An Introduction To The Psychology For / Of Endurance Sports

There is something incredibly inspiring about watching runners finish a marathon. The mental toughness required to sustain such a performance despite fatigue over long distances and durations is undeniable. It can be the difference in seconds between elite athletes, or the defining factor in finishing your first ultra. In my eyes, it’s one of the most enchanting things about endurance sports and one of the main factors that motivated me to pursue a career in performance psychology.

Whether your goal is to run 100 miles, chase a sub 3-hour marathon, or finish your first Ironman triathlon, you know you’re going to suffer for a long time. You can expect discomfort and fatigue from pushing yourself, regardless of how physically well-prepared you are. In the context of endurance sports, that’s the point. This is what athletes sign up for, especially if they want to be able the sense of achievement that comes from realising their capability. Relative suffering from maximum effort is the same lived experience for both elite and recreational endurance athletes. One of the unique challenges for all athletes in endurance sports is developing the mindset to be able to suffer ‘better’, and for longer. 

Suffer ‘Better’, And For Longer

Extended feelings of physical exertion and associated discomfort are accompanied by a constant stream of helpful and unhelpful thoughts. Some might make us feel strong and capable in our efforts, others tell us to cut corners or simply give up. Becoming aware of the relationship between your thoughts and feelings and actions is the key to being able to get the most from our training processes and push ourselves on race day.

One of the core frameworks we like to borrow from in our approach to thoughts and feelings is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). This framework has recently gained a lot of traction in sport psychology and performance psychology. Unlike many traditional approaches, it is founded upon the idea that our thoughts and feelings do not need to impact our behaviour and therefore do not need to be changed or ‘fixed’. This does not mean that we simply ignore our unhelpful thoughts and discomfort. It’s actually quite the opposite. Observing thoughts for what they are, ‘just thoughts’, can help us to accept them and focus instead on the way we choose to engage with them.

Be Present And Aware

Before we can accept unhelpful thoughts and feelings of discomfort to our performance advantage, we need to become fully aware and familiar with them and the context. It is very difficult to be open to accepting something you are not noticing. Learning to openly observe our thoughts, bodily sensations and surroundings is a great way to stay focussed on the present moment. It also provides a strong foundation for developing effective mental strategies to engage with thoughts and feelings in helpful ways. Here are some strategies for increasing openness to our internal experiences and awareness for external factors in the context and environment.

Checking In

• Practice noticing sensations in different parts of your body as a type of routine. Check in with the pressure you feel under each foot, engagement of specific muscles with each movement, the feeling of breeze on your skin, and your breathing rhythm. It’s important that you simply notice these sensations and do not overlay any interpretation like ‘I must be tired’.

Checking Out

• Work through your senses one at a time to focus on the present environment and how you’re interacting with it. Note things you can see, hear, feel, smell and taste, focussing on smaller things you might normally miss. If you listen to music, this can be a great way to engage with it differently.

By Feel

• Leave your watch at home and experience your own levels of ‘perceived effort’. That is, what you can better observe about your bodily sensations and fatigue when you can not use your pace or heart rate as a cue to expectations like ‘this is an easy pace for me’.

Once Step At A Time

• One of the most confronting things in a long run or ride is the realisation early on of how far you still have to go. A common strategy used by many athletes is breaking the distance up into smaller sections by what you see around you – trees, traffic lights, lamp posts etc. Notice what these are, their characteristics, their physical relationship to you as you travel toward them.

Train of Thought

• Just as you notice your physical sensations, observe any thoughts that pop into your mind as occurrences. Note them for interest’s sake as ‘I’m having a thought that…’. There is no need to label them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Notice what you are physically experiencing when they occurred, and when they come and go.

Obviously these experiences will be highly personalised for every athlete. The most important part is not the content, but creating openness and awareness to the experience for exactly what it is in the present moment. Practicing mindfulness in this way can be challenging at first, and these types of strategies are best served alongside clarity for why you’re out on that long run in the first place.

Embrace Your ‘Why’

Consider this apparently paradoxical scenario. Ask anyone who identifies as an elite or recreational runner, if they enjoy running. Almost all will say something like ‘Absolutely, I love running!’. They might even try to recruit you if you’re not already a runner. Follow up with ‘doesn’t it hurt though?’. And almost all will agree. At face value, why would anyone love to participate in an activity that they expect will cause them to suffer? 

Anyone who has ever been for a run can probably relate to realising the above ridiculousness at some point while running – ‘Why on earth do I do this?’. Training for endurance events also requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline. The reason we persist is likely because it represents a core set of values – our ‘Why’.

For some, the ‘Why’ might be the feeling of challenging yourself, feeling of connectedness to the running community or as way to practice gratitude for mental health. There are no correct answers. Values are far more vague than goals – they can never be fully achieved. This is the beauty of them – values persist where goals might expire, and living your values is independent of your performances or race outcomes.

If you are in touch with your values and how you found yourself here, they become easier to draw on when required. When training is tedious, and it feels easier to just hit the snooze button. Acting consistently with our values may not always be enjoyable, but we recognise that it is important, so we follow through. It’s that 4am training session in the rain when ‘no-one is watching’. Being intentional about noticing, documenting and monitoring your values-driven processes can bring a greater sense of enjoyment and commitment to your training. 

You Don’t Have To Stop

From the ACT perspective in endurance sports, why fight unhelpful thoughts and feelings of discomfort if we can expect them and know they are a core component of the sport we love? The personal strength that is associated with conquering discomfort in endurance sports even forms part of the ‘Why’ for many athletes. It’s important to note here, I am referring to discomfort from maximum physical effort and fatigue – like running an interval at threshold, pushing your bike up a steep incline, or those last couple of miles. The approach I recommend for managing these experiences is to be open and accepting when we inevitably meet them, rather than trying to ‘fix’ them.

Putting cognitive effort into trying to change or suppress unhelpful thoughts such as ‘I’ve had enough’, or ‘I don’t think I can do this’ might cause more distress in the situation. It can also distract from putting effort into the essential physical processes that are simply turning the legs over. This can be illustrated in a silly way as, ‘Whatever you do, DO NOT think about an elephant, it will harm your performance’.

Of course, an elephant immediately pops into your mind, and trying to remove it dominates our attention. Shifting the focus away from trying to control or change thoughts and feelings creates room for more productive engagement with the situation and growth from living these experiences fully, and in line with our values above.

There are plenty of thoughts we have in a day that we do not act upon. These thoughts occur, and we simply do not do anything about them. Similarly, just because you may think you need to stop running, does not mean you have to if you recognise it as avoiding the discomfort that comes from effort.

In the familiar example above, a feeling of fatigue generates a thought – ‘I need to stop’.  If you’re a new runner, this might hit close to home. When these enter our awareness, we make a choice to act or not. In fact, if you did choose to stop, you have reinforced the very thought-behaviour pattern in question. We want to de-couple this relationship if we are to manage fatigue and continue to perform as close as we can to our physical capability.

For example, there is a subtle but very important difference between ‘I need to stop’ and ‘I’m having a thought that I need to stop’, as per our earlier example. The first is a command to action, the second is just noticing that a thought popped into your mind. This simple exercise in reframing unhelpful thoughts can help us to accept them for what they are – thoughts. When conceptualised this way, it is easier to adopt strategies for dropping them or letting them go along your way – like taking a weight out of a backpack every so often. By practicing accepting thoughts, we leave more room in our mind to trust our training and past commitment to our physical processes.

From a different point of view, this approach might also bring new meaning to infuriating statements from supporters and coaches such as ‘Just keep putting one foot in front of the other’, ‘You’re really holding your form’ or ‘You look great!’. These comments are about actions – behaviours they can see. You’re acting as if you were an athlete with no feelings of fatigue in that moment. At the end of the day, only actions get us to the finish line. Regardless of feelings of fatigue, discomfort, or any unhelpful thoughts, these comments celebrate the evidence of your ability to persist despite them.

Plan To Show Up

Athletes in any sport are quick to recognise the importance of a physical training plan to prepare for this. In a typical endurance training program, there are a mixture of session types targeting different physical performance aspects – long runs, interval sessions, targeted strength training etc. to build aerobic and anaerobic capacity, improve lactate clearance and Vo2 Max.

The different challenges that a diversity of physical training sessions present is the ideal opportunity to create a foundation for mental training plan to match. Like any training, mental training comes from the deliberate repetition of our actions, processes and routines. Failing to plan our mental training processes is leaving this essential component of endurance to chance. This may be as simple as going for a run with the commitment to practicing a specific mindfulness strategy (like the examples above). Here are some recommendations for both athletes and coaches.

Routines

• Creating a routine to document your observed experiences against the function or purpose of the session. Use this to reflect on what you might have noticed about the thoughts and sensations that occurred to you under different efforts and conditions. You might use these insights to build visualisations to prepare for difficult periods in a race with sessions of comparable challenge. For example, those designed to simulate the physical experience of fatigue in the latter stages of a race.

Alone Time

• If you typically complete your long run or ride socially, create opportunities to practice becoming more open and aware of your experience alone. This is especially important if you will be racing alone. 

Mental Flexibility

• If you are naturally drawn to either monitoring internal states or external awareness, plan sessions to engage deliberately in one or the other throughout. Mental flexibility from engaging with both approaches can be useful at different points in a race, or for different types of endurance events.

Summary

To summarise, endurance sport creates special opportunities for us to realise the great sense of personal strength that comes from conquering discomfort and suffering over an extended period. For many, this experience forms part of our ‘Why’ for engaging in these sports from the start. If we want to be prepared to ‘show up’ fully for this experience – including the discomfort, fatigue – it’s essential we take advantage of training opportunities to rehearse mentally. Thoughts and sensations do not need to interact with the repetitive sequence of actions that’s been the focus of our physical training. Embracing this perspective can bring more enjoyment to the process and the inspiring challenge of endurance.

If you are an endurance sports competitor or coach and would like to expand on these ideas then Morgan is available for private performance psychology coaching either in person in Brisbane (QLD, Australia) or via Webcam for those physically located elsewhere. The best way to start the process is by filling in this short enquiry form and mentioning your preference to work with “Morgan Spence”.

Are You Competent Or Just Confident?

“I just need to feel more confident, and I will be able to perform at my best. Can you help me to build confidence?”

This is one of the most common reasons why athletes and performers reach out to us at Condor Performance. This article will seek to debunk some common misconceptions about confidence. It may even help you to be more confident when you are performing! Probably not in the way that you would imagine.

Confidence Vs. Competence

Confidence is simply the belief in one’s ability to perform a particular behaviour or action. What confidence is not is some magical state that will guarantee you perform at your best. If only! Ultimately confidence is a feeling or a thought (or a combination) but it is definitely not an action. In other words, it is quite possible to lack confidence in something you are excellent at as well as be very confident in something that you suck at.

Competence, on the other hand, is defined as the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Competence is what we develop over time, at training and practice, through hard work and repetition. And in the long run, competence is far more useful from a performance perspective than confidence will ever be. Competence for the most part is permanent, reliable, and predictable. Confidence on the hand can be fleeting and unpredictable.

Consider The Following Scenario

You are an experienced driver and you are driving your car on your way to training. In this scenario, your ability to drive the car, to use the brakes and accelerator as you need, to indicate when you are turning, to change gears, and so forth is your competence. In other words, you are a competent driver. And so where does confidence fit in? You may be feeling confident about your driving ability, but you may not. Perhaps the weather conditions are challenging for driving. Maybe it is dark. Perhaps there is a lot of traffic, or the roads are unfamiliar. Regardless of the circumstances, you don’t need to feel confident in your ability to be able to drive the car in order to drive it well.

And the same is true when it comes to performance. 

Basically, consistent motor execution (i.e., actions) is possible regardless of how you are feeling. We don’t need to feel confident in order to be able to perform. Most athletes and other performers have experienced this at least once; the “Suprise Performance”. A situation where the performance was excellent despite all sorts of self-doubt. Sometimes our clients describe this as being surprised at their ability to perform so well whilst lacking confidence. As evidence-based sport psychologists and performance psychologists, this is not surprising to us in the slightest.

Hmm, Tell Me More …

As a performance psychologist, part of my approach to consulting is to focus on learning to accept our thoughts and feelings whilst still committing to our actions. It is an approach shared by several of my colleagues at Condor Performance, including our founder Gareth J. Mole. With this approach, I focus on using our actions to generate the thoughts and feelings that we want and not the other way around.

If we take the view that we need to feel confident in order to be able to perform, we are relying on our feelings and feelings to influence our actions. The pitfall of this approach is that we are (highly) unlikely to wake up one day suddenly filled with confidence and ready to perform. So, by holding onto the belief that confidence is the key to performance, we are actually likely to undermine our ability to perform in situations when we do not feel confident.

So, it is more effective to focus on our actions (i.e., what we are doing) and use these to generate our feelings. When it comes to confidence, we want to be focusing on actions that help to develop our confidence and let the feeling follow. These actions can include our body language and displaying confidence even if we’re not feeling confident (“Fake It Til You Feel It”) as well as our preparation, and performance routines. By focusing on our actions, what we are doing is focusing on our competence. Focus on actions first, feelings will follow. In other words, competence before confidence.

Not Convinced Yet, Then Read On …

Another reason why focusing on competence before confidence will help you to perform better is that competence can be measured easily and directly, whereas confidence can’t. If we take the driving scenario from above, we can measure our competence as a car driver with a driving test or the number of speeding fines we get. In order to be able to drive a car, we need to get a license. Passing a driving test is evidence of our competence as a driver, not our confidence. But how can we measure our level of confidence when it comes to driving? The answer is that we can’t, not objectively anyway. We may feel confident as a driver, and then we find ourselves in a challenging and unusual environment (such as driving at night on unfamiliar roads in the rain), and all of a sudden, our confidence has gone.  

Focusing on our competence, which we can easily and directly measure, helps to guide us in practice. We can focus on developing and refining our skills, and we can measure our progress.

Competence Before Confidence – Conclusion

One common misconception about elite athletes and performers is that we often overestimate their level of confidence. We assume because of how skilled and experienced they are that they must feel supreme confidence. But this is far from true. Some performers never feel real confidence. Some performers are so plagued by self-doubt and performance anxieties and insecurities that they cannot feel confident before and when they are performing. Yet they can still produce exceptional performance despite not feeling confident. How are they capable of this? Because they focus on competence instead confidence.

