Psychology of Sporting - Getting Back in the Game
Whether you are off your game, or wanting to raise the bar of performance, learning to maximize your inner resources and trip the trance fantastic will help you get to where you want to go.
How the techniques of Sports Psychology can help you maximize performance
Sports Psychology is all about “being in the moment.”
The athlete remains calm, confident, fluid enough to respond instinctively to external challenges. While internally attuned, he or she is simultaneously aware of what’s coming next.
I call this “optimizing tension”. It is both a physical and mental state, and vital for excellent performance.
If you are like most of us, when something challenges your confidence, you respond with self-doubt, even anxiety. Performance suffers. Unwanted thoughts intrude. Distractions siphon your energy, weaken your focus. Your skills – so strong a moment ago – let you down. You want to be anywhere but here.
Mental acuity is the key.
When your concentration wavers, you suddenly grasp insignificant details. The golfer thinks about being embarrassed by a poor shot, rather than about hitting the ball. The tennis player thinks of the net, not the topspin. The ballerina feels the music while aware of her relationship to the rest of the ensemble. She does not think about the next step.
The mechanism of unconscious thought allows us to perceive events before they register in the conscious mind. Anxiety and stress hamper the proper firing of neurons in the brain, and what should have been a sweet moment collapses into slapstick.
Sounds bad. How do I fix it?
The Answer: Enhanced Unconscious Competence.
Sounds tough. But it’s not.
Unconscious Competence is the ability to practice a certain skill set until it becomes automatic. You have done this before in learning to cook the perfect bouillabaisse, or improving your percentage of first serves in tennis, to cite two examples.
Enhanced Unconscious Competence is when you engage your Unconscious Mind in the practice and execution of a skill set. You sharply reduce the learning curve and enjoy the journey more. Like an athlete who’s playing “in the zone,” you gain an internal awareness while attending to external events.
Here’s how it works
You practice a skill set at the Conscious level. With repetition, you break down patterns of personal and anticipated interpersonal action into components and internalize them.
At the time of performance, the athlete or performing artist relies upon the ‘instrument’ to function at the automatic level. The internal stimuli – memory of action and reaction – have set up the self-induced trance of expected performance. The Conscious mind then relies upon the unconscious to generate and execute with excellence.
This internal awareness while engaged in the outside world
is crucial to peak performance.
When your Conscious mind does not trust the Unconscious – your confidence falters. Those nagging little intruding thoughts chip away at and deteriorate your focus on the execution of the activity.
What to do?
The Answer: Train the body and mind together.
Athletes and performers talk about the level of anxiety that’s useful in attaining peak performance. They transform this anticipatory tension into energy that helps them achieve that higher zone. It is about being ‘on’.
For some, the experience involves visualizing the desired event. Larry Bird, the Celtics great, says he imagined every shot hitting the net before he let the ball fly – even in the heat of competition. He rarely missed. Similarly, golf legend Jack Nicklaus says he visualizes every shot before swinging. The technique certainly worked for him as well.
Opera singers do the same thing: a quiet moment, standing still, aligning the muscles throughout the body. They are forming the ‘instrument’ through posture, nuances of opposing tensions in the head, mouth, neck, tongue, and so on.
Some need to burn off energy – their physical engine is revved too high. Dancers and actors use T’ai chi movement, yoga postures, and a complex series of stretches while waiting in the wings. By controlling excess energy, they develop momentum and channel it into the performance.
In cases where large overt movement is not practical, athletes such as swimmers and gymnasts often focus on breathing, while imagining their movements. They will shake their hands or run in place as a way to burn energy and keep the body / mind in synch in order to remind themselves of the internal rhythm that propels their instrument.
Such intentional physical movement is one way to diminish the internal dialogue that questions competence, distracts to external stimuli, and fears judgment, failure, or evaluation. Thoughts may tangentially engage an inconsequential event or irrelevant task. These pre-performance rituals can also function as kinesthetic cues to induce trance and regain focus. Their success rate, however, is variable.
