F.Y.M.F@ck Your Mind
Don’t switch off your mind. Stop letting it make decisions for you.
Italian original: Non spegnere la mente. Smetti di lasciarle decidere al posto tuo.
F.Y.M. is the mental coaching method I created, and I present it in three professional contexts: Sport, Business and Life.
What it means
F.Y.M. means learning to recognize your mental processes and consciously choose how to act, rather than automatically reacting to thoughts, emotions, and conditioning.
Thoughts, emotions, and conditioning can influence your responses, but they should not determine them automatically.
What it does not mean
- It does not mean suppressing or switching off your thoughts.
- It does not mean ignoring emotions, or emotional and psychological needs.
- It does not mean abandoning rational judgment or refusing to reason.
- It does not mean that every automatism is a problem. Automatized technical movements are a resource for performance, and excessive control can interfere with them. The automatic reactions F.Y.M. refers to are reactions to thoughts, emotions, and conditioning.
Who created it
I’m Fausto Donadelli, a mental performance coach. F.Y.M. is the framework I developed through my experience in the mental preparation of athletes.
About meThe foundations of the method
Working with athletes from different sports and competitive levels, I came to a conviction: having talent, being prepared and having great technical skills does not necessarily mean being able to express them in competition.
That’s why I distinguish between what an athlete has and what they can make available during competition. The method is meant to facilitate access to, and use of, the resources already developed, even in conditions of uncertainty and pressure. It does not create abilities that don’t exist.
It isn’t about always reacting with greater force, but about finding the most effective response to the situation. The abilities the method works on are not an unchangeable quality reserved for a few: they can be developed through awareness, training, experience and structured reflection.
In sport, F.Y.M. works on the athlete’s ability to read, interpret and face competitive situations, regulating their own cognitive, emotional, physical and behavioral resources to produce responses that are effective, adaptive and consistent with the demands of performance.
The six dimensions
Six closely connected dimensions. Their names and order stay the same in every context.
Competitive clarity
Reading correctly what is happening, and distinguishing the fact from your own reaction to the fact.
Emotional and physiological regulation
Recognizing fear, tension or anger and managing them according to what you have to do, rather than trying to eliminate them.
Decision-making adaptability
Knowing when to keep your plan and when to change it. Being determined does not mean being rigid.
Managing mistakes and regaining effectiveness
Breaking the chain that can follow a mistake and quickly regaining behavior that is useful for performance.
Attention management
Distinguishing what is relevant from what is merely present, and directing attention according to what the moment requires.
Competitive identity and the relationship with results
Recognizing the difference between your worth as a person and the value of a single performance.
Sport, Business and Life
The same method, with the same six dimensions, presented in three professional contexts.
Sport
This is where the method originated. The six dimensions come from working with athletes from different sports and competitive levels, in mental preparation for competition.
Sports mental performance coachingBusiness
At work, skills don’t always make the difference: sometimes what matters is how we manage to use them under pressure. F.Y.M. invites you to recognize the mechanisms that shape your decisions and to separate facts from your own interpretations.
Executive coachingLife
Sometimes what shapes our choices isn’t what happens, but the meaning we give it. F.Y.M. invites you to recognize your thoughts and emotions without having to fight them, and to decide how to act instead of following habitual reactions. This is coaching, not therapy.
Life coaching
F.Y.M. is an original professional method. The method and the six dimensions were developed for sport; Business and Life are contexts in which I present the same method. It has not been independently scientifically validated, and it does not promise results.
F.Y.M. in sport, in depth
On sportmentalcoaching.org, the site dedicated to my work with athletes, you’ll find the full explanation of the method applied to sport.
Ready to raise your game?
Coaching isn’t for everyone. It’s for people willing to put themselves on the line to push past their limits. If you’re ready to train your mind the way you train for your sport or run your business, let’s talk.