Month: June 2023

Team Unity and How To Improve It

Team unity, also known as culture, is the glue that sticks together the members of sporting teams so that they work together and not against each other.

LONDON, ENGLAND – July 18th, 2013: The Australian slip fielding cordon on day one of the Investec Ashes 2nd test match, at Lords Cricket Ground in London, England.

Unity, Cohesion, Harmony …

Team unity is also known by other names such as culture, team cohesion, and team chemistry. All of these labels describe the factors that can result in some sporting teams being completely unified. Whilst others can resemble the boys from the famous novel The Lord of the Flies. If you have never read the book I’ll sum it up for you. They end up killing each other!

Team Unity is possibly the most intriguing aspect of sporting mental toughness. It is without a doubt the area that athletes expect to be good at without having to do any work. All athletes understand that to improve muscle strength they’ll need to do some work. Most athletes understand that to improve managing emotions they’ll need to do some work. But most athletes expect their teammates to respect them just by existing.

In other words, the culture of most sporting teams, even the professional ones, is typically not that flash. The second factor is that regardless of the current state of your team’s culture it can be improved. That’s right, if it’s currently poor it can be bettered and if it’s already excellent it can still be improved further.

When Team Unity Falls Apart

Between 2005 and 2015 Kevin Pietersen was the top run scorer for the English men’s national cricket team. However, he was regarded by many of his teammates as a prickly character. They tried to address this but couldn’t. Many sporting teams would simply have accepted this and let him carry on playing.

However, unity was considered so important by The England Cricket Board they eventually stopped selecting their top batsman. This article explains the situation in a lot more detail.

How Is Team Unity Best Improved In Sporting Teams?

One of the best ways (but also one of the most costly) is to engage the services of a qualified sport psychologist. I am sure all psychologists working in sport have their own way of going about this. However at Condor Performance, when it comes to improving team unity we love to work mainly with the coaching staff.

One of the main jobs of the coach of a sporting team is to unify the team and then keep them unified. The problem is most of them attempt to do this delicate work under-equipped. This results in millions of well-intended coaches around the world doing an average job of this key component of performance.

So we work with the coach or coaches and put what we call The 10 R’s under the microscope. The 10 R’s refers to five pairs of words that each starts with the letter R. They provide a great starting point for discussions on how to improve the unity of any given team. Of course, these teams don’t have to be sporting groups.

Roles and Rules

It is virtually impossible for a team to be unified without clear rules and roles. If the individual members are not clear about their roles this will cause frustration and infighting. The ‘blame game’ is rife in sporting teams with poor role clarification.

The same applies to rules. What is and is not acceptable should form a key part of pre-season for all competitive sporting teams. The most effective rules are confirmed in consultation with all the members of the team. Then they are written down. Then all parties sign on the dotted line to agree to abide by them.

Does your team work together or are you just a group of individuals?

Relationships and Respect

It is important to mention that the members of a team don’t actually need to be the best of friends. In fact, they don’t even really have to like one another. But they do need to respect one another. Mutual respect tends to result from teams whereby cliques are not allowed to form. In other words, there is some kind of relationship between all members of the team. 

Reassurance and Reasons

More for the coaches but important nonetheless is giving frequent reassurance and reasons to the playing group. Humans are not mind-readers. Athletes are humans too. Some love getting reassurance that they are on track. Others need less reassurance. This is where the magic of the ‘why’ comes in. Letting players know why they’re progressing or struggling is the magic dust.

Ready and Relaxed

One furphy in elite sports is that one of the best ways to boost team chemistry is to win more. This is like putting the cart before the horse. In actual fact, one of the best ways is to help them prepare very well. Performers who feel ready and relaxed tend to get along much better than their stressed counterparts. And of course that proper preparation needs to include all aspects of performance. What are these again? Physical, Technical, Tactical, and Mental.

Recognition and Rewards

In most sports, the wins are often obvious. If your team wins the grand final you will not need our help in celebrating that. I am a much greater believer in recognising and celebrating the less obvious wins. What about the time that your teammate smashes her PB on the Beep Test? Or when all of you are able to attend training without anyone having an injury concern? Teams with a strong culture recognise these smaller milestones.

At Condor Performance we practice what we preach. Due to the monthly approach that we use in our consulting, we all accrue months. Each time a client pays for another month we add one month to our records for that psychologist. We then celebrate 50, 100, 500, 1000 and 2000 months together. For example below is a short video we made when Brian hit 500 months recently.

Do You Need Our Help?

If you are part of a team and you’d like some info on how we can work with you and your teammates please contact us via one of the below.

Baby Steps

Learning to take small steps in the right direction is potentially one of the most important mental skills of them all. As Gareth explains in this brand new feature article.

Learning to take small steps in the right direction is potentially one of the most important mental skills of them all.

What Are Baby Steps?

Most of you have surely heard the term baby steps, right?

