Dawn Grant Blog

April’s Theme is Peak Sports Performance

If you want to peak your sport performance, choose something you want to work on every week. As you do, you will acquire increased understanding, insight, and confidence in your mechanics and mental skills – over time. Practicing helps you build confidence in your mechanics, which 90% of athletes do; but I encourage you to treat the mental side of your game just as importantly. Practice the mental skills on a regular basis, so you can reinforce them and be excellent on all levels, when you are ready to perform in your sport and win.

How do you achieve peak sports performance? I believe you acquire it with mastery, presence and inner peace. You also maintain it with those same three elements. What is mastery? Mastery is the practicing of your skills; regular, deliberate, intentional, mindful practicing, so you can master whatever you choose to put your mind, energy, time and effort into.

In 2007 my private practice took a large turn when Sports Improvement was added to my menu of services. Yes, I had worked with a few athletes here and there prior to this… a Pro Boxer, and a few baseball and tennis players, but nothing like what was starting to happen. Unbeknown to me, this turn ended up sending me down a very rewarding and success-filled path. I didn’t just stick my toes into Sports Improvement, I jumped in with two feet into the PGA TOUR. Within a few months I was working with about a dozen PGA TOUR Pros and flown to

April’s Theme is Peak Sports Performance

Do you feel comfortable with your swing, putting and ball position, and know that you are learning what works for you every time you golf? Do you realize how important it is to believe that about yourself?  If you are lacking in that area and easily taken out of the present moment, then it is quite possible for the mental aspect of the game to take you to a level of frustration, anxiety, worry, fear, regret, or any number of those types of feelings that inhibit your mechanics. Practicing your mental skills, however, will help you come to a place of confidence, trust and understanding that you need, in order to feel comfortable with the mental part of your game. So obviously if you are working hard to build your mechanics and perfecting your skills, the last thing you want is for your mental skills to be lacking and subsequently inhibiting your mechanics. But that is exactly what happens much of the time.

March’s Theme is Health and Weight Loss

We have all heard how important it is to drink water and you have heard that the body is made up of a large percentage of water and that we need to stay hydrated and drink water throughout the day. We hear things like we should be drinking eight glasses of water a day and drink before and after exercise. I have even heard that we should drink a glass of water first thing in the morning.  The benefits of drinking water are endless.  Water is essential to our health and well being.  When your body has proper hydration, it can perform at it’s best. 

March’s Theme is Health and Weight Loss

I think the first time I came across Dr. Weil I was watching him on PBS. Since then, I have seen him on many PBS documentaries. He is pretty well known for his appearance in 2009 on a documentary called Botany of Desire. He actually explains that humans have always sought altered states of consciousness and that there are foods that he feels benefit us despite being banned. Beyond that, Dr. Weil likes to have a view of a combination of mainstream and alternative medicine. He believes the two can work together in a complimentary approach to achieve maximum benefits. He feels patients should take western medicine as prescribed by their doctors and then extend the biomedical model to incorporate alternative therapies. Dr. Weil believes very strongly in Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Vitamin D, herbal remedies, meditation and other spiritual strategies. He is a huge proponent of nutrition, exercise and stress reduction, and like Dr. Fuhrman suggests a diet rich in organic fruits and vegetables with regular consumption of fish.

March’s Theme is Health and Weight Loss

    Dr. Oz came to my attention because of his very own television show. I have many clients who were referring to Dr. Oz and his insights and knowledge base he presents on his show. He has a no-holds-bar attitude towards health, he answers the hard questions, he breaks down complicated subjects and makes them easy to understand. Dr. Oz first appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007. His daily program focuses on medical issues and personal health. It was actually launched by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. His professional career was such that he was a professor at the Department of Surgery at Columbia University since 2001. He directs the Cardiovascular Institute and Complimentary Medicine Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Aside from that, he is founder and chairman of Health Corps which is a non-profit organization which pays a small stipend to recent college graduates to spend two years in high schools, mentoring students about health, nutrition, and fitness.