So to help feel more confident, focus on just getting better. How? Through the right amount of high-quality practice. After all, as detailed in this excellent article by my colleague Gareth, Practice Makes Permanent.

If this article has encouraged you to consider going about your performance from a more psychological point of view then get in touch and be guided by Harley (author) or one of our other psychologists. Even better complete one of the free, online Mental Toughness Questionnaire via this link here, and one of the crew will get back to you ASAP.

Before I began working with Condor Performance in 2019 as a performance psychologist (and soon to earn the title of sport psychologist) I was working with a mixture of athletes and the general public. This work leant towards traditional mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, grief and life stressors. In a traditional psychology setting, I am often asked what the best thing to do is to help with these sorts of issues. My answer, after the colloquial “laughter is the best medicine”, is always exercise. 

I take clients through what I call the basic five things to be taking control of to give them the best opportunity for optimal mental health.

These five areas are: 

• Diet – an appropriate and relatively healthy diet provides the nutrients and energy to deal with daily requirements 
• Water – adequate hydration of our bodies is vital for both physical and mental health. As I tell my clients our brains transmit their signals through electrical currents, these move more effectively through water than air
• Appropriate use of drugs – this means taking any medications or supplements required in the way that they were designed and instructed to do along with limiting or avoiding potentially harmful substances such as caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, and illegal substances
• Sleep – good sleep is a very close 2^nd to my top answer of exercise. In sleep, the body, and particularly the brain is restored, cleaned, and reset to face the next day
• Exercise – our bodies are designed to move and when we deny them this, they tend to crumble a little including our brains. Modern-day exercise psychology is all about not letting this happen.

Exercise Psychology Basics

It is well known that exercise has numerous physical benefits. For example, physical activity is known to reduce the risk of illnesses like heart and lung disease, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and obesity. It has also been shown to reduce the likelihood or onset of neurological illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Those who have had a stroke recover faster. It also improves or maintains muscle mass and bone strength. Exercise is a key component in maintaining or losing weight which leads to a longer life expectancy and likely higher quality of that longer life. 

What is sometimes overlooked is the value of exercise to the brain directly, and to mood and wellbeing associated with this. Studies of the impact of exercise on the brain have found that it improves blood circulation in the brain which helps clarity of thought. It increases the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain primarily responsible for memory. It also improves the connections within nerve cells in the brain improving function and protecting against disease. 

When we exercise the brain releases feel-good chemicals such as endorphins and serotonin. Many of us have heard of “runners’ high” which is this process, but the benefits are not only felt by those who run great distances. Just getting a sweat up will help the brain produce and release more of these chemicals.

The Right Amount of Exercise

When recommendations are made for how much exercise we should be getting it is just 30 minutes per day for five days a week. This does not need to be gut-busting. It does not have to come in one block of 30 minutes and can be broken down into two or three sessions of 10-15 minutes each. 

I mentioned earlier that enough good quality sleep is my 2^nd best action for better mental health, and another benefit of exercise is the strong link between increased exercise and improved quality of sleep. The actions of getting a sweat up through the day help the body feel tired and allow it to more effectively regulate itself to have a sleep period and an active period through the day rather than being confused over which is supposed to be the active one. 

One of the most frustrating things that often happens when clients struggle with depression (for example) is that it can rob them of motivation and our belief that they can achieve anything in life. Regular exercise decreases stress hormones which has a beneficial impact on dealing with life stressors and anxiety. When they begin doing some exercise, even one session a week, they begin to develop a sense of achievement and they begin to break the inertia hold of being sedentary. 

I hear clients say they are waiting for some motivation to hit them, but motivation needs to be created it does not just arrive. But like a snowball, once they take one step and do one session it makes the next easier to achieve and so on. As they continue, they can see the benefits for themselves. They might start receiving comments from friends or family on their progress and their self-esteem rises. For some it is the thrill of looser clothing or making it all the way around the block without stopping. The goals do not need to be massive, and neither do the results. The sense of empowerment for a client to see that they can take some charge over their life can be truly life-changing. 

A Pathway To Social Connections

Exercise can be done in isolation, and with the world currently dealing with pandemics and lockdowns this is both relevant and necessary, but it can also provide a pathway to social connections. This is another important component of strong mental health. Whether walking at the local park and simply seeing others doing the same, or joining a community such as weekly park runs, or getting involved with a team sport. When we exercise with others we can get, and provide, motivation and encouragement from them to simply show up when we are not feeling like it. Teams allow us to work on social skills and leadership skills that are transferable to all aspects of life. 

While exercise psychology is not a focus of Condor Performance, and we would expect our clients are already doing much more than the minimum recommendations each week, many of the skills we work on with clients are transferrable. Planning and setting appropriate structured and incremental goals with clients gives the greatest chance of achieving an end goal or dream. Assisting them to find their motivation and focus assists them to break the inertia of stillness. The accountability of someone who is checking in with them regularly and the support through setbacks allows them to know they are not alone. 

In writing this we would hope that even if it does not apply to you, it is something that you might be able to use to start a discussion with family or friends that you have seen struggling with their mental health and point them in the direction of a local psychologist to assist with getting them back in better mental, and physical, shape. 

In early 2019 I wrote the better part of a book without a title. I felt it necessary to get down on paper some of the key mental strategies that we, at Condor Performance, use on a daily basis as a sport and performance psychologists. I’m not sure if I ever intended it to be published or not. So, rather than try and finish it (below is basically the first draft) and take it to publishers I thought I would simply add it here to the blog section of our website. For the time being, I am calling this e-Book The Performance Mindset.

Typo Warning: The majority of the below text was written using voice to text software. Although it has been proofread once it has not been professionally checked and therefore is very likely to contain a litany of typographical errors. These typos will in no way impact on the concepts I’m trying to communicate however they will bother both perfectionists and grammar-police alike.

Part One

In the world of competitive sport, the term ‘performance’ is used a lot. In my experience as an Applied Sport Psychologist who has been working at the coalface of elite sport since 2005, it is generally used more in reference to competitions than training.

For example, comments like ‘that was a great performance today’ and ‘I hope I perform well on the weekend’ are much more commonplace than ‘regular mindfulness practice is a key ingredient to the preparation side of performance’ and ‘my training performance has been very consistent for some time now’ for example. 

This bias has resulted in some confusion about the true definition of performance. Given the title of this book, is worth addressing this from the very start. Quite simply, performance means ‘an extended period of preparation interspersed by opportunities to execute what has been practised under the pressure of official events’.

Performance Equals …

Performance = Preparation then Competition the Preparation then Competition then Preparation and so on.

So although we could attempt to describe our Preparation and Competition separately it would be difficult and counterproductive to try and label our ‘performance’. Using our definition it would be impossible to know which aspects of performance you were referring to. Furthermore whatever word you decided to use (e.g. good or disappointing) would be far too simple to describe the vast range of variables of either side of performance.

Did you mean that your preparation was great but that you failed to execute under the pressure of the competition? Or was it the other way around? Was the work you did in the lead-up poor but you managed to do well come game day?

With this in mind, the first bit of psychological advice that I am going to give you (first of many) is to mentally separate the preparation side of performance from the competition side.

So, as performance psychologists, we help ‘performers’ improve by addressing both sides of their performance. We help them optimise their preparation directly and depending on what they do this preparation will often go by many other names. Training, rehearsals, practice, rehab, sessions, drills, pre-season, run-throughs, effort, process(es) and workouts are amongst the most used in my experience.

More Than Semantics

We also assist directly with the competition side of performance. Again, this often masquerades as other terms such as matches, rounds, races, trials, bouts, games, tests, events, exams, assessments, heats, contests and fights – for example.

Due to the mostly 1-on-1 nature of what we do, we can easily switch between focusing on the client’s preparation and their competitions making sure never to confuse one with the other. This, despite the fact that they are obviously related to one another. But the cause and effect nature of the relationship is vastly exaggerated by many to their detriment.

In other words, although it would be reasonable to suggest that an extended period of solid preparation can assist with favourable results in a particular sporting contest it would be completely wrong to say (as many do) that the former caused the latter.

What really helps me not to fall into this all-too-common booby trap is to actually avoid using the word performance altogether. Instead, I would advise using Preparation when talking about Preparation and Competition when referring to any and all types of Competition – from heats to rounds.

Regardless of your role within the wonderful world of sport, I would advise you to start doing the same from this point forward.

Mentally Seperate Preparation from Competition

The principal reason (motivation) for separating Preparation from Competition is down to the fact that each benefit from having a different mindset. In fact, so different are these mindsets for the two sides of performance they could almost be regarded as opposites.

We will first delve into the preferred mindset for competitive situations due to the fact that it can be addressed relatively quickly. After this, and for the remainder of this e-book, we’ll focus on helping you create the best possible mindset for preparation – whether it be your own or that of those you coach.

The Ideal Mindset for Competition

The Relaxed Competition Mindset

“I’ve learned over the years that if you start thinking about the race, it stresses you out a little bit. I just try to relax and think about video games, what I’m gonna do after the race, what I’m gonna do just to chill. Stuff like that to relax a little before the race .”

Usain Bolt

As this e-book is a guide I don’t want to spent too much time on the ‘why’ as I’d rather focus on the ‘what, when and how’. Having said that a bit of context can be beneficial. So there are two ‘why’ questions on the table. Firstly, ‘why’ is the default emotion of most sporting individuals and teams to be anything other than relaxed in the lead up to competitions – either intentionally or by accident? Secondly, why does aiming to be relaxed work so well? What’s the science behind the effectiveness of this counterintuitive mindset?

The answer to the first question could be summed up by something one of my coaching clients (a client who is a high-level rowing coach) repeated back to me during a session via Skype many years ago. She said, “they don’t hand out Olympics medals for great training sessions, do they”? That pretty much sums it up. 

Same, Same But Different

Competitive sport is like almost no other human pursuit in terms of how unfairly we judge it. Not only do we easily forgot about the huge amount of effort than went into the preparation for sporting competitions but we tend to zoom in on ‘number of wins’ as being the most meaningful of all performance indicators.

Can you imagine what it would be like to spend thousands of hours preparing for something over four years and the entire world determining your success by your finishing position in an event that lasted a few minutes (or less)? Now imagine that the entire world is watching you during these few minutes despite not even knowing your name before they switched on the television. 

Even sports whereby competitive opportunities are more frequent and take hours rather than minutes – for example, professional soccer – tend to default to a ‘pathological obsession over results and outcomes’.

Win At All Cost

‘The Win At All Cost’ attitude is still regarded as a ‘badge of honour’ in many circles. This, despite the fact that most of us saw what that did to Lance Armstrong.

At the time of writing the 2018/19 edition of the English Premier League just came to end with Liverpool Football Club finishing a single point behind the eventual champions Manchester City. Liverpool smashed many of their club records and a number for the competition itself but the fact that their 97 points would have won every single edition of the English Premier League except one is regarded as secondary – even irrelevant – compared to the fact they finished as runners-up.

Can you imagine having the best year of your life by far – professionally – and yet still be considered a failure in some circles due to the fact that you got second place in the annual ‘salesman of the year’ award?

Although I am optimistic that over time the culture of elite sport will improve and the concept of ‘winning is everything’ will slowly be phased out (due in part to books like this) the best short and medium-term approach for those not wanting to get beaten down by the highly results dominated environment they find themselves in is to put all their energy into changing their mindset.

But before that, what about the science behind why prioritising relaxation just before and at certain points during competitions has such a positive impact – sometimes overnight?

Part Two

The Law of Reverse Effect

The Law of Reverse Effect in non-psychobabble terms means that for most automated motor skills in naturally ‘high stakes situations’ the less we try the easier they become.

Another way to understand The Law of Reverse Effect is to understand and accept that automatic processes – such as kicking a ball, running, catching, throwing, jumping, pulling a trigger  – often experience a ‘reverse effect’ whereby “the more you think about them” the worse they end up.

It’s easiest to understand The Law of Reverse Effect via everyday situations. Most people can relate to this if they have been subject to getting a severe case of the giggles. The harder you try not to giggle (maybe due to a warning from the teacher, coach or parent) the harder it is not to giggle. This often results in uncontrollable laugher in situations where it’s obvious that this is not acceptable behaviour. The Law of Reverse Effect would suggest the most effective remedy would be to just relax and cease trying not to giggle so much! 

How many learner drivers have failed their driving test(s) not because they couldn’t drive but because they were stressed to the eyeballs before and during their test(s)? What about the fact that the harder you try to fall asleep the harder it becomes!

Motor Skills

The reason why The Law of Reverse Effect is particularly relevant to sport and therefore warrants such prominence here is due to the high motor skill nature of sports. The amount of human movement a professional baseballer will do, say compared with a professional politician, can’t be ignored.

As human movements become more natural (mainly due to repetition but genetics plays its part) they move from the very conscious part of the brain (the frontal lobe – above your eyes) to a subconscious area called the Basal Ganglia – which is located more towards the middle of the brain closer to the top of the brain stem. When this starts to happen the movements are becoming automated which is where the term ‘muscle memory’ comes from. Due to the fact that we can learn to do pretty much any complex set of movements on ‘autopilot’, it feels like the muscles involved in that set of movements have actually remembered how to perform the task. In fact, it’s the Basal Ganglia that’s doing all the work.

This is why a chicken will run around for few a minutes after having its head chopped off. The Basal Ganglia of a chicken is found below the neckline and therefore will often remain in place and functioning after decapitation. Running for the chicken has become an automatic process and therefore it’s able to do so even after its head has been removed – albeit only for a few minutes until it dies from loss of blood.

Fine Motor Skills More Impacted By Stress

If the motor skills are fine or complex in nature then they are even more vulnerable to stress. By fine we mean smaller movements such as throwing a dart or spinning a cricket ball with just our fingers. By complex we mean anything that is very different from what we learn to do by just being a human being. For example, running would be regarded as a simple motor skill due to the fact that most of us do this a lot as children. On the other hand, all the technical requirements of golf – such as attempting a bunker shot without allowing the club to touch the sand before the swing – would be seen in most circles as unnatural and therefore complex.

Finally, the gains of the Relaxed Competition Mindset are related to how competent the athlete is. This makes complete sense. For a novice (beginner) rower taking part in his / her first few regattas a certain amount of mental reminding might be helpful. But as the athlete becomes more and more proficient (as displayed in training) and the “autopilot” takes over thinking about the skill is no longer required or desirable.

