Word: johnson
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Setbacks like those would be enough to put most athletes off their game. But Johnson found a way to push them behind him. "If you have a disappointment," he says, "you need to ask yourself 'Why did I not perform well today?'" Was it the preparation? A mistake in execution? "Then you need to get yourself at peace with that situation," he says...
According to Johnson, achieving that peace is the key to avoiding a full-fledged slump. A slump?that downward spiral that only gets worse the harder you try?is familiar to even amateur athletes. For golfers, it can start with the yips, an uncontrollable twitch of the arm or an involuntary snap of the wrist at just the wrong moment. For a pitcher, it's the strike zone over home plate that suddenly begins to jump around. For the basketball player, it's the hoop that has inexplicably shrunk...
...stop those negative thoughts from coming," says Michael Johnson, "especially when you enter an arena or when you see your competitors walk by. The only way to stop those thoughts is to replace them with something else." For Johnson, the substitute images and words were all about the race ahead. "If you're going to replace them, you might as well replace them with something that's going to help you," he says. He liked to visualize the upcoming race, concentrating on the start, the weakest part of his race, and thinking about himself shooting off the blocks like...
...Michael Johnson, who competed in three Olympic Games over a span of a dozen years, avoiding a slump was mostly a matter of staying in control. "The first thing an athlete has to realize is that you are always in control," he says. "And you need to maintain that control." Control, that is, of both the body and the mind...
That particular identity was made possible 40 years ago, in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. Exclusion laws passed in the early 1900s had reduced Asian immigration to a trickle. In 1965, the year the Civil Rights Act came into effect, says New York University sociologist Guillermina Jasso, "the racist elements of immigration law were abolished." Annual per-country quotas shot from 100?yes, 100?for most Asian nations to 20,000, with preferences for close relatives of U.S. citizens and those skilled in fields with labor shortages, like medicine. The new law unleashed...