With Winning in Mind

Lanny Bassham, an Olympic gold medalist in rifle shooting, draws on decades of competitive experience and coaching to present the Mental Management® System, a framework for achieving consistent mental performance under pressure. He positions the book as deliberately short and practical, distinguishing it from psychology-based self-improvement texts by emphasizing that his system is "100% based on competition" (vii).

Bassham opens with his personal story of repeated failure in youth sports. As a child, he was consistently the worst athlete in his class and the last picked for teams. A humiliating moment in Little League baseball, when a fly ball struck him between the eyes, sent him home in tears. His father, a military officer, encouraged him to keep searching for the right sport. In sixth grade, a classmate publicly declared him the person least likely to win an Olympic medal, sharpening his determination. A friend's invitation to a rifle club changed everything: Competitive shooting required only stillness, and Bassham was average from his first session. When the club shut down, his father acquired equipment and personally coached him. Fifteen months later, Bassham won his first national championship.

Bassham trained five hours a day, five days a week for 12 years before making the 1972 U.S. Olympic team. At the Munich Olympics, his teammate Jack Writer was the world's top shooter and heavy favorite for gold, but Bassham himself fell apart under pressure: His heart rate spiked, he shook, and he lost the match within his first 10 shots. Writer won gold; Bassham took silver. He describes the silver as "the closest thing you can get to the gold medal and still lose" (7) and resolved to develop a mental system for 1976.

Over the next two years, Bassham interviewed gold medalists daily about what they thought during peak performances. In 1974, he won three individual world titles at the World Shooting Championships. He describes himself as transformed: confident, in control, with what he calls a changed Self-Image, the habitual identity governing how a person acts and performs. In 1976 in Montreal, he won the Olympic gold medal, and he repeated as World Champion in 1978. He subsequently taught the system to athletes, military units, and professionals worldwide.

Bassham argues that 95 percent of all winning is accomplished by only 5 percent of participants, and the primary difference is mental: Winners expect to win, while others merely hope. He illustrates with Malcolm Cooper, the English Olympic shooting champion, who declared he would win the 1978 World Championships despite having to borrow a rifle after discovering his own was damaged. Cooper won and set a world record. Bassham identifies a central paradox: Champions who consciously try to win while competing rarely succeed, because outcome-oriented thinking leads to over-trying, the most common mental error in competition. He illustrates with PGA Tour player Ben Crane, whom he began coaching in 2007. After adopting a process-first approach, Crane sank a winning putt at the 2010 Torrey Pines tournament without even realizing he had won. Crane won twice that year for his best season.

Bassham formally defines Mental Management® as "the process of improving the probability of having a consistent mental performance, under pressure, on demand" (18). The system rests on three mental components. The Conscious Mind contains thoughts and mental pictures, processes the environment, and sets goals. The Subconscious Mind is the source of all skills and performing power; great performances are accomplished subconsciously, with skills built through repetition until automated. The Self-Image, the most important component, is the sum of habits and attitudes that determines how a person acts. Performance and Self-Image are always equal. When all three components are balanced, a condition Bassham calls the Triad State, performance flows effortlessly.

The book presents nine Principles of Mental Management®. Among the most central: The Conscious Mind can concentrate on only one thing at a time, so what a person pictures is critical. The Self-Image moves a person to act on whatever the Conscious Mind pictures. Self-Image and performance are always equal, meaning lasting performance change requires Self-Image change first. The Principle of Reinforcement holds that the more a person thinks, talks, and writes about something happening, the more likely it becomes. Bassham warns against reinforcing errors by dwelling on them, cautioning that even listening to others describe mistakes can imprint those same problems.

Bassham presents a 10-step goal-setting system that rejects both modest "realistic" goals and sweeping "big-sky" goals as outcome-oriented traps. He advocates process-oriented goals focused on controllable elements such as training frequency and mental discipline. Key steps include determining a goal worth dedicating one's life to, listing personal pay-value (the specific rewards that make a goal worth pursuing), creating a written plan, and starting immediately. He emphasizes setting a new goal before reaching the current one, recounting the depression he experienced after his Olympic gold because he had no goal beyond it. A case study features Canadian pistol shooter Linda Thom, who after a seven-year break wrote a first-person affirmation of Olympic victory in her journal every night for 18 months and won gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

The book devotes significant attention to rehearsal, defined as thinking about an action without physically performing it. Bassham explains that vivid rehearsal creates neural pathways similar to those formed by actual performance and introduces Principle 8: The Self-Image cannot tell the difference between what actually happens and what is vividly imagined. He illustrates by describing how he rehearsed shooting a perfect 400 in the kneeling position for two months, then executed that exact sequence in competition to set the national record.

Bassham divides every performance into three phases: Anticipation (preparation before action), Action (thought during performance), and Reinforcement (thought after performance). He argues that most elite athletes break down in the Reinforcement phase by dwelling on mistakes. He also introduces the mental program, a duplicable sequence of thoughts designed to occupy the Conscious Mind and trigger subconscious execution, with structures tailored to specific sports.

Bassham reframes pressure as something to harness rather than avoid, offering recovery strategies such as controlled breathing and visualization. He challenges the notion of innate talent, arguing that great performers create themselves through quality training, and recommends keeping a Performance Journal that records only positive outcomes to reinforce a winning Self-Image.

The book's most distinctive tool is the Directive Affirmation, a paragraph written in first person present tense describing a goal, its pay-value, and a plan, read and visualized at five prominent locations daily for 21 days. Bassham credits it with the greatest single impact on his success. The mechanism works because the affirmation creates conflict between old and new Self-Images, and the mind cannot tolerate the conflict, eventually exchanging old habits for new ones. He provides examples for domains ranging from athletic performance to weight management, becoming a non-smoker, and starting a business.

Bassham closes with Principle 9, the Principle of Value: People appreciate things in proportion to the price they pay. He argues that winning is special because it is difficult and that meaningful growth happens during the climb. He illustrates with an anecdote about a woman paralyzed by a fear of heights during an apartment fire who refuses to cross a ladder stretched 10 stories above the ground, yet crosses without hesitation when a firefighter carries her son to the other side. Her Self-Image did not include crossing high places, but it did include saving her child. Bassham urges readers to find comparable motivation and take deliberate control of their Conscious Mind, Subconscious skills, and Self-Image growth.