Maybe for some, it rings a bell from the classic Bill Murray movie “What About Bob?”. For the rest of you here is a two-minute clip from the 1990’s comedy classic which gets straight to the heart of this concept:

As brilliantly explained by “Dr. Leo Marvin” Baby Steps are about taking small, incremental steps. And as I will explain later they actually don’t have to be towards a goal. In fact, sometimes chasing a goal can create some surprising and unnecessary issues.

Baby Steps for Sport Psychology

Although the concept of baby steps originates more from psychiatry it is just as applicable to modern-day sport psychology. In fact, it might be even more beneficial in performance-enhancement settings than deficit-fixing ones.

There are a couple of important aspects to highlight first. To start with most of the really meaningful stuff in our lives takes a lot of time to develop. So although the concept of baby steps does not directly mention the speed of those steps I think it’s implied. Slow and steady baby steps.

The second aspect central to baby steps is that most improvement is kind of hard to see. Like the nervous steps of a toddler learning to walk sometimes it’s more shuffle than step. And of course, there is a lot of falling over. 

I have always held the belief that slow, steady, hard-to-see improvements are the best type. For they tend to be longer-lasting.

Sure, every athlete and performer has the potential to make huge improvements all of a sudden, but these are typically the direct result of years of hard work where suddenly everything clicked. In most situations, there were a ton of baby steps before the huge step occurred.

Baby Steps With And Without Goals

Despite rumours in some circles, I don’t have a problem with goal setting. Setting goals is fine as long as the “setter” has a vague idea of how much influence they have on what they are “setting”.

I am a decent squash player and one of my intentions for when I hit 50 (4 years from now) is to climb the squash Masters rankings. Now I might set a goal, for example, of trying to get into the Top 10 squash players of my age group in New South Wales. But I am blissfully aware that I only have some influence on this. Another way of saying this is the reaching or not reaching of that future intention is only partially up to me.

Think about it. The quality of the other squash players and their training processes play a monumental part in whether or not I will achieve this goal or not. Imagine if suddenly five of the best male squash players of my age suddenly decided to move to New Zealand to start up a business together. Without me doing diddly squat the chances of me achieving this ranking goal would improve dramatically.

On the flip side, if a small wave of squash-loving Egyptian and Pakistani immigrants moved to Australia in the next few years (both nations are traditionally very strong in this sport) then the chances of me achieving my goal would go down significantly. But without me doing anything differently. 

So how then do baby steps work without setting goals?

Basically, you try and make tiny improvements at something important but without having a bigger purpose. This might be hard for many involved in competitive sports where there might always seem like there is an end goal in mind.

One of the biggest myths about the world’s best athletes is that they all set goals. Absolute hogwash. A large chunk of them just want to get better over time, and then with a huge dollop of patience, they end up at the top of the pile.

Examples

The basketballer wants to improve her basketball abilities but is not too concerned about making it as a pro. The cricketer is obsessed with becoming a more consistent batter but has not sat down to clarify his cricketing intentions over the next 5 years.

Earlier I said setting goals can actually do more harm than good. There are two ways in which setting goals can trip up athletes and other nonsporting performers.

First, is the very existence of the goal as a huge dollar of unnecessary pressure. Now of course in an ideal world using a psychological flexibility framework pressure would not be problematic. In the same way that negative thoughts and feelings ought not to be problematic. The reality is that working with a qualified sport psychologist to ensure that this happens is still the exception, rather than the norm. So too much pressure is an issue for many performers still. And a lot of this unhealthy kind of pressure comes from the expectations of others and the future.

Imagine a golfer going into a golf tournament whereby only a win will give them enough ranking points to get into the Top 20 Order of Merit. The goal they set at the start of the season. Many psychologically inflexible golfers would perform better if they didn’t have this hanging around their necks as they stood on the first tee each day.

The other issue with goalsetting is actually when you achieve them. If not careful ‘getting there’ can act as a huge demotivator. Let me use the golfer from the previous paragraph to illustrate. So this golfer had a season-long goal of finishing in the Top 20 Order of Merit. Now, let’s imagine that he had a better-than-expected season going into the final tournament. In fact mathematically even if he comes dead last in this event he will still end up in the Top 20. Deep down, will he be as focused in these final rounds?

Baking Your Cake And Eat It 

The Japanese have a word that roughly translates to constant improvement. It’s called Kaizen. So a Kaizen Mindset might be the best way to use baby steps. And it’s best done by actually separating out the four performance pillars.

Let’s see if we can slowly improve your sporting abilities without concerning ourselves too much with where it might end up.

See if you can get some objective data on your current physical abilities. Now get to work and try and improve them ever so slightly over the next month. Then retest. Do exactly the same for your current tactical, technical, and mental abilities. For the mental part, you might like to consider mental health and performance-specific mental toughness as being related but not the same thing.

And if you need a hand, we can help you with both (get in touch here).