Despite the fact that possibly the most successful individual athlete of the last 20 years – Usain Bolt – religiously adopted a Relaxed Competition Mindset – there is still very little published evidence related to the effectiveness of this method.

Luckily, not all scientific data is published in peer-reviewed journal articles. My colleagues and I at Condor Performance have been encouraging athletes and sporting coaches to adopt this philosophy for over ten years now and the feedback has ranged from small effect to “game-changer” with the occasional ‘magic bullet’. These are real athletes and coaches paying real money looking for real mental improvements and I am still waiting for the day that one of them says to me “sorry, I was far too relaxed before then competition”.

But not everyone that I mentioned The Relaxed Competition Mindset to ‘got it’ straight away. Athletes and coaches from high decision making sports often pointed out that despite Usain Bolt’s achievements his chosen sport of sprinting is very light in decision making. Is the Relaxed Competition Mindset just as applicable for high decision making sports – such as cricket, tennis and most of the traditional team sports?

The Answer Is Yes

Yes, because guess where decision making ends up after it’s been rehearsed a few hundred times? That’s right – the basal ganglia. This is why a squash player can often make excellent split-second decisions – such as to play a drop shot. As you will find out later in this guide when we put the spotlight on tactics a combination of simplifying our decisions (reducing the number of choices) and rehearsing them will allow decision making to become just as automatic as running is for a headless chicken.

Another hesitation to mimic Usain Bolt’s pre-race preferences often come from the concern that the actions of a Relaxed Competition Mindset might often look – to the untrained eye – like a lack of interest or professionalism or desire to do well. One only needs to look at the antics of Mr Bolt in the moments before some of this biggest races to empathise with this concern. Moments prior to the 100m final of the 2012 Olympic Games he gives one of the officials a fist pump.

Looking relaxed and being relaxed are not one and the same of course. What this means is it’s entirely possible for you to develop a Relaxed Competition Mindset without anyone suspecting you’ve changed a thing. Which brings is nicely to the final part of this chapter – how to create one.

How To Develop An RCM

By far the most effective way to actually have a Relaxed Competition Mindset whilst competing is simply to strive for one. If I were your coach I’d basically be asking you to set that (trying to relax) as the main aim of your completive situations. Furthermore, striving (or aiming) to be relaxed is far more important than actually being relaxed.

Being relaxed is an outcome (result) and therefore not something we can guarantee. However, having the intention of being calm and having that as one of the ‘main aims’ of high-pressure assessment situations is something we have a lot of influence over. This frees us from the awkward situation where we know that being relaxed is important but we just can’t get anywhere close to feeling that way.

I have been lucky enough to be involved with a number of elite athletes who have shown remarkable gains by striving to be relaxed but only every showing small reductions in the actual amount of stress experienced in the lead up to competitions.

Part Three

The Ideal Mindset for Preparation

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of true preparation we need to understand what this practice time is designed to do. To do this I will introduce you to an analogy that is very dear to my heart. Why? Well, in part because I came up with it and in part because I use it with 100% of my sporting clients.

The analogy is that you are like a four-engined aircraft with five major “components”. Four of these components are the four engines themselves with the other component being ‘the rest of the aeroplane’ or ‘main body and wings’. 

The four engines represent what could be described as the traditional desirables of sports science; physical, technical, mental and tactical superiority. The rest of the aeroplane symbolises everything else that could be targeted for either improvement or maintenance in order to either directly or indirectly assist with our dreams and goals.

We could call these five major components Physical Capabilities, Technical Consistency, Mental Toughness, Tactical Wisdom and Personal Thriving.

Not only does this analogy include Personal Thriving as a key part of trying to be ‘optimal’ but it actually suggests that it might be the most important major component of all. In other words, there is not a lot of point in having four tip-top engines attached to an aircraft that is falling apart. It would make complete sense that if this were the case then the main body, wings and tail of the aircraft would get prioritised for improvement first. Although this may seem obvious in the aeronautical industry it certainly isn’t in competitive sport and other performance industries. 

Secondly, the professionals who typically look after and maintain fleets of aeroplanes are aeronautical engineers. I believe we could learn a lot about the way in which they go about their work. Actual aeronautical engineers have a mindset (due mainly to their training) that prevention is much better than trying to fix something after it has failed. In other words, they don’t sit around the hanger eating doughnuts waiting for one of the keys parts of their aeroplanes to blow up before trying to improve them. 

They are constantly checking all aspects of all of the aeroplanes they’re responsible for. Put this ‘aeronautical engineer mindset’ into the head of a young athlete then instead of waiting for an injury to happen, they start to include stretching in their weekly routines as a regular preventative measure.

Put this ‘aeronautical engineer mindset’ into a Head Coach then she quickly works out that it’s better not to assume that everything is fine, Instead go and measure it in some way. Furthermore, she understands that she is her own aeroplane and every single one of her athletes is their own plane too.

Finally, this analogy allows us to more easily see how “outcomes” (components and subcomponents) and “processes” (methods and tools) work together and why focusing more on the latter than the former is a ‘no brainer’.

Subcomponents

Now each of the five major components has a number of subcomponents that we could target for either improvement or maintenance. Of course, we could also choose not to target them.

For example, using Physical Capabilities as a quick example we might choose to target cardiovascular fitness for improvement, flexibility for maintenance and muscle strength might remain un-targeted for the time being.

Then, each of the subcomponents will have a set of “methods” that would be handy for just these purposes. Some of these methods will require some tools, whilst others will not. Some methods will have a definite impact on the associated subcomponent whilst others will only have a probable benefit. Then there are methods that do nothing for the subcomponent and even some that actually cause damage.

For example, if targeting cardiovascular fitness then two of the methods might be skipping and running whereby the skipping need a tool (skipping rope) and running don’t (you don’t need running shoes to run). Both have an obvious and direct impact on cardio fitness.

In other words, your plane has 5 major components, dozens of subcomponents and potentially hundreds of method and tools for ensuring your vessel is in the best possible condition and can fly as far as possible.  

Pomfret’s Paradox and Barracosa’s Law 

Pomfret’s Paradox refers to the fact that there is an unlimited number of ways to prepare but a finite amount of time to do so. With the analogy of the plane in mind by the time you have come up with all the many methods that can be used across the subcomponents, there will be far too many to squeeze into your week.

In my work as a sport psychologist, I work with many athletes of sports that can’t be done as a source of income. For example, most of the Olympic sports such as rowing and shooting. Many of these athletes have full-time jobs and families. Therefore the amount of preparation time they get during the week can be limited. Yet not once have I ever asked one of these clients to increase their preparation time. In fact, I’m more likely to suggest they decrease their overall training time.

This is due to Barracosa’s Law, sometimes called the Q10 x Q10 Principle.

Barracosa’s Law refers to the fact that the quantity and quality of preparation are separate concepts. It translates into a crucial mental skill as it allows the performer to mentally separate the amount of training from the effectiveness. All too often in high-performance situations, improvements are sought by trying to increase quantity whilst either ignoring or actually decreasing quality.

The first Q is for the quantity of preparation. Quantity is measured in units with the most common in sporting settings being minutes, hours, reps (repetitions), millimetres, grams and attempts. The ideal amount of quantity is somewhere in the middle with too many (much) and too few to be avoided.

Not for the last time, I will use examples away from sport to get my point across. In dental hygiene, for example, brushing one’s teeth once a week would be a Q1 (too infrequent), brushing them 10 times a day would be a Q3 (too often) but brushing them twice a day would be Q10 (also known as the sweet spot). In other words, a low quantity score occurs when either we are overdoing or undergoing it.

The second Q represents the other major element to preparation and that’s quality. Quality is very different from quantity due to the fact that it’s not possible to have something that is too high in quality. So for quality, a high score of 7, 8, 9 or 10 suggests really beneficial actions are taking place whereas below 4 implies what is being done during that time is not that effective.

Knowing the best way to brush your teeth and having access to the best possible toothbrush and toothpaste would be a 10. Inferior brushing techniques and poor quality toothpaste would lower this number even if the brushing was still taking place twice a day.

Another analogy to explain how quality and quantity really work is to think of water. There is not much to celebrate if you access to unlimited water but that water is contaminated. Likewise, although having access to the pristine waters of the New Zealand mountains might be nice it wouldn’t mean much if you only had a couple of litres that you brought down yourself from a hike you did years back. 

So the aim of preparation (all kinds) is to try and help all of the areas that we are working towards a score of 100 (10 x 10). To ensure we’re doing the right amounts of the highest possible practice across all the areas that are important to us. 

An extension of Barracosa’s Law is to actually do the maths. If you feel this would be of some benefit to you or your athletes. For example, if your current physical regime means that you attend a 90-minute hot yoga class once a month you might decide that in terms of quality this is a 9 / 10 activity. However, as you’d prefer to do it weekly then you give it a 4 / 10 for quantity. As 4 x 9 is 36 then you might like to think of you current physical choices are operating at 36% or 36 out of a possible 100.

It makes a lot more sense (to me at least) that we multiple the Qs instead of adding them together – to create a maximum of 100 instead of 20. The reason being is that although it’s useful to be able to mentally separate the quantity of quality of our preparation the fact is that whilst you’re actually doing that 10 minutes HIT activity the two sides are working together with more of a multiplication effect.

If you are not sure if doing the actual maths is going to help or hinder you then I would suggest giving it a go first and deciding later. They are just numbers after all – they can’t really hurt you. 

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Part Four

Time To Get To Work

I will be spending the rest of this e-book going through each of the five major components. In doing so I will try clarify what the subcomponents are and the various method and tools that exist for each. The order I will be going through is as follows:

PC, TC, PT, MT and TW

I want to start with PC (Physical Capabilities) because it’s the most tangible of the components. Therefore it will be the ideal place to set the tone for how we then approach some of the less tangible ones later on.

I am mindful as I write this section that I am not a qualified expert in three of the five components (physical, technical and tactical). So I need to be somewhat careful about how much advice I give compared with Mental Toughness and Personal Thriving which fit completely with my formal credentials and experience as a performance psychologist.

But here is my justification for not entirely skipping over these three components entirely. Everything that humans do is partially psychological in nature. 

Although I am not a qualified dentist I would happily take on any qualified dental expert in getting – for example – people to floss more often due to my knowledge of motivation and what is required to form genuine habits. Although I am not a qualified physiotherapist my knowledge and experience around the mental impacts and solutions to injuries (physical setbacks) allows me to confidentially and without apologies contribute to the Physical Preparation of athletes. You get the picture.

Physical Capabilities Being Targeted By Physical Preparation

For each part of the Preparation Plane there will be a number of subcomponents that could be targeted for either improvement or maintenance. For each of these there will be potentially millions of methods that help us do just that. To help us not get overwhelmed by the almost endless number of methods and tools for each of the subcomponents then we can – and will – stick to mostly the methods that we know definitely work. 

When applied to the first engine of the Preparation Plane – Physical Capabilities Being Targeted By Physical Activities – it might look something like this:

Physical Activities >> Subcomponents  vv	Increasing Heart Rate on purpose via HM	Stretching on purpose	Resisting on purpose	Balancing on purpose
Cardio	Definitely	Probably	Probably	Maybe
Flexibility	Maybe	Definitely	Maybe	Probably
Strength	Probably	Probably	Definitely	Maybe
Balance	Maybe	Probably	Probably	Definitely

By zooming in only on the “definitely” above we can quite easily start to create some lists of specific method and tools that will more than likely improve or maintain each of the four subcomponents of Physical Capabilities if they are done regularly and on purpose.

Subcomponents	Methods	Useful Tools	Examples
Cardio	Increasing Heart Rate on purpose via HM	skipping rope	running, skipping
Flexibility	Stretching on purpose		stretching
Strength	Resisting on purpose	heavy things	weight training
Balance	Resisting on purpose	balance board	balancing

You’ll notice that the word ‘on purpose’ appears alongside each of the Physical Preparation subcomponents. This is important. Intentionality (being deliberate or purposive) is one of the easiest ways to boost the effectiveness of the any activity (more sophisticated way to follow). 

It is particularly important for the ‘increasing Heart Rate’ subcomponent as there are many occasions where one’s HR will increase that we would not want to count towards as physical preparation – such as when we get nervous or consume too much caffeine.

Have we left out anything? 

Well I invite the exercise physiologists reading this book to contact me if they think I have but I am quietly confident that the four subcomponents above cover most if it.

Let’s put it to the test. 

What about speed? 

The kind that might help you run 100 meters as fast as possible. Correct me if I am wrong but all four physical preparation subcomponents will help you become faster at sprinting. The precise way in which they are combined may well be difference for a middle distance runner, long distance runner or sprinter but that can be addressed via the amount of time you spend on each one. Again, I am no expert here but I am guessing a sprinter will want to spend a lot more time on upper body muscle development that his Marathon running counterpart.

What about injuries?

Surely the kinds of exercises that a physiotherapist might ask us to do are vastly different from these four simple subcomponents? I spend a lot of time with injured athletes and their rehabilitation programs tend to always be made up of lots of stretching, weights, cardio and balancing activities simply adapted to gently improve the physical condition in a way that doesn’t risk further injury.

In other words the subcomponents are identical for injured and uninjured athletes – what might be different are the methods and the tools.

In fact, you could argue that terms such as ‘injury’ are unhelpful as they direct the mind towards the problem rather than the solution. With the exception of unexpected career ending injuries the ideal mindset for injuries athletes is simply to adjust their physical preparation accordingly. 

For example, before a ligament injury in the knee (such as an anterior cruciate ligament or ‘ACL’) a squash player might have been doing 2 x 30 minute of “shuttle runs” per week. After the ACL and with some advice from a qualified physiotherapist, she changes this to 2 x 30 minute of “shuttle walks” instead. The quantity has remained the same and the quality is also still very high as it refers more of a ‘best possible’ way of thinking as opposed to a ‘best ever’ one. More about quality and quantity later – what about the rest of the Preparation Plane.

Part Five

Technical Consistency Being Targeted By Technical Preparation

The technical aspects of sport are all about biomechanics or the science related to preferred body movements, positions and postures. And although this engine is by far the most sports-specific – meaning that the subcomponents will vary the most between sports (and even different positions within the same sport) – there are still some general rules that we can follow.

First and foremost we need to acknowledge that making technical changes will be disruptive to our ability to then automatically repeat the new version of the technique. Bigger and more frequent changes will be particularly destabilising.

This presents us with yet another conundrum. How we safely navigate the highly technical nature of sport where, for example, some codes refer to the guy in charge of everything as the Technical Director?

