was a young boy, a lifeline through a childhood marked by his family’s frequent moves. When he became a father, he knew he wanted to pass on his love of water, fishing, and the natural world to his daughters. Most of all, he wanted to give them hope for their future. As soon as they were old enough, Mark taught his girls how to read the water and see the patterns in nature. He discovered that fly fishing and fatherhood require many of the same skills: patience, flexibility, and the knowledge of when to reel in and when to let go.

Sport: A Stage for Life aims not just to inspire you, but to guide you in applying the lessons of sport so that you may evolve in your own journey of self-development and transformation. You will learn how a father and his daughter applied these lessons in building successful corporate careers and enriching their personal lives.

Eddie Jones is one of the most successful sports coaches of all time. From coaching three different nations to Rugby World Cup Finals and with a winning record with England of nearly 80 per cent, Eddie Jones knows what it takes to lead and manage high-performance teams. For the first time, Eddie Jones shows just what it takes to be a leader in a high performance and high pressure environment and how these lessons can be applied to every walk of life, from coaching the U9 rugby team to leading a multinational organisation to simply doing your job better.

Are you looking for unique ways to "get into the game"? To enhance your training and find focus? You aren't alone. Increasingly, athletes and coaches are incorporating mindfulness practices into their training. That's because mindfulness can help you lower your stress levels, connect with the moment, and mentally bounce back after setbacks. So whether you're a sports enthusiast or a professional athlete, mindfulness can also help you deal with physical aspects of training, such as fatigue, aches, pains, injury, burnout, and exhaustion.