Category: Sports Science Stuff

Willpower: What Exactly Is It?

Willpower is not an uncommon word in the English language. A quick Google search produces roughly 76,300,000 results. However, as is the case with so many concepts in psychology, there is not a tremendous amount of clarity about precisely what willpower is.

Articles discussing its usefulness and ways to enhance it are even less common. So, I will try to remedy that with this thought piece.

There are some attempts to clarify willpower in this excellent article on the American Psychological Association website, but I like this clue the most:

The ability to delay gratification, resisting short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals

Let’s Run Some Examples

Although technically, willpower is not considered a mostly sport psychology concept (not in the same way, for example, goal setting and visualisation are), maybe it should be. I struggle to think of any other sub-discipline of psychology where the above definition is so relevant. Below, I will use two fictitious athletes as examples to get my points across.

Meet Larry

Larry (not a real person) is a talented Division Two college baseball pitcher. When he was younger, he was the standout player in the Little League. Where he grew up in a remote part of Louisiana, baseball was all the town seemed to care about. And there were few distractions, so Larry would spend hours and hours after school and on weekends throwing his dishevelled bag of balls at a graffitied rectangle on an old gymnastics propped up against the garage wall.

He wouldn’t have known if Larry had been asked why he spends so much time working on his pitching. He wouldn’t have heard about willpower. Instead, he was simply a living, breathing example of it.

A Change In Environment

Things changed once Larry moved across State lines to Texas to start college. For a start, he was older now. He became interested in girls, but maybe more significantly, from a willpower perspective, there were plenty around for him to be interested in!

Due to his upbringing and the importance of work ethic imposed on him from a young age, he still found it relatively easy to attend compulsory team practice. But suddenly, even this had a slightly different motive. You see, a handful of young ladies at Larry’s college would always watch the baseballers in training. This was a far cry from the Larry of a decade earlier, who would thunder his Rawlings into the dusty gym mat with an audience of zero or one. (Sometimes, his neighbour would watch from across the fence).

Not All Practice Is The Same

Larry’s baseball team coach clarified that additional practice was entirely voluntary. However, all the players would have access to the facilities should they want to do some extras. At first, Larry did some extra pitching after training, but soon, this stopped when he worked out that it would start to encroach on his social life.

Little did Larry know that the baseball coach was psychologically very astute. Despite saying it was voluntary, he would ask one of the assistant coaches to track which players would do additional training and how much. He would classify those who did as being more internally motivated. Due to this invaluable psychological trait, he predicted more extraordinary things for these athletes and, in turn, tried to give them more opportunities during games.

Larry would tell himself that part of the college experience was to have fun. Indeed, science now is unequivocal in that neglecting a social life entirely to support excellence is a terrible idea. However, he failed to realise that with a little bit of time management, he could bake his cake and eat it. In other words, he could easily have squeezed in 2 to 3 hours of additional non-team practice (early mornings, for example) while having a rich and fulfilling social life as well.

Like hundreds of thousands of elite college athletes, Larry never quite fulfilled his dream of playing in the big leagues. His diminishing willpower during his teenage years ultimately got in the way.

A Different Example

Wendy (a made-up person, too) came to squash late and by pure luck. When she was 14, her family moved from the South Island of New Zealand to the North Island. By pure coincidence, the house that they rented was a four-minute walk to the local squash courts. Wendy had not been an especially sporty kid before the family moved, but the squash club seemed to provide the best opportunity for meeting new people. So, they signed Wendy up for some group classes.

Wendy quickly realised that she enjoyed most of the elements of this sport. She loved that it did not depend on certain weather conditions, which in New Zealand can cause havoc with the more popular outdoor sports such as rugby union and cricket. She also loved the decision-making aspect of squash and the speed of play.

There was no easy way to take extra classes, as private tuition was too expensive for Wendy’s family. So, instead, she asked the court manager if she could help clean them in exchange for after-hours access. She was allowed to do this, so she went to work.

During most mornings, before school, Wendy would get up at 5 am and walk to the courts. For the first hour, she’d sweep and mop the four courts. For the second hour, she’d practice. Sometimes, this was alone; Wendy would creatively devise drills that would allow for solo practice. Occasionally, one of the older male players would join her for the second hour and play practice matches.

Then, She Started Competing

At age 16, a sport psychologist came to run a Mental Toughness workshop at the club and suggested that those “interested in getting to the very top” should at least keep some form of performance journal. Wendy did not need a second prompt and started reflecting after each training session and her growing number of squash competitions.