The answer is that we need to separate the two sides of Technical Preparation into the “adjustment” part and the “consolidation” part. Both count as Technical Preparation but – like stretching and running – they have very different purposes.

Time spent on technical adjustments will generally centre around “working out what the best technique” is. This can be done with a coach or without one. Think about those golf magazines articles full of photos with lines all over them. It would be normal for this time to have a lot of second-guessing, experimenting, tinkering and backflipping.

In tennis, this might be seeing what it feels like for your default backhand to become two-handed rather the one-handed (or vice versa). In ice hockey, this could include varying the distance between your hands on the stick as you attempt a slap shot.

Time spent on technical consolidation is the pure unadulterated repetition of the movements that have now been “locked away” after whatever time on adjustments was required.

The amount of time that you dedicate to each of the two types of technical consistency will depend mostly on your current abilities and how soon your next competition is.

Let me explain …

For novice (beginner) athletes you’d expect a healthy dose of tinkering as they become comfortable with the basic techniques of their new sport. As the athletes improve the number of technical adjustments should decline to the point where it would want to be virtually absent from the weekly training of an elite performer.

The opposite, of course, would apply for technical consolidation whereby you’d expect elite athletes to spend far more time trying to commit their movements to muscle memory compared with a beginner.

I for one believe that far too much time is typically spent on both these sides of technical preparation. Remember, it’s only one of the four engines.

Time spent on technical adjustments should take place as far from competitions as possible. A month before is much better than a week before but not as good as four months before.

If, like most athletes, you have an “off-season” then do all of your technical adjustings in one big go during the early part of your offseason. Then don’t even think about trying to squeeze in any more technical changes before the next offseason – 12 months later. 

This hard and fast rule can be relaxed somewhat for novice and younger athletes but the same principles apply to everyone. Change (if you must), consolidate, consolidate, consolidate and then compete. For a younger athlete this might mean the change happens on Monday (after feedback from the coach), this new technique is practised on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday after the game on Saturday. In other words no technical changes after Monday.

They can then spend the rest of their time on the only activity that counts as Technical Preparation – which is the repetition of these “locked-in” body positions/movements until they feel as natural as possible.

Before moving on to the next Component it is important to spend a little time addressing the notion of the perfect technique.

Biomechanists look away now. There is no such thing. The perfect technique is a bit like the Loch Ness Monster. It’s a myth. Just because people talk about it and you can buy mugs with a picture of “it” on doesn’t make it real.

Entire sporting careers have been squandered by athletes chasing a perfect technique when little did they know that the way they were doing it’ when they there thirteen was probably fine but just lacked a bunch of repetition.

The world of elite sports is full of examples of high achieving athletes whose techniques are or were regarded as suspect or at least unconventional.

How many PGA tour events have you won David and Gary?

Usain Bolt and Michael Johnson are also great examples of athletes who achieved greatness with techniques that were heavily criticised – before they started to win stuff. Bolt sprinted with an “uneven side” and Johnson hardly moved is arms – both counter to what the text books say.  

Technical Practice and The Q10 x Q10 Principle

Remember that Barracosa’s Law, above, applies to all forms of preparation. It strongly encourages us to question the quality of all of our practice. What this basically means is that on occasions the best way to ensure the maximum possible quality of our technical practice is to know what type of technical practice is required at this time. Are you changing something just for the sake of it or are you sure this technical change is required? Are you repeating a new movement due to having recently changed it or are you just going through the motions because it feels good?

One thing is for sure though unless you are a beginner athlete you probably need less quantity of technical practice than you are currently undertaking.

Part Six

Tactical Wisdom being targeted by Tactical Preparation

Ok, so we have done the below the neck stuff – it’s now time to move to the components where the brain is really in charge.

As was the case with technical preparation, the precise nature of your tactical preparation is really going to depend on your particular sport (or sports) as well as your designated role (or roles). But as was the case with both technical and physical previously there are still some universal guidelines that could be outlined that apply to 100% of athletes and coaches. 

But before we do that let’s really clarify what we mean by the tactical side of sport. In my experience, it’s very frequently misunderstood and confused with other areas.

Being ‘tactically wise’ means that the athlete consistently makes the best possible decision given the circumstances whilst competing. In order words Tactical Preparation is all about various training exercises aimed at helping athletes make better ‘in competition’ decisions and choices. What this means is that we can exclude other types of decisions from this particular engine of the Preparation Plane. Such as the decision to specialise as a defender or midfielder or the choice about whether to stay for another drink or head home now.

Don’t get me wrong, these are also decisions and of course they all impact on performance they just belong to a different part of the plane.

Introducing Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law – named after British psychologist William Hick – proved that both decision-making speed and accuracy were most related to the number of possible options to choose from. In other words, increase the number of perceived options for a person to choose and watch how the decision making time and number of poor selections increases. 

Decreasing the number of items available to choose from in “the buffet” of the brain is one of the most effective ways to improve both decisions making speed (far more important in some sports, say squash, than others such as golf) and decision making accuracy (actually picking the right option).

And it not the actual number of choices that matters it’s the number of perceived choices. In other words, it’s the number of options that the decision-maker is aware of rather than the total that exists. From a psychology of performance point of view, this is a very bid deal.

Of course, once the number of perceived choices across a range of situations has been reduced then decision-making practice drills need to be introduced that genuinely expose the athletes to actually having to make these decisions in a way that would be similar – or harder – than during competition.

In many ways, this is exactly the same scenario that we faced for technical preparation. The process of deciding ahead of time the smaller workable number of choices is much like Technical Adjustment in that this wants to be done infrequently and ideally during the offseason. We could call the tactical equivalent ‘tactical clarification’.

The decision making drills that occur after this and could (should) by part of weekly training at any time of year might be called Tactical Automation – a process that is very similar in it’s intent to Technical Consolidation.

Tactical Clarification

If we interpret Hick’s Law to the extreme then the aim would be to simply reduce the number of decision making options to as few as possible with ‘two’ being the ideal, three being not quite as good but better than four etc.

To make sure you’re following you might like to take a minute to consider why the smallest number of decision making options is two and not one or zero.

Did you get it?

Any action which only has a single option (for example, using a putter when your ball is on the putting green) doesn’t need to be practiced from a decision making point of view.

Whilst we are alive then it’s not possible for an action to have less than one option. In other words zero decision making possibilities is really someone that belongs to the forth dimension.

It may often feel like no decisions are being made – and it’s the job of tactical automation to make you feel that way – but unless you’re one of those chickens that has had its head chopped off – there is a decision making aspect to everything we do.

One of the aims of this guide is to help you manage this unavoidable truth.

If Blank Then Blank Scenarios

First, we need to see if we can predict some of your competitive decision-making scenarios. Then, can we minimise the number of choice options to three of four without running the risk of knowing what is going on around us?

As mentioned before the decision-making requirements can vary a lot not only from sport to sport (sprinting low to gridiron high) but also within each sports depending on your role (quarterback very high, everyone else lower).

I have always found that creating simple If Blank Then Blank Scenarios the best way to go about Tactical Clarification. This is one of the ways of clarifying some of the most intense decision making situations imaginable (for example, those that would exist in the emergency department of a hospital) so let’s assume it’s sufficient for our purposes.

I have resisted the temptation thus far to use certain sports in detail to explain various concepts but this part of the guide would really suffer without some.

Tennis Examples

If my opponent is at the net and in the middle then go for a lob shot rather than a passing shot …

If the wind is assisting my serve then use more slices serves …

Soccer Examples

If we lose the ball in our attacking half then one forward drops back to defend …

If we are leading on the scoreboard with 10 minutes to play then midfield just tried to keep hold of the ball …

Once these scenarios have been clarified then of course it’s time to really learn them. I would suggest starting by learning them theoretically. Get your friend to ask you ‘what would you do if lost the ball in your attacking half’ for example? Afterwards, you can then move to a more applied type of tactical practice. By this, I mean to practice “on-field” situations that have been manipulated to force you to have to make the very decisions you have previously clarified. If you get them wrong in practice, keeping trying until you don’t.

Part Seven (Just Added)

Mental Toughness, Health and Wellbeing

Okay, we are now getting to the part that we really know a lot about. There are now two parts of the plane remaining; sporting/performance mental toughness and overall health and wellbeing. Mental Toughness is the fourth and final of the engines. In this way, we would benefit from treating it like the previous three. For these, in case you’d benefit from a quick reminder, the engine itself needs to be broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Then, each of these mini-outcomes could have a series of processes aimed at their improvement or maintenance.

This suggests that that very first task here is to break down mental toughness for sport / performance into smaller chunks.

My colleagues and I at Condor Performance did this many years ago. We looked at all the dozens of definitions of mental toughness that were available at the time both from and outside of the science. But few attempted to subcategorise the concept. Yet, by looking at the many definitions you can quickly see what these subcomponents are.

And So Metuf Was Born

Metuf is the word created by taking the first letter of what we consider “The Big Five” subcomponents of sporting/performance mental toughness:

M for Motivation

E for Emotions

T for Thoughts

U for Unity

F for Focus

I expected, over the years to have to add one or two new subcomponents but this had never been required. For example, most of the other mental desirables are either synonyms of one of these five are a combination of them. For example, although some might say that attention and concentration are different from focus we’d disagree. Each of these is clearly about the ability (or lack of) to stay on task. Performing under pressure is another classic. Performing under pressure is basically what occurs when you’re good enough at the E and the F parts. When you can manage your emotions and focus regardless of both internal and external distractions then you’ll be able to execute your skills under pressure.

Regardless of whether you agree or not with the Metuf breakdown, the concept of subcategorisation is crucial for the next stage. The stage that very, very few athletes, coaches and performers get to. What are the best processes for improving these five mental constructs? For example, if you asked a group of 10-year-olds to draw up a list of ways of improving mental toughness you’d likely get very few ideas. But ask the same group to come up with ways to help them bond as a group, to improve their group unity and you’ll get dozens of great ideas.

This ebook/blog is not the best place for us to list the hundreds of processes that my colleagues and I use on a daily basis. Although now a little out of date one of the best places to learn about these processes is via the Metuf for Sports website we created just for this purpose. At Metuf for Sports, you’ll be able to watch the introductory videos for free. Then, for the cost comparable to a book you’ll be able to complete the entire course whereby the video formats does justice to these concepts in a way that the written word would struggle.

Finally, Mental Health

Yes, it would remise of me not to finish this ebook with some comments about “the rest of the plane”.

Maybe one of the best places to end is where we began, by emphasising the importance of separating processes from outcomes. Mental health, regardless of how you choose to define it is an outcome. It’s a result and it’s a consequence. In fact, all health measures, both mental and physical, are outcomes.

It is the opinion of this psychologist that we spend far too much time thinking about outcomes in general. And that this is particularly troublesome when it comes to physical and mental health.

The two biggest reasons why an over-emphasis on outcomes is problematic is due to the fact that we don’t have that much influence over them (think genetics) and it distracts us from the processes that we would benefit from making permanent.

The health industry is very keen on diagnoses. They love to come up with labels. They then use these labels to work backwards and attempt interventions or a series of interventions (aka processes). This by self is quite logical as surely somebody with bipolar will benefit from different processes compared with someone without it however once the diagnosis has been “fixed” all too often the processes then get abandoned. Then the problem (diagnoses) often returns and around and around we go.

Extreme Process Mindset

What if we took an Extreme Process Mindset and applied it to mental health and well-being. What would that look like? Well in the first instance we wouldn’t bother with diagnoses and labels. We would ask ourselves the question of what collections of processes would have the greatest impact on mental health with the least side effects.

My colleagues and I Condor Performance recently spent the better part of two days trying to answer this very question. In doing so we came up with some smaller health outcomes that make it considerably easier to suggest processes. Through a combination of both luck and a bit of ingenuity, these smaller health outcomes spell the word NEEEEDS (yes, that’s Needs but with 4 x S).

I thought it might be a fun way to end this e-book by asking those who have followed it over the last few months to guess what the NEEEEDS stands for.

If you have an idea please list your best guess in the comments section below and I will personally email everyone who has a guess the actual list. Please free to copy and paste this to make it easier:

I think the …

N stands for …

E stands for …

E stands for …

E stands for …

E stands for …

D stands for …

S stands for …

~ The End ~

Too Many Chefs In the Sporting Kitchen!

In my work I don’t actively seek any controversy. However as other trailblazers will be aware when you push the envelope regarding the work you do it comes with a certain amount of contention.

Once such area which I have always believed in but have really written about is this one. The topic of too many athletes having too many coaches. I use the word “coach” as the label to describe any official helper or advice giver. So although your grandfather would not count as a coach if chatting to you about some recent performances over a family dinner. He certainly would if he followed you down to the bowling alley twice a month and started giving you tips.

Let me start with the end in mind and work my way backwards. For team sport athletes I feel the ideal number of official coaches should be one. For those participating in individual sports the ideal number long terms is zero!

Let me explain …

The school system has it more or less correct. Teachers are generally aware of the fact that they have a limited amount of time to do their job. So although a maths teacher might be very proud of his or her contribution to someone who goes on to be a world-renowned engineer the maths teacher would not be involved past a certain point. This should be the same for developmental sporting coaches. But unfortunately it doesn’t happen that way very often.

In sport the more successful an athlete becomes the more coaches they tend to attract. Many of these coaches will be well intended but problematic nonetheless. The primary issue with having five or six official advice givers (which is common nowadays) is that much of their suggestions will be contradictory. This puts the athlete into a real predicament because he or she probably wants to trust all of them. But they soon find out this is not possible as different suggestions clash. I could write an entire book on one of the reasons why the advice tends to be so contradictory. But suffice to say it’s because sports coaching is still mainly based on guesswork. If you ask most coaches why they’d doing something the most common answer is this. “That’s what my coach used to do”.

There is also a real issue with role clarity. Which area of the “performance plane” each coach is supposed to be giving advice about is not obvious. In other words you get technical coaches giving psychological and tactical advice. You have physical coaches giving mental health and well-being advice.

What’s The Solution To Too Many Chefs / Coaches?

The answer is very different depending on if you play a team sport or an individual sport. For team sports there is no getting away from the fact that there needs to be a head coach. Ideally the head coach becomes the go-between for the players and all the other experts involved. In other words you may have a technical coach who is observing the players from a technical standpoint (biomechanics). But to ensure that any messaging around biomechanics does not accidentally get in the way of the bigger picture that message needs to come from one person – the head coach.

