Real-World Self-Leadership Case: U.S. Olympic Athletes, Mental Imagery, and Performance Stress

  The case study attached addresses how top tier Olympic athletes utilize mental practice to help improve their performance. The descriptions from Shiffrin and Cook demonstrates that regardless of your hobby, career or task at hand, self-leadership strategies, positive self-talk, mental imagery, rehearsal [practice] and self-goal setting) can be successfully utilized to benefit and improve one’s performance. As you read about them, do you think people in other types of pressure performance situations aside from sports and music benefit in a similar way from applying these strategies? Why or why not? Give some specific examples.