A massive feature of her journaling was willpower-related. When her motivation to train dropped, she’d write about this and remind herself that some of the growing number of distractions—such as the two (not one, but two) fast food joints in town—would make her feel good for a few minutes, but what she was working towards would be far more satisfying for a much more extended period.

Obstacles 

When obstacles got in the way of her improvement endeavours—for example, the entire squash club was closed for three months for refurbishment purposes—she would always creatively work around them. She set up a home gym to ensure she stayed in top physical condition and would gorge on YouTube videos of the world’s best to solidify technical and technical brilliance in her mind’s eye.

When Wendy started playing squash professionally, her willpower was second nature. She did not need to work on it. Unlike in Larry’s case, where a lack of willpower ultimately got between him and his potential for Wendy, it was her secret weapon. It was the difference between her becoming great as opposed to just good.

7 Ways To Boost Your Willpower 

1. Read this article a second time 😃!
2. Keep a reflection/performance journal of some sort.
3. Set some long-term goals – but at the same time, remind yourself you’ll only ever have some influence over these.
4. Design ready-to-go backups for your most common training sessions before they’re needed.
5. Accept that external motivators such as prize money and trophies are fragile. Willpower and internal motivation are “best mates”, so if you improve the latter, the former should also benefit.
6. Vary your practice as much as possible, as monotony will lead to boredom, and boredom is the biggest threat to willpower by far,
7. Work with one of our team of sports/performance psychologists for at least a month. During the initial Kick Start Session, ask them to target willpower. The best way to get started is to watch this explanatory video below and then get in touch by filling in your details here.

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Introduction

This article will focus on the mental side of baseball (or Baseball Psychology) by exploring its mental challenges. I will also take a deep dive into some of the different approaches that we, as performance psychologists, tend to use a lot when working with our growing number of baseball clients. As with all of our articles, if you have any comments or questions, please add them at the bottom. I will endeavour to reply to every single one within a few days.

Why Is Baseball So Psychologically Challenging?

Since joining Condor Performance, I have worked with hundreds of baseball players at all levels of the sport. This has allowed me to see how individuals react to the challenges thrown their way (literally and metaphorically) and determine what works and does not work in strengthening performance.

Analysing baseball performance and determining player strength is a big deal in baseball, maybe more so than any other sport. If you have already seen the movie Moneyball, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If you have not seen it, you should.

Through these practices, baseball has become obsessed with statistics. This obsession has filtered down into the mindset of the players. These stats, as important as they are, are outcomes, and the players only have some influence over them. As explained in far more detail in this article by my colleague Gareth, an ‘outcome focus’ can and usually does distract from the process.

The other aspect of baseball that makes it so tricky psychologically is how much time the players have to think. Of course, there are other sports similar to this—think golf—but baseball’s relatively slow pace compared to many sports is a massive hurdle from a mental point of view.

Process, Process and Process

This means a significant part of improving any baseball player’s mindset is shifting their attention away from being statistically motivated to being process-orientated. Statistics muddy the waters. Focusing on them means trying to control too much of what happens in the game.

This generally leads to overthinking, concentrating on the wrong stuff and a drop in motivation. All of these factors are the kryptonite to consistency, which wants to be the goal that we are all striving for. Of course, this is true for many sports, but baseball is particularly susceptible to an obsession with outcomes (both large and small).

It’s How You Handle The Stats!

Many people might be reading this and thinking that statistics are crucial. To an extent, this can be true. They should be seen as clues to potential improvement.

Most stats assume too much and don’t represent the cog in the machine that we have the most influence over. Statistics are the taste of your favourite meal, whereas processes are the recipe that allows you to reproduce that taste repeatedly. I am much more interested in knowing whether we executed the recipe correctly.

In baseball psychology terms, I’m more interested in knowing that you approached the plate aggressively and followed your pre-pitch routine.

In a statistics-only (mostly) frame of mind, we can get distracted from the essence of baseball: skill execution and enjoyment. To put our best foot forward in the contest, we want to be focused on the present moment, routine-based, and active with our processes. Strengthening these three mental skills will help take any baseball player’s performance to the next level.

Psychological Flexibility and Baseball Psychology

Focusing on the present moment aligns with the primary approach in the sport psychology consulting we do here at Condor Performance: psychological flexibility.

Focusing on the past can generate an internal experience of frustration, disappointment and regret. The future can provoke stress, anxiety, and worry.

These can distract or cause an individual to rush, which is not the mindset we want to have. Baseball is a stop-start sport, which means there is a clear distinction between the present moment and this pitch.

This pitch is the only one from a mental toughness point of view. As a pitcher, it’s the only one I have influence over throwing. As a hitter, it’s the only one I can look to hit. And as a fielder, it is the only one I can make a play on.