The same would apply to a sport psychologist working with a sporting team. Having a sport psychologist deliver mental skills training without the head coach being involved is absurd. Sport psychologists sometimes get into a huff when they hear this for fear of breaches in confidentiality. Or they feel the head coach is not been qualified to deliver the mental skills. All these potential issues can be nullified by proper communication and agreements before the start of the contract. 

This head coach can still work tremendously hard to make him or herself irrelevant on match day but ultimately the nature of team sports will still require them to be there before, during and after the match.

Coachless Individuals Athletes

This is not the case with individual athletes such as tennis players, golfers, surfers and boxers etc. These sports do not require a coach to be there during competition.

If you don’t have to have something at this important time, why would you want it? Central to sporting mental toughness is a low reliance on factors that we have little or no influence on. Other people, even the most reliable and well intended, are are partially influenceable. What does this mean? It means that athletes who depend on “certain” things or people are risking it from a psychological point of view. Why? Because you can’t guarantee these things or people will be there when you want them to be.

This philosophy, in part, explains why our team or sport psychologists and performance psychologists spend very little time with our clients whilst they are competing. Don’t get me wrong if a client insists on having a session the night before a competition we will certainly oblige. But we are trained to assist our clients improve in such a way that they would not feel like they needed such a session.

Too Many Coaches

From a systems point of you I’m not sure what the answer to that too many coaches dilemma is. What I do know is this. If you are a developmental aged elite athlete (13 – 17) and you have already had close to 10 official coaches then the system has failed you. Unless of course in the unlikely event that all of those coaches are singing from the same song book. And they are unbelievably good at communicating between one another. Until that happens then less is more when it comes to the number of coaches and formal advice giver as you have.

We would like to hear from readers via the comments section below about stories on this topic. Did you have too many coaches? How did it impact you? Can you give examples of when well intended advice was contradictory? To safeguard your identity feel free to add your comment using a false name.

Below is a 16 minute video on what has become known as The Aeroplane Analogy. It basically explains how mental toughness and mental health fit into the overall performance picture. And below that a full transcription of the video in case you’d rather read than watch (or do both). Enjoy and as always please share and comment.

Transcription

Greetings, everybody. I hope you’re well. My name is Gareth Mole. I’m one of the senior sport and performance psychologists that has the great pleasure to work for Condor Performance. We’re an Australian-based group of sport and performance psychologists that have been providing mental toughness training services since 2005. My colleagues and I at Condor Performance are the creators and the custodians of Metuf. Metuf has been designed to solve one of the most common problems in competitive sport, and that is that everybody seems to be aware of the importance of the mental side. Yet, at the same time, there is a tremendous lack of understanding in terms of how to improve it. So Metuf is the answer to that dilemma.

In order for me to explain how mental toughness fits into the bigger picture as part of this very brief introductory video, I’m going to use an analogy that the competitive athlete is a little bit like a four-engined airplane, similar to the one that has just flown onto your screen. So there’s a couple of things to mention before I actually take you through what each part of the airplane represents. So the first thing to mention is that the mindset of those that actually work on airplanes, so for example, aeronautical engineers, is a mindset that we believe would be incredibly valuable if adopted by competitive athletes and coaches.

The mindset that they have is one whereby they do not wait for something to go wrong before they attend to it. They are constantly checking in on the state of all different aspects of their aircraft. The likelihood that something goes wrong is a lot, lot lower because they are constantly doing checks and maintenance. This is a mindset that would be incredibly valuable if you are a competitive athlete or a competitive sporting coach. Unfortunately, the default is for something to only get a significant amount of attention when something goes wrong.

The second reason why this analogy is so helpful is because as you can imagine, there is no point in having four engines that are in fantastic condition if they’re attached to an aircraft that is falling into disrepair. I’m going to come back to that second part of the analogy after I’ve taken you through all the different aspects of the airplane. Okay. So let’s start by giving you some clues. So engine one is PC. Engine two is TC. The main body of the aircraft is MB and WB. The third engine is MT, and the fourth engine is TW. If you like, pause the video and have a little bit of a go at trying to work out what each of these five different aspects of the airplane is referring to.

Okay, so let’s go through the answers. Let’s see how you end. So PC refers to physical capabilities, and one way you could break down the physical aspects of your sport is to think about it in terms of speed, fitness, strength, flexibility, and balance. TC refers to technical consistency, and technical consistency is basically where we would consider all the different skills that are applicable for your sport. Of course, because this Metuf program is designed for all coaches and all athletes of all sports, then I’m simply going to refer to them here as skill A, skill B, skill C, and skill D, for example.

But to give you a bit of a clue as to what these are for you in your particular sport, it’s probably the area that you’ve spent the most amount of time on. So for example, if you’re a golfer, then I suspect that you have spent the most amount of time on areas such as practicing your putting, practicing your short game, practicing your long game. If you are a rugby player, then I suspect you spent the most amount of time practicing your passing, practicing your catching, practicing your kicking, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay. Next, we have mental toughness, and all I’m going to do for mental toughness at this stage is give you the first letter of each of the five different aspects of mental toughness. So M, E, T, U, and F. I’ll let you think about that for a little bit. Moving on to TW. TW refers to tactical wisdom, and tactical wisdom is basically all about on-field decision-making. I’m not going to go into any detail in terms of tactical wisdom, except to mention a couple of things.

One is we are referring to the decisions that get made in sporting contests. So we are not referring to life decisions, for example. That is going to be better contained in the MB WB section. Of course, the second thing to acknowledge, as is the case with all of these engines, is that sports, of course, do vary significantly in terms of the amount that is going on. So for example, a tennis player and a squash player, of course, have to make hundreds and hundreds of decisions almost instantly as part of a tennis match or a squash match. Whereas, for example, a 100-meter sprinter does not have nearly the same amount of decisions to make in their competitive environment.

Okay. So those are the four engines, and we won’t be finished until we have worked out what the MB and the WB is referring to. So I’d be interested to know how many of you worked out, but that stands for mental health and wellbeing. That’s right. The main part of the aircraft is mental health and wellbeing, and I’m going to go back to why this analogy, that the competitive athlete is like a four-engined airplane is so useful. So I want to emphasise that there is not a lot of point in having amazing physical capabilities, amazing technical abilities, really good sporting mental toughness, and amazing on-field decision-making if your overall mental health and wellbeing is suffering.

In other words, there’s no point in having four amazing engines attached to an airplane that is falling into disrepair. So you can imagine if there was an airplane where the main fuselage is all rusty and full of holes, and yet attached to that airplane were four engines that were straight out of the factory floor, brand new, ready to go. That aircraft is going to struggle because although the engines are doing their best to basically propel the aircraft towards its destination, the fact that they’re attached to an aircraft that’s falling into disrepair is a potential disaster waiting to happen.

So logic would suggest that in those circumstances, it would be a more logical, more sensible to improve the actual main part of the aircraft first or at least at the same time as looking at the engines. If it is an area of concern to you, then it’s probably worth you prioritising your energy into improving that area either first or alongside areas such as physical, technical, mental, and tactical. What we are trying to avoid is for you to ignore your mental health and wellbeing completely, and just focus on those four sporting engines. If you would like some assistance on mental health and wellbeing, then the best way of going about that is for you to speak to someone, a family member, your family doctor. For example, just say that you are concerned about your mental health and that you would like to do some kind of assessment. That is always the best way to start.

This Metuf program will not directly help you with your mental health and wellbeing as you can appreciate. The program has been created in order to improve sporting mental toughness. So that M, E, T, U, and F that you’ll find out about in a minute. So we are not going to talk specifically about mental health and wellbeing as part of this program, but that’s not to say that we are diminishing its importance. In many ways, we’re doing the exact opposite.

Okay. To finish up this very brief introductory video, what I want to do is set up the rest of the video presentations that are about to follow. So you may recall that we broke down physical capabilities into five different sub-areas. So speed, fitness, strength, flexibility, and balance, for example. So now, we want to do the same for mental toughness, and let’s see how many you managed to work out. So basically, the M stands for motivation. The E stands for emotions. The T stands for thoughts, U for unity, and F for focus.

So when we talk about mental toughness, we’re actually talking about a combination of these five different areas, and it is important to emphasise that it is much more useful to talk about it at the subcategory level. As you can appreciate, it’s quite possible for an athlete to be highly motivated, but to really struggle with their focus, for example. You can have those two things happening at the same time, and so it would be counterproductive for us to describe either ourselves, an athlete, or even a sporting team as mentally tough because in doing so, we lose out on the ability for us to hone in on these five separate aspects of mental toughness.

So the second thing to mention is that if I was to ask you to come up with ideas on how to improve the five aspects of physical capabilities, I’m guessing that you’re going to have a whole bunch of ideas that will come to mind pretty quickly. So for example, for speed, we might do some sprint training. To improve fitness, we might do some endurance training, resistance for strength, stretching for flexibility, and then of course, balancing if we want to improve our balance or our proprioception.

If I was to put you on the spot, however, and ask you to do the same for mental toughness, can you list five different ideas, activities, tasks, processes that are designed to improve motivation, emotions, thoughts, unity, and focus, what would you come up with? What would come to mind? If you’re like most people, not a lot comes to mind. You might basically think about maybe a little bit of goal setting for motivation, and that’s often when you might run out of suggestions. So we are here to address that issue, and we’re going to do it in a very simple way, a very intentionally simple way. That’s through the introduction of mental methods.

So as you can see there, what we are basically going to do in the upcoming video presentations is introduce you to five mental methods. At the moment, we can call them mental methods A, B, C, D, and E. Each one of them designed to address the five different aspects of mental toughness in the same way that sprint training, endurance, resistance, stretching, and balancing address speed, fitness, strength, flexibility, and balance respectively. So I look forward to seeing you at the beginning of the video presentation, which is all about motivation and how to either improve or maintain it. See you then.

If you’d like to listen to the full episode below is the embedded audio file. If you’d prefer to read then further down the page is the full transcription of this Sport Psychology Podcast. As always we’d love to hear your comments using the comments section at the very bottom. Enjoy and share!

Sport Psychology Podcast – Transcription

Published on Thursday 20th August 2020

Dan Abrahams:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Sport Psych Show. Thanks so much for joining me. Today I’m delighted to be speaking with sport psychologist, Gareth Mole. Gareth, welcome to the Sport Psych Show.

Gareth J. Mole:

Thanks, Dan.

Dan Abrahams:

It’s great to have you here. Why don’t we start by getting you to introduce yourself to the Sport Psych Show audience?

Gareth J. Mole:

Sure, Dan. So my name is Gareth Mole. A little fun fact, I was named off to Gareth Edwards, obviously the legendary Welsh rugby union player. One of the greats, and I suppose sometimes I do reflect if you name a child after one of the greatest athletes, maybe he or she is determined to potentially end up working in the sports industry. So I was born in South Africa, lived in South Africa until I was 10, and I suppose growing up in South Africa really shaped my passion for sport and you could probably guess the kinds of sports which I’m particularly fond of and particularly passionate about, obviously crickets, rugby union.

So my childhood sporting heroes are people like Jonty Rhodes and Joost van der Westhuizen. I think I was living in South Africa when Gary Player passed on the baton to Ernie Els. So I definitely give credit to South Africa for my love of sport. And I suppose, and we may talk about this later, growing up in apartheid there’s a part of me that feels like my sort of sense of wanting things to be fair might be from those days.

When I was 10 moved to the UK, I went to boarding school in the UK at a place called Oundle in Northamptonshire near Peterborough, and I’m worth mentioning that because I have been appropriately accused of being fairly opinionated and I put that down to a lot of debating whilst the at Oundle. At Oundle certainly when I was there, debating was sort of regarded as a sport. And so we did a lot of it and we got fairly good at it, and once you have gotten into the routine of giving your opinions on an almost daily basis, it is quite hard to turn it off.

Then I did my undergraduate psychology at the University of Leeds, which was fantastic. And then after a little bit of backpacking and so on, I moved to Australia in 2003 to complete my master’s in Sports Psychology, which turned into or turned out to be, I should say, the last running of that particular master’s program. So I sort of got fairly lucky in that I applied from the UK, got accepted, moved over here, and then shortly after moving over here found out that they weren’t going to be taking any sports psych master’s students because the program was wrapping up.

And then like a lot of us graduated as a newly qualified sport psychologist. So I was waiting for the phone to start ringing because I’d spent seven years studying and it was tumbleweed. And so I sort of thought to myself, “Hang on, I’ve just relocated to the other side of the world. I’ve spent seven years studying, and there’s a sort of a dearth of jobs. What do I do about it?”

And so I just decided that the only sort of proactive option was to create work for myself. So in 2005 I started Condor Performance. And so we sort of slowly grown in the last 15 years, and without having this as a goal or an intention, someone who’s incredibly processed-focused, I’ve ended up with a team of nine other psychologists. We call them sports psychologists and performance psychologists because as some of your listeners may be aware in Australia, you cannot use the term sports psychology if you don’t have the endorsement in sport and exercise psychology.

So myself and Michelle Pain, who’s a bit of a pioneer in sports psych here in Australia are able to and choose to use the term sport psychologists, and the other eight are all performance psychologists, which here in Australia means they’re all registered psychologists with AHPRA, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Authority. So basically we are a team of sports psychologists and performance psychologists that works predominantly in sport, but also in non-sporting settings such as the performing arts and so on.

And then just to wrap up the intro to give you and the listeners an idea of my sort of day-to-day work. So I suppose I spend the majority of my time on the business and not in the business. So the kind of things I would do on a Thursday morning, be supervising the other psychologists, sales and marketing, which I’ve always been surprised is regarded as a bit of a dirty word for highly qualified people, whereas I see it as absolutely essential risk management, bookkeeping, et cetera. I only work with a small percentage of our overall clients and quite interestingly, a growing percentage of those are sporting coaches, about a third of my personal clients and our sporting coaches.

So I have no interaction with their players. In fact, I think their players wouldn’t even know I existed. I work exclusively with the coach in order to help him or her become a better mental skills coach, a better mental coach, as well as just coaching people and not just players, if that makes sense. And just finally, as a sports psychologist, I would describe myself as very behavioral. And so I know you’ve had guests on who are big fans of act acceptance and commitment therapy. I draw heavily on that.

