"Sleep is the best recovery! Sleep is 90% of recovery, regeneration and repairing the body and mind. Everything else is 10%.” 

These are the thoughts of Navin Hettiarachchi, Director of Athletic Performance for the Washington Wizards. Whether you're a professional athlete, a high school athlete, or a weekend warrior, you need to get your sleep. "You snooze, you lose," is dead wrong.  When you snooze, you win.

One of the best ways to work on your perceptual-cognitive skills while training your mentality is to juggle. Juggling improves hand-eye coordination, reflexes, peripheral vision, and a host of other motor skills. I'm teaching one of my teams how to juggle, and it provides an amazing insight into how an athlete's mind views challenge, failure, and the success of others. In short, it's a perfect activity for working on your mindset. Here's a brief summary of how to learn.

If you're not familiar with Kikimita (Hansel Emmanuel Donato), you need to check him out. Not because he has over 1 million followers on Instagram, but because this one-armed basketball player is the epitome of adaptability and attitude. He's overcome the loss of an arm at age six to now have a Division I offer from Tennessee State University. It is truly an inspiring story.

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, we read this insight from Hamlet, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Four hundred years later, US Navy Seal Jocko Willink released an epic commentary in which he refers to everything as, "Good." In either case, we see the importance of your perspective on a situation. Are you asking, "Why is this happening TO me?"  Or are you asking, "Why is this happening FOR me?" What lens are you looking through when you encounter challenges or difficulty? If all you see is negative, it's time to check your prescription.