All the previously thrown pitches are done and cannot be changed. All future pitches are irrelevant because we have no idea what will happen. It’s this pitch (and only this pitch) that matters.

Repeatable Routines Are Key

We can increase that present-moment focus by making it routine-based. When the play pauses, there is a small window for all players to reset. Having repeatable routines can help by ensuring the players use actions to ready themselves for the next play.

Think of David Ortiz at the plate or Craig Kimbrel on the mound as exaggerated but practical examples of having a routine before every pitch.

Irrespective of what has happened, the routine is roughly the same and ensures a mental state of readiness.

Once we have readied ourselves and locked in that focus, we give ourselves a better opportunity to land a punch in this contest. Baseball comprises split-second decisions and moments, so being primed for these moments is a core aspect of mentally strong baseballers.

I see players who often alter their intentions based on previous events. The most common is a tendency to play conservatively when things have not gone their way. Here are a few classic examples:

• Let a ball drop in the field instead of laying out for it.
• Not throwing an off-speed pitch when there’s a runner on third.
• Waiting for the pitch rather than looking to attack it at the plate.

In these situations, we have drastically reduced our chances of showcasing our strengths and skills. If this sounds like you, get in touch, and we’ll see if we can help you through one of our 1-on-1 sport psychology monthly options.

Staying True To Our Processes

Staying true to our processes is designed to help us be aggressive and look to command the moment. Getting caught focusing on something else means we lose that command. We begin to play like we have something to lose instead of playing like we have something to win. Playing to avoid mistakes instead of creating success becomes a habit. We catch ourselves worrying more about the opinions of others than the pride we have in ourselves.

How Important Are Words?

I have often pondered how important it is to use the correct word. Both in professional situations as well as personal ones. Yes, maybe it’s the flight of an overthinker, but the fact is that words matter.

As a sports psychologist, does it go against the Psychological Flexibility framework that underpins all of my consulting to insist that certain words are better than others in specific situations?

Let me use an example before diving into the main dish of vulnerability and team cohesion. Some clients will know I’m not a huge fan of the word ‘mistake’. From time to time, I have suggested that we even consider replacing this loaded term with the far more accurate and potentially beneficial phrase of ‘unfortunate occurrence’.

I will endeavour to write an entire article on this subject in due course, but here is the gist. Too many athletes take too much blame when something unfortunate happens during competition(s).

Back To Vulnerability

But I digress. The word vulnerability wasn’t used much in applied or academic sport psychology until recently. 

So, let’s look at the actual word itself. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word vulnerability means ‘able to be easily hurt, influenced, or attacked’. Hmm, that doesn’t sound that great! The Merriam-Webster free online dictionary isn’t much better with ‘capable of being physically or emotionally wounded’.

The appeal to want to become more vulnerable takes an even bigger blow when you look at the origins of the via Etymonline (below) 😬.

Brené Brown’s Work

Due to the smallness of performance psychology as a profession, more often than not, the research needs to come from a more generic source. And this is certainly the case here where the work by the legendary Brené Brown put vulnerability and related concepts on the map.

Before I stumbled across the work of Brené Brown, I must admit that I was guilty of not seeing the hidden benefits of learning to be vulnerable. Maybe it’s like sport itself. Maybe you need to do it to have an idea of what it’s really like. So this I did.

The Bridge in Kentucky, USA

Partially for personal reasons and partially for professional reasons, earlier this year, I spent two weeks at a facility in Kentucky, USA, called The Bridge. For those who follow the work of Dr Peter Attia, it’s the same Bridge he attended and mentions in his highly recommended book Outlive.

I will not include a full breakdown of my experience in The Woods of Kentucky, mostly because a thorough account of the entire program would be a far more appropriate subject for an entire book, not a 1000-word blog article. However, I’m happy to disclose that one of the most significant inclusions of the process was learning to be vulnerable in a group setting.

And when it’s done properly and professionally (and boy, was it), there is no substitute from a team cohesion and togetherness point of view. In 14 days, we went from a group of complete strangers to people who feel more like family than friends.

Emotional Courage

I know that for some reading this, it’s just semantics, but in 2024, before the world catches up, maybe what I was taught at The Bridge is better described as emotional courage. And I couldn’t help but notice when Googling Brené’s website to link it above the blurb in the search results puts the word courage first: Brené Brown is a researcher and storyteller who’s spent two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.

The courage to let down the walls and let your real feelings come out. Brené correctly describes doing this type of work properly is messy. And messy it is, but necessarily messy. Unavoidably messy if you want the benefits on the other side. 