I suppose a good way to describe my personal philosophy as an applied sports psychologist is really, I try and almost direct everything back to the action side of things, the behavioral side of things. So I like CBT, but I will very much lean towards the B of CBT. If I’m to describe how I’m operating, it would be a tiny little C and a huge B. That’s kind of how I would describe myself. So for example, when helping golfers to develop pre-shot routines, it’s the routines of the golfers that I work with very, very action-based, and I’m almost intentionally trying to minimize the cognitive demands that are included in those pre-shot routines.

Dan Abrahams:

Interesting. Thorough introduction there, Gareth. I love it. Now we’ve spoken off-air about what we can talk about and, well, you threw me a bit of a curve ball, which was this idea of perhaps talking about what psychology might look like in 2050, which I thought was a really, really fun topic to talk about. But I think we can have a broad conversation, because I think there’re several things you’ve said already, which are really interesting and we can bring in the behavioural stuff into that, and you’ve talked about marketing and selling and what we do as a profession, helping people understand. And I think all of that really comes under the header of psychology in 2050.

So it’s going to be an interesting conversation. I mean, if I may ask you, when we were talking off-air you mentioned, let’s talk about what psychology can look like in 2050. What drew you to that? Why that conversation?

Gareth J. Mole:

Two things happened a couple of weeks ago. So one is, I listen to most of your interviews and I’m a bit of a fanboy, in that basically I almost insist that all of my colleagues listen to most of the conversations that you’ve had. And one of the things that I picked up on is that you often ask your guests, if you had a time machine and you went back five or 10 years, and I thought to myself, if Dan’s got this time machine, then I think we might want to do a couple of trips in the other direction. So that was the first thing.

And then what happened, almost as if it was telling me to respond, is that Back to the Future II was on Australian television. In the movie, for anyone who hasn’t watched it, the film is set in I think 1985 and Back to the Future part two is 30 years into the future. And I thought it would be a really fun little conversation for us to have about, not five years from now, not 10 years from now, which in many ways sort of seems so close, but what about 30 years, which I’m guessing is probably around about the time where the two of us will be sort of either about to retire or retired, but hopefully still alive.

So that’s why I picked 2050 for us to sort of, I suppose, in many ways, just hypothesise about some of the directions that the profession might be heading. And I suppose just the final bit, there is a part of me that can’t help but think from a goal setting perspective. If you can crystallise what the future might look like, maybe what we able to do or appealing to the greater sports psych community is maybe we can work together to actually increase the chances that some of them happen.

Dan Abrahams:

Well, let’s get in our DeLorean car, back to the future car, [inaudible 00:11:10] 2050. I’m sure there’s many people who would think of better things to do if they did have a car to go to 2050, but hey, we’re passionate sports psychology, so we can go and seek what sports psychology looks like in 2050. So talk to me, give me a number one prediction, or thought or feeling.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yeah. And I just want to clarify that I’m calling these, they’re not really hypotheses, I’m calling them “hopotheses”. Hopothesis is kind of a bit like a hypothesis, but with slightly less evidence to make the educated guests. And so, the first two, Dan, are linked and I’m super keen to get your thoughts on these. The first one is an official change of name to performance psychology as the overarching name of the discipline in 2050.

And funny enough, just to really sort of emphasise my point, last week I listened to your conversation with Paula Reid, the adventure psychologist, and it was really obvious to me that someone like Paula and her passion would fit very nicely under performance psychology semantically, but that she was articulating very well that it’s not really the same as sports psychology. There was a fantastic conversation between the two of you how in many ways she thought sport was a lot more predictable and so on. So my first prediction is the overarching name of the discipline will be performance psychology and we’ll have the option of calling ourselves performance psychologists.

And part two will be specialisation within performance psychology. So what we’re basically saying is that someone could be a golf psychologist as a subdiscipline of performance psychology, or they could be an adventure psychologist like Paula mentioned, or maybe they aren’t that interested in sport but they love the performing arts. And so maybe they would be a dance psychologist and all these different performance pursuits would fit semantically logically under the broad term performance psychology. And for those who might be listening, you think, “Oh, no.” Because that’s moving away from specialisation, we can then specialise within performance psychology.

Sport Psychology Podcast continued …

Dan Abrahams:

So just to try and draw a picture here. At the top of our sheet of paper we’ve got performance psychologist.

And down from that, I’m picturing sports psychologist, maybe a performing arts psychologist, maybe-

I can’t really use the term … Well, maybe business psychologist, although that has its own sort of credentials.

But underneath sports psychologist would be all the sports that you can think of. And what you’re saying is you’ve got to work in say four or five or six that could actually render you a sports psychologist. Would that be a picture I’ve created that would be accurate to your vision?

Gareth J. Mole:

A very accurate picture, Dan. Yeah. So I suppose there’s a couple of obvious ones missing. I think military, I think would be one, which would be another type of performance psychology. I don’t know the name of it, but we work with a lot of people in the medical profession. People like ambulance drivers and surgeons, often in their training. So we’re basically using the same kind of principles that we would work that we would use to help a golfer or a cricketer perform under pressure. We would use those exact same or very similar, I should say, mental strategies to help someone become better at performing a complicated surgical procedure. So I suppose you could call it medical psychology, maybe something along those lines.

That debate could … Yeah, healthcare psychology. Exactly very sort of poignant at the moment. And all of these would be the layer under performance psychology, where you’ve got practitioners who are both good at the, you call it the below the line, above the line. I suppose I call it the mental health and the mental toughness side of things, or the mental side of the actual performance area and then the mental aspects of the rest of their life.

Dan Abrahams:

I think it’s interesting because I think if we draw it back to today, listening to you speak, it makes me consider the confusion that people have around sports psychology. What is sports psychology? Is it about performance? Is it about welfare or well-being? There’s a big drive around mental health at the moment. And I’ve spoken quite a bit about this on the Sport Psych Show with various people. That conflation between welfare, well-being and mental health. What is it that we do? How do we describe it? What qualifications do we need? What registrations do we need? It almost feels like what you want in 2050 is a much more streamlined picture, some clarity here whereby everything falls under this term of performance psychology.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yeah. And I think that’s spot on. I think a label is a really important aspect of clarity. Picking the right label.

And for me, semantically performance psychology is the best label. I mean, I’m sure it’s the case there in the UK, but here in Australia there’s, I can think of a couple of very prominent, qualified sports psychologists who refer to themselves as sports psychologists who don’t do much work in sport. And in fact, the official title, the full title here in Australia at the moment is sport and exercise psychologist. And having done this work for 15 years, I can tell you, I don’t give any advice to anyone on the exercise side of things. So I think that there has to be a realization that at some point if we want to collectively inform the public about what we do, we might want to start by picking the label that is most closely related to what we all actually do.

Dan Abrahams:

Interesting. Interesting. So performance psychology at the top, underneath that strands, including sports psychology, exercise psychology, military psychology, public sector psychology, private sector psychology such as corporate psychology. Yeah, interesting. And building on that idea, run a sports psychology piece. This idea of working in multiple sports, or specialising in a sport. I mean, is that something that you come across?

Do you think it is a challenge is for a sport psychologist to work across multiple sports? Should sport psychologists specialise? Do you think in 2050 you will see a lot more? Well, I’m a performance psychologist and I specialise in golf. I’m a performance psychologist and I specialise in soccer. I’m a performance psychologist and I specialise in baseball. Do you think specialism is the future?

Gareth J. Mole:

I think that’s where we will end up, it’s inevitable. I mean, if you look at other professions, things like the medical profession, for example, that’s basically what’s happened. You got people who work in the medical profession now who … You got knee surgeons who only operate on a particular type of knee injury. Like that’s all they do. Whereas, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, all knee surgeons had to be able to do everything.

I do like your question though, Dan, because you’re almost implying, I think that, is that too much? In other words, are our skillsets actually better off if you have to work in rugby and then golf and you have to then sort of be flexible. I think that ultimately what we would probably want to see is the psychologist having the choice. I think that’s what we would probably want to see. It might be that I have a colleague for example who absolutely loves baseball, and as soon as a baseball contacts us, it goes straight to my colleague, David, and that it might be reasonable to say to someone like him, “Look, do you just want to fill your boots with baseball, because you love the sports so much?”

Whereas to someone else, that might lead to monotony, it might lead to boredom. Who are we to say? Individual differences is a common theme that keeps coming up in the show, which I think is such an important reminder. I think it would be about creating a mechanism that would allow the psychologists to choose. Personally I would definitely not choose to specialise in one sport. I would probably pick the ones that I’m most fond of. Sports like squash, cricket, rugby union, golf, football, et cetera. So I would probably naturally end up with about five or six, and therefore it’s likely I would then continue to use the term sports psychologist who works or specialises across those sports.

Dan Abrahams:

It’s an interesting landscape. I think obviously right now, when you qualify as a sports psychologist, you qualify to work in all sports. And I think the vast majority of sports psychs would say, “Well, that’s what I do. I’m a sports psychologist. I work across all sports.” I had a conversation with Professor Brendan Cropley on episode 90 about this. And I think it’s one of those, like every landscape, it has its advantages and disadvantages, its strengths and its weaknesses.

As a former professional golfer, I feel fairly confident walking into a golfing environment and having a great deal of knowledge, that’s going to set the scene, that’s going to help me to build the relationship with the golfer. I’ve been there, I’ve been in his or her shoes. I know what it feels like. So, I feel I’m at an advantage there. At the same time, and not that I’ve actually ever come across a golfer who said this, at the same time I can also fully appreciate that, that golfer has a lot of people around them who know about golf.

He will have one, maybe a couple of coaches, maybe a couple of parting coach, a short game coach, as well as a full swing coach. He or she has got a lot of people around them who know a lot about golf, who can advise on that side of things. And sometimes I think that sports people like to have people around them who don’t necessarily have an expertise of their particular sport and knowledge of their sports, who they can talk with more generally about performance psychology or welfare and well-being.

So I think there’s that interesting landscape there. So, yeah. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that. I think it brings its own advantages and its own limitations when one specialises, but I can, when you were speaking there, I was thinking of multidisciplinary. For example, I was thinking of a psych who comes in and says, “That’s my strength here, is I work across multiple sports.”

Gareth J. Mole:

“And actually because of that, I bring in a range of experiences to the table.” And I think of, okay, your comment here in a second. I think of the sports psychs who may be spend 20, 25 weeks out on the golf tour, and I’m sure there’s some who do it on the tennis tour as well, which is great. But why they’re missing out is they’re missing out on working in other sports and experiencing those other sports can feel what they do in golf or in tennis or in any sport that they spend the most amount of time in.

Yeah. I mean, I think if I was having a vote, the way I would do it is in training in the journey to becoming a qualified performance psychologist. Let’s say it in 2015, that’s a regulated and registered profession. I would insist that the trainees have exposure right across that spectrum that you mentioned earlier. So you have to work with some people in the public sector, for example, because that’s part of your criteria, but that once you have earned the right to call yourself a performance psychologist, then ultimately you can then decide.

And I suppose one little comment, and I forget which episode it was, but there was a great conversation between you and someone about how important it is to know the sport. And I think you kind of both agreed that it’s better to have the knowledge and not need it than need it and not have it. Anyway, if those weren’t the words you used, those were the words which I remembered from listening into that conversation. Better to have the understanding of what a leg before wicket is and not need it than be in an awkward conversation where they’re talking about how leg before wicket is, kind of his or her awkward way of getting out and having to put your hand up and saying, “Sorry, can you guys just tell me what LBW stands for.”

So I don’t think we are necessarily in a situation whereby just because someone knows a huge amount about bobsled that, that means that they’re going to blurt out a whole bunch of sort of technical and tactical advice on bobsled. You would hope that as part of the training. What they’re saying is you are not the technical and the tactical coach, but a knowledge of this sport is going to allow you to build rapport and reduce the chances that people are going to be talking a language that you have no idea what they’re talking about.

Dan Abrahams:

Yeah. And as you’re speaking there, I’m actually thinking of the advantages of knowing quite a lot about a specific sport. For me, I think it can help you set up better questions. I think it can increase your range of ideas around performance psychology. I personally think I can have more ideas in golf psychology than somebody who more solutions than somebody who hasn’t been in a golfing environment before, in my humble opinion. So I can see an advantage in that respect. Is it critical? Absolutely not.

So I think that’s an interesting landscape. I think, related to that, I mean, you mentioned you started to talk about the qualifications that a sports psychologist has, and I do wonder if there can be some professional governing bodies who could hand out certain credit or qualifications related to a specific sport related to psychology.

So in golf, may be the Professional Golfers’ Association could have psychology courses for psychologists within golf so that you can as a psychologist go on these courses and learn the specifics of golf psychology. Maybe the IRFU in England could offer psychology courses related to rugby for psychologists to go on. And maybe coaches might go on them as well. I mean, I know the English FA have done this or did do this for a number of years, five levels, but for psychologists to go on as well to be able to really learn the language and the specific challenges that people face, because golf psychology is different to tennis psychology, is different to football psychology, is different to rugby psychology and so on and so forth. Of course, they have similarities, but there are differences. So I wonder. Getting your comment here, I wonder from a professional perspective, can we have accreditation that enables practitioners to advance their knowledge of specific sports?

Gareth J. Mole:

I think that’s an absolutely crackerjack idea. One of the reasons I love the format that you’ve created here with a Sport Psych Show is that I didn’t think of that when I was sort of brainstorming to myself earlier. That’s not something that popped into my mind, but through the process of dialogue, that idea just popped out and it’s only 2020 we got 30 years where we can potentially make some of these things happen.

And of course, one of the really important things there is you’ve got the football experts or the rugby experts being involved. We’re not excluding them and saying, “Hang on, guys. We don’t need you. We can learn plenty about your sport. And we’re the ones with the fancy psychology credentials.” It’s bringing them into the conversation and then saying, “Look, you guys know a lot about football. We know a lot about human behavior. You teach us a bit, we’ll teach you a bit and then we’ll come up with some kind of clear sort of set of qualifications and we’ll then work together to inform the public.”

So they’re not sort of having to second guess what that person does and what that person does. And just a final comment on of course on knowledge, we need to remember that knowledge forms along … Sorry, falls along a continuum. And so we’re not saying that everybody who wanted to work in golf as a psychologist would need your knowledge of golf. I think it’s going to be very difficult to compete with someone who has played like you have and as coach like you had.

