

Snowboarding, Life and The Secret Of Pushing Yourself - prosa
http://macournoyer.com/blog/2010/02/14/snowboarding/

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adamilardi
Yeah word of advice kiddies don't try that trick unless you can land other
ones. It's a good point that you need the guts but you also need the planning
and skill. He practiced in his mind and watched video's.

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smokinn
Practicing in his mind is actually the most important thing he did to land it.

I watched a documentary on TV a long time ago that said that Olympic divers
will typically spend several days rehearsing a dive they've never done before
in their head before attempting it. Only when they feel confident that they've
got every motion clearly set in their head do they try it.

There was a scientist who was doing I think fMRI tests on one of the divers as
he was "practicing" and the scientist said that most likely when the dive is
actually being executed (the diver didn't have that head-bowl thing on when he
was actually diving obviously), the same neural pathways are used. What the
diver was doing when imagining the jump over and over was reinforcing the same
pathway over and over. That's what allowed him to execute the dive perfectly
on the "first" try.

The same effect comes into play in a breakup after a long relationship. The
reason you feel so depressed and so physically bad in an unexpected breakup is
that you've been reinforcing one specific pathway every day for years so if
it's suddenly cut off the brain doesn't handle that well at all.

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prosa
The last sentence just about sums up personal growth for me.