Team sports athletes – especially the men 😬 – are typically not very emotionally courageous with each other, and maybe this is necessary if the facilitator is not trained and experienced. Like dentistry, if it is not done properly, it can backfire and be disastrous.

But one thing is for sure. We will ensure that our growing team of sport and performance psychologists gets the appropriate skills training in this area. We will be ready to assist when the sporting world fully embraces vulnerability as a mental skill to be taken seriously. If you can’t wait until then, feel free to get in touch via Our Contact form beforehand (like now).

Emotions, Sport And Performance

• As sport psychologists and performance psychologists, we are often asked for ways to improve emotional management. So, what exactly does this involve?
• Through variations of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we can learn to manage our emotions in more helpful ways.
• At Condor Performance the goal of our emotions work is mainly to teach clients how to perform at the highest possible level whilst experiencing the full range of emotions. It is not about helping them feel better or a certain way.
• If you’d like more information about our performance psychology services, complete the form on our Contact Us page.

Please Make Me Feel Better! 

In our profession, we deal with emotions every single day. Athletes and performers often ask us how they can learn to feel better. Most of the time, this is a desire to feel a certain way on competition day. A day that is often riddled with a whirlwind of emotions from excitement to anxiety and everything in between. Our work around emotions often begins with a deep dive into reality.

We’re probably never going to feel great on these highly meaningful days. And we will certainly never feel great before and during all competitive situations. As fellow psychologist Peter Clarke mentions in this Podcast interview, “We have this thing in our mind of I gotta feel perfect, calm and confident and THEN I’ll perform well. Mate, if that’s the case, you’re going to perform well for a very small portion of the time.”

Our first job as Psychologists is to help our clients let go of the idea of wanting to control how they feel. Emotions aren’t something we have a huge amount of influence over. Athletes and performers often come to us to learn how to eliminate the “negative” emotions and replace them with positive ones.

In their defence, this is often what is taught to us from a very young age. Remember this from the movie A League of Their Own? “There’s No Crying in Baseball.” Great film but awful advice.

Emotions And Performance

During the initial Kick Start Session with new clients, we often hear stories of emotional struggles on game day. Performers often describe the many ways in which they try to control these uncomfortable feelings. We get remarkable insight into how much impact feelings seem to have on their performance. To understand how to manage emotions, we must first understand exactly what they are.

Why Do We Feel Things?

Athletes and performers need to understand why humans experience emotions. In short, they play a very important role in our survival. There are countless examples, but the classic is the natural human feeling of fear. Being afraid of snakes, for example, is jolly useful. This fear is a major deterrent to going anywhere near anything resembling a snake. Even though most snakes are nonvenomous, we typically leave them alone, mostly thanks to fear.

Survival vs Performance

So, what we know about emotions is that within a survival framework, they’re great at keeping us alive. However, emotions in the performance domain have a habit of getting in the way of us doing the things we already know how to do well. Our job as psychologists is to challenge the consensus that emotions directly impact our performance. That is, to challenge the idea if I feel “bad” (i.e. nervous, anxious, doubtful) on game day, I’ll inevitably perform “poorly”. One of the first questions we will often ask a new client is this one.

“How do you view the relationship between emotions and performance? If I were to draw an arrow between the two, which direction would the arrow be pointing, and what would this mean?”

Nine times out of ten, the response I get is something like this. “How I feel usually determines how I perform”. But if we rarely feel fantastic come performance day due to our Amygdala, then we’re in trouble, no?

The Reality Of Emotions in Sport

Their ability to welcome and embrace these emotions and perform at a high level with them present has made them so good in their performance domain. The ability to do this is a skill that can be developed by anyone. And just like learning the right [biomechanical] technique, the earlier this becomes a habit, the better.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

The main coaching framework we work within at Condor Performance is known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT (pronounced “act”) for short. This approach suggests that trying to get rid of unwanted emotions creates a lot of psychological distress. This psychological distress is almost always worse than the original feeling.

This often has a maladaptive impact on our behaviour (or, in this case, a negative impact on our performance). This is because we are trying to fight something we don’t have a lot of influence over. Attention is then taken away from basic muscle memory. Suddenly, a 4-foot put isn’t as easy as it was on the practice green earlier that day.

Through the mindful nature of ACT, we can learn to reduce the impact of emotions. How? By building awareness, making room for them, and learning to let these feelings come and go without a struggle.