March’s Theme is Health and Weight Loss

Dr. Fuhrman Healthful Eating Food Pyramid

I came across Dr. Fuhrman’s work while searching healthy eating habits and nutrition. I actually have a friend of mine who was raving about Dr. Fuhrman and his books and workshops series that can be bought as a DVD set called Eat to Live. The title of that caught my attention because we hear so much talk about live to eat and how so many people will go about their lives loving food and living to eat. I like that Dr. Fuhrman sees it differently. He has been on Dr. Oz Show and Dr. Oz is quoted as saying that “His work is a medical breakthrough. That there is no question in my mind that it will work for you.”

Eat to Live offers a highly effective scientifically proven way to lose weight quickly, but more importantly, Dr. Fuhrman comes up with an equation suggesting that we take a look at the density of nutrients in our foods so that we can not only lose weight but be health-wise about it. Nutrient-dense foods are a first priority. Calories are a second priority. The equation that he has come up with is H=N/C. Health equals nutrients divided by calories. Low calorie nutrient-dense foods are at the base of our food pyramid, that means that those foods should be on our “must eat every day” list. This is what we should be eating the most of: Low calorie, nutrient-dense foods.

TEAM USA Super School January 27^th 2014

 I had the wonderful honor for the second year in a row, of being invited by Judy Morris to be a guest speaker at the TEAM USA Super School at South Florida Shooting Club. This is one of four Super Schools that are offered quarterly throughout the year and being the second year in a row that TEAM USA has offered these schools that I am privileged to attend. TEAM USA consists of the best shooters in the United States of America whose performances at competitions have consistently shown that they succeed far beyond average and have been able to prover over time that they have mastered their skills.

Seminole Cup Sporting Clay Tournament-Quail Creek Plantation February 20-23 2014

Seminole Cup is one of the first events of the year that draws a large crowd in the clay shooting world. For many it is the first event of the year for which they are ready to dust off their shotguns and break some targets in the sunshine. This year, we had such a long, cold winter. I know everyone was looking forward to warm weather. Many were itching to shoot some clay.

March’s Theme is Health and Weight Loss

How many of you start the day with I can’t? Samuel Johnson said “Clear your mind of can’t.” There are actually hypnotherapy sessions that I take clients into that clear their minds of can’t. It works extremely well and many people have changed their lives for the better. So if there is something that you are ready to put an end to, a habit or the habitual saying of I can’t, then you are ready to move forward. Make the choice to make a difference in your life today. There have been many clients of mine that come to me wanting to quit, whether smoking, drinking, over-eating, dipping, etc. They all say the same thing: I can’t. I can’t quit for more than a day, I can’t stop for more than 48 hours, I can’t seem to get past a month, I can’t have a cup of coffee without wanting a cigarette, I can’t deal without a drink, I can’t go past this bakery without getting a dozen donuts, I can’t I can’t I can’t. Theses are a lot of things that people repeat. The more you repeat those things, the more the brain reinforces them for you and the more likely you are to continue the habit or action in your life. There is no benefit to the I can’ts. Whatever it is you say to yourself, whatever thoughts you have, they are factual to your body. They are perceived as truth. If you simply learn to say things like: I CAN have a cup of coffee without a cigarette, or I can deal with this stress better today.

March’s Theme is Health and Weight Loss

How motivated are you to live a long healthy active life? It seems to me that most people are pretty content with getting up, and going about their same daily routine; going to bed at night only to turn around and repeat the same thing the following day. The next thing you know, most of their lives have gone by. They aren’t necessarily as healthy or as active or as fit as they’d like to be in order to live the kind of life that they want to live. Now I have met plenty of people that have said; “well, you gotta die of something,” and they defend their rights to eat unhealthy foods and ingest unhealthy beverages or smoke cigarettes or not exercise. I wonder how many of them really are that interested in not living a long healthy active life. I would guess that most of them probably haven’t stopped long enough in their day-to-day routines to realize that time is passing by and they are not taking good care of their bodies. To live a long healthy active life, you’ve got to do something. Plenty of people don’t particularly care about their lives or they are miserable with their circumstances and maybe they would like their lives to be over sooner rather than later and if that is the case, I can help them to enjoy life once again or for the first time ever in their lives. But for the rest of the folks who may be oblivious about health issues, maybe aren’t taking the best care of themselves or not even putting much thought into it; they have made efforts to take care of themselves based on the information that has been fed to them. Only to find out now that they aren’t really that healthy and if they continue down a certain path they will not live a long healthy active life.