So maybe if your knowledge of golf is a 10 out of 10 and someone who’s never heard of the game or the sport is a zero out of 10, and I’ve met a few of those by the way. Maybe what we’re saying is that in order for you to work in golf as a psychologist you need to approve a seven out of 10 knowledge of golf. We’re not saying that you need to become an equivalent expert of someone who has played the sport at a high level, coached it at a high level. It’s simply saying, if you want to work in golf, we can’t allow you to do that if your knowledge of golf is a three out of 10.

Dan Abrahams:

Your next prediction-

Gareth J. Mole:

Yes.

Dan Abrahams:

… of 2050.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yeah. What were we calling them? Hopotheses, I think.

Dan Abrahams:

Hopotheses, thank you.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yes, we may have just invented a new word, which is totally appropriate I think when you’re thinking about the future. So my next is the slightly controversial one. This is where we start. In 2050, I think there’ll be much more emphasis on formal qualifications. And what I mean by that is, I think that there’ll be a much reduced likelihood that someone will be allowed to work in any performance sector who hasn’t met certain, I suppose formal qualifications. So, I’m predicting it’s, and it’s just a prediction, that there will be a lot less people involved in sport and performance who simply finished high school and then decided they were going to start a business and make up a title. That’s my prediction.

Dan Abrahams:

Why do you think that’s important?

Gareth J. Mole:

Look, I suppose the reason why I wanted to include that, and this is maybe where the bit of the hopothesis is really emphasized, because I run a business which I suppose is, in many ways I’m looking after the best interest of a total of 10 psychologists. I suppose I have a lot of conversations with sporting organizations and individuals as well. And one thing is very clear and that is that, in particular in sport, there is still a huge lack of understanding about what various professional titles actually mean from a kind of a risk point of view.

And so, one of the things that we’re doing on a fairly regular basis is sort of trying to educate and make aware the fact that for example, as a psychologist, we all have a professional indemnity insurance. That’s a very boring sort of fact, but it’s a fact nonetheless. And therefore, if you do decide to employ, let’s say a mind coach or mindset coach, then I would like the sporting entity to know that they’re doing that and they can tolerate the risk that comes with that person having no professional insurance for example, and other things besides.

So I think that what will eventually happen is that, we will invite into the conversation people who potentially don’t have any recognized qualifications but who do a very good job of the work. People like Gilbert Enoka is incredibly well-regarded and has done an amazing job in New Zealand rugby, but he’s not a registered psychologist. So bringing people like Gilbert into the conversation and saying, okay, how do we communicate all these different titles to the sporting community out there, I think is a really important step.

And it may involve the difficult decision of certain people who don’t have recognized qualifications who might not be doing a good job. It may involve us saying to them, “So you can no longer work with such and such a team or such and such an individual.” Dan, what’s your thoughts on this, and how’s things panning out in the UK with regards to that? Is that the hopothesis with the longest bow?

Dan Abrahams:

Yeah. I mean, I think I’ll start by saying, I think clarity. Again, I’m going to come back to this word clarity. I just think the sports industry needs greater clarity as to what … Let’s come back to your title of performance psychology. What do performance psychologists, or we could use sports psychologists. What do sports psychologists do? Let’s come back to 2020 and call it sports psychology, and just say, look, what do sports psychologists do? What are your qualifications? Who are you registered with? What do you do? And how are we protected? What are we getting when we get a sports psychologist?

And I think we as an industry need to be better. So if we talk about 2020 to 2050, 30 years, I think we got 30 years to become better, helping the sport industry, gain clarity as to what sports psychology is and what sports psychologists do. I personally don’t have a problem with anybody going away and doing whatever they want in terms of a … They can do a two-week course. They can do a two-day course or a two-year course. Whatever they want to do, they do. But I think what national governing bodies, organisations, clubs, teams require is clarity.

I think there needs to be as much exposure as possible with regard sports psychology and sports psychologists so that these national governing bodies, clubs, teams, organizations know exactly what they get. And if they choose to say, “Okay, we know you’ve got the qualifications, you’ve got the registration, you’ve got the insurances. We know our people are safe. However, we’re going to go with Johnny or Mary over there Who’s got their two week NLP qualification, because you know what? We think they’re brilliant at what they do.” Fine. No problem at all.

But I think we in the next 30 years, if we want to talk about this span of time, we have to be better at every single national governing body, every single organization, every single club globally in every single sport, knowing exactly what they get with us. Now that is complex and complicated because every single country has different rules. In UK, I should say, there’s an interesting dynamic whereby a practitioner psychologist, the term practitioner psychologist is legally protected but the term performance psychologist isn’t.

Again, I could do a two-week course and then call myself a performance psychologist. So there’s an interesting dynamic there. So I think we do have to try to come together. That’s a very bland statement I know, but some people within psychology who are registered psychologists within their country have to come together and find a way to help our global sports organisations understand what they get when they employ us as psychologists. When we do that, I think then there’s very real choice through that very real clarity.

Sport Psychology Podcast continued …

Gareth J. Mole:

Yeah. Look, I totally agree. There’s probably just a couple of additions there. I think that one is, what I really like about what you said there is we’re ensuring that the consumer is the one that knows what we do. So I think it was in episode two with Chris Shambrook where I think he was alluding to this fact, if memory serves me correctly, but he said something along the lines of, we know a lot about what we do, like you and me because we work within the profession.

But what about build the rugby coach from down the road? Like, does he know? A few months ago I went to stay with some friends in Sydney and they were like, “Oh, one of your sports psychologists guys is all over the news at moment.” And I was like, “Oh, show me the article.” And sure enough, it was not somebody who was a qualified psychologist. It was a mindset coach. And so these friends of mine just naturally assumed that because that person was working in the mental side of sport, that they were a sports psychologist. I think that is an absolute key to it.

We have to start including various different programs, which means that the consumer, the people who are potentially interested in our services, they are the ones that know what it means to be a qualified performance psychologist and what it means to not be a qualified performance psychologist. That’s the real key with regards to that, that third prediction of more emphasis on formal qualifications.

Dan Abrahams:

Well, I think you’ve eloquently put it in that sentence. The consumer needs to know what we do. I think that’s a really eloquent way of putting it. The challenge is it’s on a global scale. The challenge is that we could go down to the lay person, the person who’s just a sports fan and most people don’t have a clue, no idea.

And if they’re going to make an assumption, they’re going to assume it’s predominantly around mental health. I think there are a lot of coaches through no fault of their own who would see it in a similar vein mental health towards welfare and well-being. And then I think there’s the more informed coaches, players, key stakeholders in our organization, sporting organizations who understand that there’s a performance psychology piece to this as well. And actually ironically, I think most sports psychology see themselves as purveyors of performance psychology.

So there really needs to be an education process. We need to become proper profession. And for me, we are a proper profession. I mean, there are papers, research articles out there, commentaries that say, “Well, we’re not a profession because we don’t have a standard practice, strengthened by and large, and I might get vilified for this on social media.” But my understanding of say a sports science or, especially strength and conditioning is that there are standard methodologies of practice that run through those industries.

And therefore, it becomes much easier for them to be recognized professions. But anyway, I think what we need to do is, we need to avoid the rant because I think it is getting better. But I think as we’re talking about 30 years, 2050, I think we need to be less scared of marketing, you coming back to your marketing point at the beginning. We need to be less scared of marketing, of sales. We need to be less scared of helping people understand what it is that we do on those multiple levels, performance psychology, welfare and well-being, and mental health. Let’s move along. Give me another hopothesis.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yes. Number four. Yes. So, number four was a much greater collaboration between coaches and performance psychologists. And I hope everyone’s sitting down for this. The kicker to this is in 30 years time. This collaboration between coaches and performance psychologists will eventuate in the first few head coaches who are qualified performance psychologists. In other words, people who potentially have no experience playing a particular sport will be given the top job.

So obviously in English football we’re talking about the manager here. In most other sports we’re talking about the head coach. And I suppose for me this is … Again, referring back to a lot of the conversations that you’ve had with your guests, a lot of the really interesting conversations were from coaches who were basically saying, “Look, what we do as a coach is psychology.” And I’ve heard you say many, many times, you just can’t remove the psychology from the equation.

Depending on when you put this episode out, obviously, you and I both know that Liverpool have just won their first Premier League title for 30 years. And if you listen to Jürgen Klopp, it would be easy to assume guy had some pretty impressive psychology qualifications. So I think that the fourth hopothesis is going to be much, much more collaboration between coaches and performance psychologists.

So an expansion of what I do at the moment with a third of my clients who are sporting coaches, but that becoming much more common place. And then the eventual end point of that will be, if I’m working with a coach and assisting him or her so much with all aspects of their coaching, because ultimately you cannot remove the psych-social part of human improvement. You just can’t. You may not think it’s there, but it’s there.

Then what will eventually happen is that some people will be then said, “Well, why don’t you just come in and be the head coach.” And if that happens, if that prediction happens, then obviously one thing that we really want to make happen is for those first few qualified psychologists to do the best possible job. I refer back to Annika Sörenstam, who I think in 2003 was invited to play on one of the men’s tour events-

… and under obscene … Yeah. Under obscene. So. Yes. Female golfer invited to play on one of the men’s tour events, but she didn’t do that well. I did a bit of research before she came 96 out of 111. So what we would want to ensure if my prediction is correct, Dan, and that’s in 30 years time, you will see qualified performance psychologists are in the role of head coach or manager. What we’ve got to make sure happens is those first few do an excellent job, both from a results point of view, from an impact point of view, because otherwise it could set us back another 20 years.

If the first few that are given that opportunity don’t do a great job, then as you can imagine, the sports industry might misjudge us unfairly. And so we would have to work very hard to making sure that those first few who were given the opportunity did the best possible job possible. And we see it already. There’s head coaches who come from biomechanics, there’s head coaches who come from strength and conditioning. Isn’t it a bit bizarre that on paper the area which is most aligned with coaching, which is surely is, is human improvement?

Psychology is the one that’s least likely to generate a head coach from my point of view. It’s the most likely, and I think all we’ve got at the moment in 2020 is a situation where, to be honest, and this refers back to some of your comments earlier. I don’t think the sports industry is ready for that. I don’t think that if there was a qualified sport or performance psychologist who was actually the head coach of a Premier League team of a major league baseball team, I think the first thing that do is say, “Don’t use the term sports psychologist or performance psychologist. People are going to get the wrong idea.” And I think that’s very indicative.

Dan Abrahams:

I think it’s interesting. It’s just speaking there. I’m thinking of the question, how much domain specific expertise do you need to have as a coach? So if I was to join José Mourinho’s coaching team, if I was to join Jurgen Klopp’s coaching team, how much domain specific knowledge do I need for that to happen? And I think it’s intriguing. I really do. That kind of thing has happened already in British soccer. So Steve McClaren invited Bill Beswick to be his assistant manager at Middlesborough actually a couple of decades ago.

I know that Bruno Demichelis, an Italian sport psychologist was brought over by Carlo Ancelotti around 2008, 2009, to be his assistant manager at Chelsea after being his assistant manager at AC Milan, or at least being very influential at AC Milan. So that kind of thing has happened, but it’s very, very rare. I’m sure there are other instances in other sports globally, and maybe listeners can tweet in if they know of that happening. But I think it’s very possible, and I would like to see it because I think that, that can be such a crucial role that somebody can play.

I think you can coach because you don’t necessarily need much domain specific knowledge to be a coach, especially if, what normally happen is you’d have a couple of other coaches who have a vast amount of domain specific knowledge, they have a vast amount of knowledge on the strategical, tactical, physical technical side of the specific sport you’re talking about. So I think you could still coach. I certainly think that coach could take on the role of a head of psychosocial methodology within that coaching unit, which I think is sorely lacking.

And again, in my mind when I’m thinking of this, I’m always thinking of say Premier League soccer in England, because I know that the coaching teams there are quite big, but you could say about baseball, the American version of football, NFL, basketball, that there are substantial coaching staff. The size of the coaching staff is quite big. I think it always lacks what I would describe as a head of psychosocial methodology.

So I think that, that person could do that and just, let’s come back to on-pitch involvement. On-pitch involvement. Again, let’s come back to your notion of, this is about working towards 2050. If on the picture, on the court or on the field is where it happens, why or why, or why would you not have the psych there in amongst it doing it? I just don’t get that, unless the psych is a clinical psych and it’s about the mental health piece, and the welfare and well-being is not about performance.

If it’s performance psych, why is the psych not involved in the performance environment? That doesn’t make sense, if you really strip it back and you really think about it. Now, that might involve some communication. It might involve some general fitness levels from the sports psych him or herself, but why not? Why not? Why can’t … Trust me until you can’t trust me. And if I make a mistake, that’s fine. Have a conversation with me, admonished me, if you have to.

Now I’m not going to go and talk. I’m not going to stand on the pitch and direct people tactically, but I can certainly engage in conversation around a psych social piece. These are the things that mediate wins and losses. These are the things that mediate jobs, whether somebody keeps their job who doesn’t. The things that mediate players’ careers. Why oh why, or why am I not invited onto the pitch? Why?

Gareth J. Mole:

Well, I think the biggest reason is just still the stigma that comes with the word psychologist, I think is such a heavy burden. I remember at the very infancy of my career in the year 2005, I just moved to Australia, and I remember there was a huge international conference in Sydney. Pure luck, I just moved to Australia and there was the biggest international [sport psychology] conference, and there was a very well-regarded sports psychologist who just given a keynote and I was a bit cheeky in those days and I sort of went up and tapped him on the shoulder and I said, I won’t mention his name, but I said, “Sir, can you give me one bit of advice for someone who really wants to make it as a sports psychologist.”

And he turned around, he said, “Don’t use the term psychologist.” And I was like, “Oh, you are kidding me. You’re joking. I’m just moved right across the world in order to do a program that basically allows me to use this title and you’re telling me that if I want to make it I should use another term.” So, look, I think it’s inevitable. Just going back to your comment about the two assistant coaches that you mentioned, who were psychologists, all that really needs to happen is that I think we would agree that one of the best ways to become a head coach is for you to first be an assistant coach.

So if people, if qualified psychologists are being given the opportunity to be assistant coaches, then the only thing missing from that anecdote, Dan, was then taking over the head coaching role when the person who brought them in moved aside or when somewhere else. And then the only bit missing from that is for as many people to know that, that person is a qualified psychologist. So it might not necessarily be as extreme as not using the term head coach and using the term performance psychologist, although there’s a part of me thinks that’s a totally appropriate name for someone involved in helping a bunch of human beings improve, given what we know about psych social.