Acceptance

ACT is an umbrella term for a range of mindfulness-based skills, with acceptance being one of the most useful and important. Through the skill of acceptance, our goal for athletes and performers is to help them open up to the uncomfortable feelings they experience as part of the human condition before accepting their presence and allowing them to be there rather than trying to avoid them. The idea behind acceptance is that if we learn to make room for emotions in our lives (without trying to fight them off), their power is ultimately diminished. ACT assumes that the struggle with and fighting off these emotions gives them their power over our actions.

The “Noticing Self”

There is a part of us that feels, and then there is a part that notices that we feel a certain way. Performers need to learn to notice their emotions as they arise and build more awareness of them – why? Because our default response to uncomfortable feelings is to turn away from them – try to suppress, avoid or escape them, or distract ourselves from them. This is problematic regarding the motor skills required in most sports. It stops you from doing what you are naturally very good at (e.g. kicking a soccer ball, etc).

A trap we often fall into in performance settings is getting sucked into this default response. Eventually, we become so caught up in getting rid of uncomfortable emotions (an impossible task) that we can’t be intensity aware, present and focused on what we must be doing.

To help athletes and performers develop the noticing skill, we ask them to practice intentionally and consciously noticing and acknowledging uncomfortable feelings. We might ask them to tell themselves what they feel silently. For example, “I’m noticing anxiety”, or “I notice I’m feeling worried”. Through accepting and noticing emotions, we can learn to sit with the discomfort and reduce its impact on our actions (motor skills).

Emotion Validation and Commitment

Without acknowledging the presence of uncomfortable emotions, we can invalidate our own experiences. When our most inner and private emotional experiences feel invalid, we risk falling victim to that unhelpful emotion default response (suppress, avoid, escape, distract). Following this, our default cognitive response is often “I shouldn’t feel this way” or “I should be able to handle this better”.

But at the end of the day, a choice must be made. The athlete or performer can choose to:

1. Feel uncomfortable emotions and choose not to commit to their actions or
2. Feel these uncomfortable emotions and commit to their actions despite them.

Through mental toughness training, we aim to empower individuals to choose the latter. With the help of skills such as acceptance, noticing and validation, the decision to commit becomes much easier. 

Learning to Embrace Emotion

At Condor Performance, we aim to guide athletes and performers towards a healthier relationship with emotions. Think about how boring life would be without them!

We know happiness only because we’ve experienced sadness, so it is important as part of the human condition that we choose to welcome all emotions, pleasant and unpleasant. In the performance domain, we often view emotion negatively, but rather than looking at it as a sign of weakness, we can see it as a sign that we’re living. If you need help in doing this, then get in touch.

Our very own Darren Godwin recently interviewed with Radio New Zealand, and his advice was so beneficial we decided to transcribe it and convert it into this brand-new feature article entitled Mental Skills For Younger Performers. Please add any and all questions and comments at the bottom, and Darren will endeavour to reply to each and every one. Note some edits have been made to the original to make it easy to read.

Catherine [The Interviewer]:

In parenting, we’re talking about how to help sporty kids deal with the psychological impact of winning, losing, and the pressures of competition.

Melbourne-based provisional psychologist Darren Godwin works with Australia’s largest sport and performance psychology practice, Condor Performance. Professional sports teams have the services of psychologists to help players navigate the ups and downs of competition and their own doubts and motivation. Darren says tween and teen athletes and their parents can benefit from the same assistance. Thanks for being with us.

Darren Godwin [The Interviewee]:

Hi, Catherine. Thanks for having me. How are you doing?

Catherine:

Really good. I want to make an observation at the outset, and that is what we’ve seen, and it’s become a source of some angst and debate about what seems like a growing kind of professionalisation of high school sports in particular. We’ve got schools with academies and kids in training programs. I have spoken to some physiologists worried about the level of training that some are going through while their bodies are still growing. What’s your starting point, and what’s happening in Australia concerning the sorts of quasi-professional sports that kids are coming up against quite young?

Darren:

I think there are probably a couple of factors that can contribute to that, and one might be just that our world is more connected than ever before, so we can access and see people who do incredible things more easily. There are a lot of people who do incredible things around the world. So perhaps that pushes or incentivises us to start introducing that earlier and earlier into some of these education systems.

Catherine:

Some schools compete on this basis, and it’s not like, in our case, rugby and rowing and whatever haven’t always been sports where schools have prided themselves or built their reputation. Still, this idea of academies and quasi-professional training does seem to have spread. It’s just an observation. Is this what is on your mind, or is it more just in general for any young person playing competitive sport they’re going to come up against those highs and lows?

Darren:

I think it’s more just a general sense of it. Sport offers some unique experiences that I think can provide a lot of areas to grow and develop as a person, and I think there are a lot of parallels between just some of the nature of things that happen within sports. How can we develop skills that support and enhance people to learn, grow, and handle those challenges life will throw our way, too?

