Optimize Athletic Performance; Kerri Bicskei

Kerri Bicskei uses mindfulness and meditation to optimize athletic performance in her ‘Ready Set Mindful’ coaching business where she trains top national and international professional athletes. Kerri has first-hand experience after enjoying a decade-long career as a professional volleyball player who developed skills to successfully manage sport-related stressors. She navigated multiple challenges, including health issues and surgeries that forced her to develop powerful strategies to enhance her athletic performance and supercharge her well-being.

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• Website: www.ReadySetMindful.com
• Podcast: www.ReadySetMindful.com/podcast

Most Influential Person

• Mike Socko, one of my mentors, a former volleyball coach of mine. He was someone who first introduced meditation to me and who got me into meditating. He's an amazing person.

Effect on Emotions

• I think when you have a mindfulness routine, [it can help] change how I respond to things like maybe I have a quick, quick fuse, and I get angry easily, or I'm really impatient.
• So I think having a mindfulness routine, a little bit of breath, work, some meditation, can work to recondition our neural pathways.
• We're so entrenched in some of these behaviors, and patterns that it takes a good chunk of time for our mindfulness practice to really seep in and start to rewire some of those pathways so that we can start to react in a different way.
• These mindful practices can help us have more space between our thoughts and our emotional reaction to certain things.
• So it really helps just slow down in order to optimize athletic performance.

Thoughts on Breathing

• Breathwork is this big umbrella. There's so many different different styles of breathwork that are that are underneath that umbrella. And that was something that was just so accessible to me from the beginning.
• I'd learn box breathing and how impactful that that was, and how quick it was to use. That's something that I like to do a lot with my clients.
• Inhale for four, pause for four, then exhale for four,  pause for four. Breathe in and out through your nose. It creates two minutes of stability for your nervous system.
• If you use that every day, start to build that in just two minutes in the morning, every single day, then you will notice your your reactions start to shift, your energy will will shift.
• Attention to breathing will help you optimize athletic performance.

Suggested Resources

• Book: The Untethered Soul by Michael A Singer
• App: Insight Timer

Bullying Story

• In the holistic assessment that I do with clients, we see that there are little ‘T' traumas, big ‘T' traumas. The little ‘T' traumas, are like emotional trauma, sexual trauma, physical trauma. Those are easier for people to see if they've had any of those in their experience.
• The emotional trauma is one that I [see a lot], because partners, parents, coaches, the people in our lives that love us the most can unintentionally traumatize us with comments
• Just the one comment that came out of a fifth graders mouth so long ago and our body is still holding on to some of that trauma. That's why we respond in a certain way sometimes, because, we remember these isolated events of these emotional traumas that that happened to us.
• I love to start there to figure out what I'm going to be working with what's at play behind the scenes because emotional trauma, physical trauma, sexual trauma, that will come up in so many of your different interactions.

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