When you play any kind of game, be it during the training stage or during the actual game itself, you need to play the game first. When you start out playing the game in your mind, you can visualize what is going to happen before it does. You can see all kinds of different possibilities for the game, and all manner of different ways the game can end up going. When you play this way, the game becomes downright easy for you to win.

Winning any kind of event comes down to more than just physical conditioning. It ultimately comes down to what’s in your mind. How you think about the game, and what you think about pertaining to the game, are ultimately what will determine how successful you are in any kind of athletic pursuit. As the old saying goes, thoughts are things. When you play the game in your head first, victory is all but assured from the beginning. You want it the most, and you most thoroughly imagine winning. From there, you just have to actually do it.

Playing the game in your head before you play it on the field or the court might sound like just something people do when they’re sitting on a mat in the lotus position- food for flakes, basically. But every study that has ever been done on visualization confirms that its effects are extremely real. In fact, when a person “practices” in their mind, they are shown to improve at a given activity almost as much as people who practice in real life do. When you practice winning, winning will become your most powerful habit.