But if that’s too much, then it would be just a case of such and such is our new head coach. Tom Smith is our new head coach who is a qualified performance psychologist with 30 years experience helping people improve. That may be enough to then get a little bit of momentum going. And again, hence why there are hopotheses because there’s a part of me that’s saying this because I desperately want it to happen, but I’m not sure if it will.

Yeah. And just for me and a word about players here, because I think maybe a lot of head coaches would say, “Oh, well, the players won’t have that. Rubbish, rubbish.” I think this is something that coaches get wrong very respectfully. I think players are much more open-minded. Players want to improve. They want to get better. Now, players demand competence, and there’s always going to be some players who are a little bit more closed-minded, and they might always have something to say, and that’s okay, that’s fine. That’s fair enough. Everybody’s individual differences. Again, everybody’s individual, and that’s fine. And you might never please some people within a squad of players, but I think firstly, I think players would be much more open to it than coaches think or believe.

Sport Psychology Podcast continued …

Dan Abrahams:

… I think it comes back to negotiation. I think that you’ll trust me to negotiate with your players. I’d like to sit down with players, to sit down with the captain, the leadership group and say, “This is what I propose happen, because as an example, we know that you have to focus your attention as you’re competing and deal with distractions quickly. We know that you have to compete at a certain intensity level. We know that you have to compete with a positive intent. You have to execute your actions positively.

These are the kinds of things, the game winning and losing mediators that I want to really help you with, that I want to work with you on. This is what I’m proposing. What are your thoughts? Where are your pushbacks here? What would work for you? What wouldn’t work for you? How can we give this a go?” It kind of it comes back to negotiation. We got to be better at the art side of negotiation when it comes to things like that, but give us a chance to do it. Because I think that coaches would see a great deal of benefit if they open their minds and allowed it to happen.

Gareth J. Mole:

Totally agree with that. And I love what you said. Was it trust me until I stuff up? What was the word that you said there?

Dan Abrahams:

Well, trust me until you can’t trust me.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yeah. Trust me until you can’t trust me. I’ve written that down. That’s a keeper.

Dan Abrahams:

Yeah. Trust me-

Gareth J. Mole:

That’s a keeper. Trust me till you can’t trust me. And what you just emphasise there is that, if you remove the label in the stigma with psychologist and you just describe to that group of players what we do, you get complete buy-in, don’t you? Think about it. It’s like I can help you stay motivated when you’re not particularly motivated. We can help you perform under pressure. We can help you concentrate on the things that are most important. If you were just to describe the processes that we do on a daily or a weekly basis, you get complete buy-in. Everyone’s like, “Yep. I want some of that. Thank you very much. Good appointment.”

As soon as you say, “Oh, by the way, he’s a qualified psychologist.” you start getting a little bit of concerns. But I do agree with you wholeheartedly, those pushbacks are probably likely to come much more from administrators, owners, people maybe concerned with the image of the club. I think if you were to say to the players, we think that a qualified psychologist is going to be best placed to be your main coach and these are the reasons, I think you’re right. I think that even in 2020, I think there wouldn’t be any issues there whatsoever.

Dan Abrahams:

Yeah. Yes, yes. I mean, it’s certainly an extreme point of view or extreme approach to say this psych is going to be your main coach. I think maybe at the beginning this psychologist is going to be on the pitch with us.

These are the reasons why, and again, then we fall into that negotiation. But across all of this conversation, I want to emphasize, and I’m sure you would as well that nobody’s saying, “Hey, coaches, you have this opinion and it’s the wrong opinion or this is a terrible opinion.” This opinion or the approaches we’ve got right now are limited because we as psychologists, in my opinion, sports psychologists, haven’t been good enough to get our message across to help you understand what we can do. I think we need to be better at that. I think that we need to be a little bit bolder with our messages at times, and a bit braver and we’re going to get lots of pushbacks and that’s okay.

And that last thing to say, so in 2050, there will be some psychs, sports psychs who won’t … Performance psychs, if we’re going to call them performance psychologists, who won’t want to go on to pitch, who won’t want to go get their [crosstalk 01:00:32] body essentially. That’s okay. But what I would say there is possibly my hope is that actually that’s where coaches will say, “Well, do we want that person? Do we want that psychologist?” Because actually we want to have the performance psych who’s willing to get out there.

Now, we’re going to be at our early 70s then. So maybe I shouldn’t be saying this because hopefully it will be fit 70-year-olds who can still get out there. But as hopefully we won’t be putting ourselves at a disadvantage. But look, I’m conscious of time. And I’d like to get on to … I think this is a great conversation. Let’s get onto our fifth and final.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yeah. So I suppose, and as a natural conclusion to all of the other four, what I’ve written down here, Dan is much greater unity and collaboration within the profession. And literally, I’ve written down proper international trade union for performance psychology. So, if we’re talking about what … One of the things you mentioned previously about SMC, for example, and having a lot more clarity, one of the things we haven’t done yet is how to look at some of the other professions in sport and said, “What have you done to clarify your position?”

I don’t think we’ve done that yet. I don’t think we’ve looked at some of the success stories. So one of the most obvious things to do would be to form some kind of international trade union for performance psychology. So you start with the correct label, as we mentioned earlier. Let’s try not to confuse people unnecessarily because we pick the wrong term. And then what we do is we look at other international trade unions, other professions that have worked well, even if some of the people are in Australia, some of them are in the UK, some of them are in the USA, and it’s a classic case of the … Some of the parts make up much more than the individuals involved.

And I’ll be honest, and maybe I can sort of segue into just a massive thank you to you and a wrap for putting together the Sport Psych Show. But over here in Australia, there’s a part of me, I’ll be honest. It’s sort of started to lose a little bit of hope in terms of whether or not the profession was actually going in the right direction. Here in Australia, we used to have four master’s programs. We have one.

Now, it would be very easy if you were stuck in Australia only to think that sports psychology is going backwards and hanging by a thread. I think that would be an appropriate way for me to describe it. And it was only really when I stumbled across your podcast and started listening to some of the high quality banter, I call it, that I was reinvigorated for the first time in many, many years, that there are some incredibly smart, passionate, and skillful people who happen to have the same professional title as me.

The only thing is, some of them are in the US. Your conversations with Scott Goldman were just mind-blowing, just like, are you kidding me? Didn’t even knew exist. I had no idea he existed. The one with Chris Shambrook as well, it was just unbelievable. [inaudible 01:04:05], just immediately sort of gave me something that I could start using with my clients and my team. So I think the individual superstars, if we can call on that exists, they just don’t operate as a team. That’s the only thing that is potentially missing.

So my final hopothesis, and maybe this is partially a prediction, and maybe it’s partially a call of expressions of interest, would be international group of performance psychologist who collaborate well together for the advancement of the profession. And all of the previous things that we’ve discussed during the interview would all be very common, regular discussion points for that particular group. Your thoughts on that one?

Dan Abrahams:

Well, at the moment my mind is envisioning a whole bunch of sports psychologists on the picket line with banners and placards saying right for sports psychs. So I’ve got that in my mind. Now, I love it. It’s an interesting landscape, every country has its different landscape. I think it’s different scene in terms of sports psych. it’s fascinating listening to you in terms of what’s happening in Australia. I can’t believe there’s only one master’s program. That just amazes me, because certainly here in the UK, I honestly believe that our sports science and sports psychology is what it is today, which is extraordinarily strong because of Australia, because Australia beat us at everything in the ’80s and through the ’90s.

And then we had to do something and for various reasons the investment went through and the English Institute of Sport emerged and various things, and now we have very, very strong academic departments research, very strong in terms of practitioners. There is, I mean, certainly at English Institute of Sport a lot of psychs who work together. So there is that sense of collaboration there. So I think it does exist, but I think every country has its challenges. I mean, I look over as a Brit to the state and I grew up on a diet of American psychology in many respects. And yeah-

… I have interesting conversations with people over there who are very … There’s a lot of divided opinion as to the landscape over there when it comes to sports psych. There’s a lot of unregulated stuff, and at same time there’s a lot of great stuff that goes on. So I would love to see more global unity. I think that global unity is enormously challenging, but hopefully things like the Sport Psych Show can help. That would be awesome if people feel that it does. So yeah. 2050, the year of collaboration, perhaps. I think hopefully the year of greater clarity, the year of greater, maybe greater cohesion between coaches and psychs. I think those are the three … They just happened to be three Cs, but maybe the three Cs I take out of this hopothesis is clarity, collaboration and cohesion.

Gareth J. Mole:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, although the international collaboration might be regarded as the biggest challenge, and I can see that, let’s just think about what you’ve managed to achieve in the Sport Psych Show. I’m sitting halfway between Sydney and Canberra. You’re in London. Through the wonders of modern technology, it’s like we’re sitting across from one another. So I think the advantage about the international approach is that what we can do is we can go, “Okay, what have you done in your country, Sweden? What have you guys done? And what can we learn from that?”

And I think ultimately, Dan, that will trump the difficulties that exist between borders, and those difficulties are really things that we could potentially just decide and not something that are going to interfere with what we are potentially trying to work on. So from my point of view, my enthusiasm for something international would be much greater than something only based in Australia, because I believe listening to so many of the interviews that you’ve had on the Sport Psych Show that there’s a really nice flavor of different experiences from different countries, and we could really learn a lot from what have you guys done versus us. And so for me, it would have to be international.

Dan Abrahams:

Interesting. Great stuff. And before we round things off, you mentioned that word technology. I mean, we hadn’t really talked about technology, which could be fruitful on another conversation in the future on the Sport Psych Show, but technology I’m sure would play a massive role in sports psychology delivery in 2050. But Gareth, what a rich conversation? I really, really enjoyed that, mate. Thank you so much for coming on.

Brilliant, Gareth. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, mate. I Really enjoyed that. Thank you.

Gareth J. Mole:

And you too, Dan, and keep up the great work.

Dan Abrahams:

Thank you, mate. I really enjoyed that podcast, everyone, and I’d love to hear what you, the listener think. So please do get in touch via Twitter or Facebook or through my website, danabrahams.com to tell me exactly what you think of the Sport Psych Show. And if you do have any suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them. I’m already looking forward to next week’s episode. Bye for now.

In this article we will explore the concept of mental blocks. Specifically the kinds of mental blocks that we commonly encounter in a sport and performance context. Without a doubt, some sports are likely to product more mental blocks than others. Which ones? Those that require manoeuvres such as gymnastics, surfing and all equestrian sports to name the most obvious.

For the rest of this article I will use gymnastics as an example. This is what the situation typically looks like when we find out about the mental block. A young gymnast is preparing for a major upcoming competition. For the uneven bars she is confident about the whole routine expect for the The Def (see below).

The Def (bars)

Description: The Def is a Gienger release move with an extra full twist. In simpler terms, the Def is a skill completed on the uneven bars where the gymnast releases the bar, completes a back salto layout with one and a half twists (540°) before catching the bar again.

In the mind of this hypothetical gymnast The Def is a mental block. It’s a skill that is so hard that she can’t imagine being able to do it in training; let alone in competition.

So how we know it’s a mental block as opposed to a different type of block? Is it enough to just take this athlete’s word for it? Not really.

What are the other kinds of blocks?

The main ones are physical and technical blocks. A physical block is when the body simply will not allow for the skill to be executed at this time. This might be due to injury, or literally the size of athlete. Think about a junior basketballer who wants to dunk the ball. She knows how but is just not tall enough (yet) to get anywhere near the ring.

A technical block, on the other hand, is when an athlete currently doesn’t have the “muscle memory” to execute a certain skill. A great example of this is when it golf, a few year back, they allowed long handled putters. For the non-golfing readers, this is a putter (used on the green) that is much longer than normal ones. The technique required to use this new type of putter is not the same as for a normal, shorter putter. So, many players tried it, had technical blocks and then went back to the old style.

Finally, We Have Mental Blocks

Or maybe we should call them genuine mental blocks. A genuine mental block is when the performer really believes that they will not be able to perform the skill. And it’s this belief, and nothing else, that is actually getting in the way of them doing it.

So here are no physical nor technical reasons why they shouldn’t be able to do this skill. One of the most compelling pointers it’s a mental block is if the performer has already done the skill in the past. 

Let’s go back to our example of the gymnast. If she has executed The Def before but can’t anymore this suggests a mental block.

Some sport psychologists might like to find out if there is reason for this. Was there a bad fall once? Maybe she saw another gymnast try and fail? Maybe someone has told her it’s impossible. Personally, I prefer to spend the majority of the mental conditioning on how to help them overcome the mental block. And these suggestions, below, are likely to the same regardless of the cause. And remember, these is not always a cause. This is mainly due to the limited amount of time that we have without our sporting clients. On average, via our monthly approach to consulting, we spend between 90 and 120 minutes “in session” with our clients. So it’s not that we are uninterested in the causes of things (such as mental blocks) it’s that we don’t have time to really get into them.

Baby Steps 

Baby steps refers to simply breaking down the skill into smaller, more manageable parts. Of course this is normally the coaches’ domain but not all coaches are mentally astute. Competence (actions) before confidence (a feeling) is the key here. Competence before confidence means that an athlete needs to be able to do something competently in order to feel confidence. In other words telling them “you can do it” is not very effective. Baby steps are a great way to overcome mental blocks. If done right there is never a large leap in difficulty.

For example, let us imagine that The Def is a 9 / 10 in terms of difficulty. What does a 7 look like? And and 5 or 3? Once these have been established then the gymnast can go back to the number in which they feel competent. Let’s say 4/10. With some patience, they can then work their way slowly up through the numbers. Do not, under any circumstances, jump from a 6 to 9 for example.

Seperate Actions from Thoughts from Emotions

Another way to overcome mental blocks is by realising that actions, thoughts and emotions are not one and the same. By this I mean separate actions, emotions and thoughts into different types of stimulus. This can be done away from training to start with. Through processes like Really Simple Mindfulness anyone can learn to observe their emotions and thoughts and therefore not let them stop certain actions from taking place.

As some of my clients know I like to prove this during sessions. For example, I will ask them to tap their head whilst saying to themselves “I am tapping my thigh”. Once the athlete knows that action are genuinely independent of thoughts and emotions they can use this in training. Using the current example, this means accepting that thoughts such as “I will never be able to do this” are fine. Feelings of panic are to be accepted and they don’t have to stop you from taking the first step (literally).

And if you combine these two ideas, the combination tends to be very effective.

As always, if you’d like a helping hand let us know.