Catherine:

Another general observation. You’ve gone there already in some ways. We seem to be having a generation that, for various reasons, is dealing with rising anxiety or has to manage anxiety. Your reference to how interlinked everything is and the overload that can be put on young brains and nervous systems is one factor. A pandemic interrupting their schooling and regular routine is another. But in general, is that on your mind also that resilience is something we need to work on with a generation of young people?

Darren:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s helpful to acknowledge a mental skills component that we culturally don’t introduce to our younger audiences. We look at the systems and the education systems, facilities, things we’ve got set up there, there’s more of an emphasis on the knowledge, the learning and the connectivity, but not so much on the mental skills development. So, we are trying to build the capacity to learn how to handle those challenges and build resilience.

Catherine:

So, where do you begin? Let’s get some parameters around the kind of ages that we’re talking about, what’s appropriate, and what’s helpful at different ages and/or stages of development.

Darren:

Sure. In my experience, at least, we work with anyone between the ages of ten, and maybe the oldest I’ve worked with is sixty-eight. So it can be for a variety of things. It could just be someone who is looking to be highly competitive. It could be someone just looking to enjoy their weekend competition more. A lot of what we do to support them is to help them with things like confidence in their skills and abilities, the confidence to execute what they’ve practised in any given conditions, the composure to manage their emotions under stressful situations and the commitment to trade-off, I guess, what might seem like something hard in the short term, but it’s going to provide a long-term benefit.

So when we look at those age brackets, the developmental brackets we’re talking about, young kids, we try to accentuate the fun and keep them involved.

Catherine:

We want them to have fun, right?

Darren:

Exactly.

Catherine:

We don’t want to stress them out.

Darren:

Social development, it is a highly social period for youngsters. They’re trying to connect with themselves in the world, so at a young age, we’re saying, “Hey, let’s look at the fun side of things a little bit more.”

Teenage years, it’s becoming a lot more social, but they’re becoming a lot more independent. They’re trying to figure out who they are and what they want to be in this world. So that is typically when we start to see more competitive things show up and still the same thing. It’s trying to help them understand what they want to do that’s going to help benefit them in the long run.

Catherine:

Let’s come back to those three points you’ve already touched on that are all interrelated. Let’s break them down. Let’s start with confidence. It’s about doing what you’re trained to do, but many things can get in the way, right?

But I wonder if we should start with number two, managing emotions and stressful situations. You’ll often see this in young kids, you’ll spot probably the champion at a very young age because they seem to manage to be calm. They seem to focus on fixing a mistake or concentrating on what they will do next. Then there’s someone else who’s angry, frustrated and throwing the tennis racket. So how do we begin to introduce and help kids with the skill to manage their emotions and the stress of competition? What sorts of things would you do?

Darren:

When we’re talking about emotions, I always try to explain there are two components. One is the internal experience that’s happening with that emotion, what do we feel and the other is the expression of that emotion, what do we do?

So we try to separate the two so we can acknowledge and accept that you’re a human being and it’s okay to have all these emotions. They show up because it’s helpful for our survival and/or something matters to us in that moment. We don’t get emotional about things we don’t care about, so something matters to us at that moment.

So it’s building those mental skills to acknowledge, understand, and accept what emotion is showing up for me now, as well as how I express what I want to express. If we want to go one step further (what you said is I’m here with a task in front of me), how do I shift my focus to the task in front of me if that’s what’s most important?

Catherine:

So first of all, it’s that old thing as always with young people – validate what they’re feeling.

Darren:

Absolutely.

Catherine:

There’s also the … it’s dubbed red to blue, right? Athletes learn this at all levels. There’s your immediate rage reaction, stress reaction, or worry reaction, and you want to get to the calm blue ocean part of the brain to deal with the issue. In what ways would you deal with, say, an early teen or a mid-teen on the emotion in the moment? Is it a simple breathing skill or a calming skill? Is it self-talk? What kinds of skills can they add to their repertoire quite young?

Darren:

Oh, I think maybe a mindfulness practice is probably something that they can start to do. Mindfulness is defined by two main points. One is contact with the present moment. And two is a reduced judgment of what’s happening in their current experience.

Like with all things, preparation is going to benefit this the most. So it’s trying to help and guide athletes to practice these things in advance so they’re not left in a situation where they must scramble and work out something on the fly. I guess a mindfulness practice is something that can be helpful. It can just start with a minute or two minutes of just observing and watching different experiences that are happening, tuning into one or some of our senses, what we see, smell, taste, touch or hear, and that can often be a good way to recenter us back into this moment right now.

