Eight-time world champion breakaway roper Lari Dee Guy and her mental coach, Donene Taylor, join Amy Wilson to discuss the necessity of having a strong mental game when competing at a professional level.
After working with a mental coach of her own, Taylor, a world champion tie-down roper, wrote the book Heart of a Champion to share her experiences and lessons learned with fellow athletes. “I wrote this book because this is what I needed,” Taylor says. “This book, it encompasses all of the mental performance strategies you need — confidence, focus, perseverance, positive self talk, how to practice, how to compete with pressure — it’s all in there.”
“I feel that, mental game, you have to be able to do what other people don’t do,” Guy says, “and you get to stay at the top of your game by always moving forward. You know, I work every single day on my basics of roping, but I never really thought about my mental game until I started working with Donene. It brought back what I needed to remember that I always did, you know, when I competed well, and remembering what I needed to get back to.”
On future goals as a breakaway roper, Guy says, “Yah know, one of the main ones that every breakaway roper’s ever wanted is to get to the NFR and be able to compete at the Thomas & Mack. I hope that I get to, myself, step in there and compete. And if that doesn’t happen, I want to dang sure see it for the younger generation.”
On January 16, Guy was honored as one of the 2020 inductees to the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame. You can watch the Induction Ceremony, held at Billy Bob’s Texas in the Fort Worth Stockyards, on The Cowboy Channel February 3 at 7:30PM EST.