Catherine:

Let’s work through perhaps the anticipation of a big event and the nerves and anxiety that can build over the days ahead. Is mental rehearsal still a big thing? Does it help to visualise where you’ll be, what you’ll be feeling, what you’ll be doing, where your locker will be, and where your gear will go? Is that something you can help develop as a skill as well?

Darren:

Absolutely. Yes. Mental imagery, visualisation, and mental rehearsal are fantastic skills to help with our preparation. These mental skills have many benefits. First, you’re repeatedly putting yourself in that situation and becoming more familiar with it. Trying to recall with detail the things that you want to focus on, where you want to be, what you want to do and how it’s going to go, and that it’d be deeply connected to what you’ve trained and what you’ve practised.

Visualisation is also very accessible. If you can’t make training that day for whatever reason, it can be done in your home. It can be done alongside your training. Some good research shows the benefits of doing it alongside training, and it can be done when you’re injured. So it keeps you connected with the task and what you need to do.

Catherine:

It could also be very basic. I mean, it’s not necessarily just about the skills that you want to rehearse mentally. It can be like, “Okay, I’ve got a stressful day tomorrow. I’ve got to be ready to go at this time. What time am I getting up? I’m going to shower. I’m going to have my breakfast. I’m going to pack my bag, or I’ve got my bag packed.” Walking through all the steps that can cause stress and pressure. Right? It’s the anticipation of practising what you will go through.

Darren:

Yes, absolutely. Another point to what you said is that it’s an acceptance or a connection. We’re not trying to avoid the stress that’s happening the next day.

Catherine:

We’re walking into it.

Darren:

We’re walking into it.

Catherine:

So, with nerves and anxiety, what ways do you talk this through with young people? They are here to help us, that they can feel unpleasant, but that they serve a purpose? How do you help them harness them rather than be overrun by them?

Darren:

I think just a little bit of education comes along with that. For example, just trying to understand the physiology, the biology that we have and how our body works, and these things are ultimately here to help us.

Then, if you break down the actual things that are happening physiologically for us, things like our heart rate going up, meaning we’ve got more blood going to our muscles, which means we’re going to be more ready to use those muscles with strength, power, and flexibility. Our pupils are dilating, and we can see things more clearly and easily identify moving objects. Usually, that alertness, that energy in our body, means that our reaction time is consistently sharp. So when you go through all of these things, and you ask an athlete this kind of things that benefit your sport, almost all the time, they’re going to benefit their performance or their sport in some way.

Catherine:

It will also benefit school work, exams, and other things that cause stress. How do you approach negative self-talk? Some people seem to have a natural talent for turning things around, and others, it’s always, “I won’t win this. I’ll get this far. I’m ahead, but I’m going to muck it up.” How do you talk through that self-talk intervention with people at this age?

Darren:

I think it’s interesting at a young age because they haven’t necessarily had as much time to go further down that self-talk route and develop a habit or relationship with that self-talk.

So I might say something like if we’re going to cross a busy intersection and there are four lanes of traffic with cars and there are no lights and they’re all going very quickly, we’re going to think about … probably what we would say is negative things. “Oh, I might get hit by a car.” It’s not a pleasant thing to think about, but it’s a very helpful thing to think about.

So it’s just trying to build this relationship that sometimes, as these negative things arise, can we practice identifying the context? What’s this situation? What’s happening right now? What’s important to me right now? Then, if it is important, let’s pay some attention to it. And if it’s not, we can practice letting go, and it’s that letting go part that I think is important in some sporting contexts because the sporting context triggers some of those things quite a lot.

Catherine:

Here’s a really good point actually to this point. “Like many kids his age, my 14-year-old dreams of a career in professional football. The chance of that working out is minuscule, but it’s all he wants to do. He detests the idea of doing anything else. He puts so much pressure on himself to perform and is crushed if he doesn’t shine on the park. Should I encourage him to chase his dream or be realistic? I’m torn.”

Darren:

That’s a great question. It’s tough, and I think for parents out there, it’s just trying to guide them and go along with your child and help them discover it for themselves. It’s not to say that they can’t go down that path and then later find out that it’s not something meaningful for them. But it’s worth also just continually having conversations with them. “What’s important to you? What are you willing to try to do to see how this goes?” And try to be a supportive and open person who walks them along that journey with them. There will be moments where it’s hard, and I think we’re trying to be there for them in all moments, not just moments of success.

Catherine:

What happens over time, of course, and a lot of athletes (most athletes) find this out is they want to be this or that, but they’re not going to make the professional league. Still, they may have a very rewarding emitter or quasi-professional role. They may become sports psychologists or trainers or whatever.

It’s about focusing on the joy of participating in the sport. Hard, I know, when they’ve got very specific dreams, but ultimately, that’s what you want to be doing. Also, what do you learn in chasing a goal, whether or not it’s achieved?

I guess that’s another point to discuss. Setting goals can come to ones that you know you will tick off: “I’ve done my training this week, I’ve done this, I’ve done that. I’ve done the next thing, ” and those beyond your control. It is really important to teach kids about effort in any area. You focus on what you can do and reach for what’s beyond your control, but you accept it’s ultimately beyond your control. Yeah?

Darren:

Yes, absolutely. That’s another great mental skill to start learning early, and they work well through the life cycle. It is the ability to identify what we can and can’t control. The tricky part happens when we think we have more control over something than we do. It’s often the case in sports, but yes, it can be as simple as writing things down on paper and trying to gauge yourself, maybe out of ten. Ten is for anything that I think I can guarantee. One, it’s a complete fluke that it happens. How much influence do I think I have over these things?

Catherine:

So, you can have a goal of winning the tennis tournament, but what you need is the mental attitude that what you can do is all your preparation, all your training, all your readiness, your best performance. The goal of winning is what you are reaching for, but you can’t control that. That is a skill that great performers will learn somewhere along the line. And this is arguably one of the most invaluable mental skills for younger performers, correct?

Darren:

100%.

Catherine:

Darren, thanks very, very much. Darren Godwin is with Condor Performance. He’s a performance psychologist with Condor Performance in Australia.

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I am guessing that when you think of sport psychology books, you imagine publications by academics that have sold a few thousand copies. The issue is that most of these books are designed to be for practitioners and not the performers. There are books written with athletes and performers in mind, but typically, they are limited in their scope. So we asked our growing team of sport and performance psychologists about what books they suggest to their clients.

Below, in no particular order, are these publications. As you can see many of them are not sport psychology books per se, but together they form a handy toolkit for anyone interested in the mental aspects of human performance. If you think we are missing one (or more), please add the details to the comments section at the very bottle of the list.

The Third Space by Dr Adam Fraser

Brian says…

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The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doig 

Brian says…

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Breath by James Nestor

Brian says…

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Atomic Habits by James Clear

Darren says …

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A Liberated Mind by Dr Steven C. Hayes

Darren says …

Madalyn says …

This powerful book is centred around ‘Psychological Flexibility’, a term referring to being open and willing to engage with uncomfortable internal experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories) so that they no longer stop us from committing to the actions that are important to us.

This book contains excellent insight into the evidence-based practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a framework the Condor Performance team use to help their sporting and non-sporting clients lean into discomfort and not struggle with it. ACT is based on the premise that our problem-solving mind is hardwired to avoid, suppress and fight off uncomfortable internal experiences. To live a full and meaningful life, we need to have a more ‘flexible’ relationship with our mind where we notice, observe and accept these experiences, reflect on our values and focus on committed action towards our long-term goals. Much of our work at Condor Performance is about our clients’ relationships with internal experiences. Therefore, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about our work or is looking to improve their performance.

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The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think of You by Dr Michael Gervais

Harley says …

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The Resilience Project by Hugh van Cuylenburg

Harley says …

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Legacy: What The All Blacks Can Teach Us About The Business of Life by James Kerr

Harley says …

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Do Hard Things by Steve Magness

Harley says …

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The Practice of Groundness by Brad Stulberg

Harley says …

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Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Harley says …

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A Still Quiet Place For Athletes by Amy Saltzman

Charlotte says …

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The Happiness Trap by Dr Russ Harris

Chris says …

(1) Mindfulness. Being aware of the present moment without judgment helps us recognise how we respond to situations and redirect ourselves to practical actions. 

(2) Acceptance. Acknowledging unwanted thoughts and emotions helps reduce our natural internal struggle with them.

(3) Commitment. By identifying our values (things that give us a sense of meaning), we can become more purposeful in our behaviours. In other words, deliberately acting aligns with what is important to us. 

Happy reading (no pun intended)! 

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Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan

James says …

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The Coaches by David Becker and Scott Hill

James says …

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The Score Takes Care Of Itself by Bill Walsh

Gareth says …

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Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

Gareth says …

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If you feel like this list of sports psychology books is missing any that you have read and would recommend, please add the details to the comments section below. Ideally, include the title, author, and WHY you would suggest to anyone looking to further their performance psychology knowledge. After more than one individual has mentioned the same publication, we will consider moving it up to the official list above.