In the heat of competition, athletes and performers alike don't have the luxury of being taken away by distractions. Just think of any recent performance of yours. How many distractions did you deal with? How did you deal with the unwanted, negative and discomforting thoughts and feelings?
Imagine you are playing in the World Cup hosted in your home country for your national team. The press demanded that anything other than your team winning the whole tournament would be a failure. Your team scraped through the first knockout game against a smaller country on penalties, with your captain being so nervous he watched from the sidelines. The media were then mocking your team for crying before a penalty shootout. You then make it to the semi-final against one of the favourites to win the tournament. Just one step away from the final. The pressure is immense. The whole nation relies on you to perform and get the win. Then the unthinkable happens. The opposing team scored four goals in six minutes, two separated by 69 seconds. The other team win by the biggest margin in any World Cup final or semi-final game and your team suffers the biggest loss of any hosting nation ever. If you are a football fan, you would have guessed already that the above is what happened to the Brazil national team in the 2014 World Cup.
We can all guess and try to pick apart what happened in that story, but that isn’t the point of this. As athletes, performing to the best of your ability in these high-pressure moments is something you have to do. In the example above, it is clear to see that the discomforting thoughts and feelings associated with that situation took over the Brazillian players. They unfortunately allowed themself to be hooked by these discomforting thoughts and feelings. Being hooked by these unfortunately took their attention away from doing what needed to be done at that moment.
As an athlete or performers who are about to go and perform, we need all the attention we can get. Our attention needs to be on the external stimuli of the game, not the internal stimuli of our thoughts and feelings. However, this is easier said than done. The beautiful thing though, there is a way.
Usually within the sporting and performance domains, it was understood that performance and life can be improved by changing and overcoming the negative thoughts and feelings we have. Now these approaches work and have a whole host of evidence to back them up. However, I want to shine the light on a more unique and unusual approach.
Instead of focusing on changing the unwanted and discomforting thoughts and feelings, we can instead focus on how we relate to our thoughts and feelings. Instead of changing them, we learn to accept and defuse from the unwanted inner experience, freeing us up so we can have a more energetic life doing the things we want and need to do. You can learn how to let thoughts and feelings run their course without making them worse.
We can learn to realise that thoughts are just thoughts, nothing more or nothing less. Our minds come up with all sorts of stuff all the time, whether that is something distressing, weird or happy. Our mind is always busy with something distracting, attempting to distract us from what we need to be doing. Now these thoughts are not a problem. They only become a problem when we become hooked by them. How do you know you've been hooked by a thought you ask? You will feel it. You can feel it taking over your body, like you jsut put on a coat.
We can choose if we want to identify with the thoughts our mind comes up with. We can choose if we beleive and buy into the things our mind says. We can also perceive the things our mind comes up with as ‘chit-chat’ that you can simply notice, allowing you to move on and focus on what needs to be done in the real world at that moment.
Funnily enough, we are doing this all the time. We have thousands of thoughts every day that we don’t get emotionally attached to. We jsut forget them because paying no attention to them means those thoughts come and go so quickly we don’t notice them! We are creating a relationship with our thoughts, our mind and the content inside it. This can be a real eye-opener for many people. Thoughts are not reality, just ideas.
Our main aim for the above is to become psychologically flexible. That is the ability to respond in a flexible, adaptive and effective manner to changing situations. It means casting aside any unnecessary distractions caused by rigid thinking, unhelpful emotional reactivity and ineffective habits of behaviour.
Three pillars underpin the process of becoming psychologically flexible:
Openness
Awareness
Engagement
Openness refers to our ability to be fully aware of and not reject the discomforting internal physical and emotional experiences. This includes all the self-doubt, pain, embarrassment, distracting thoughts and so on. Awareness is our ability to be in contact with the present moment. What is happening around us right now, the physical reality outside of our body, in addition to what is going on inside of the body as well. We also defuse from our self-context, basically not being ruled by the old ideas about ourselves and our abilities. Finally, engagement relates to being fully involved in what you are doing and being involved in it because it is important to you. it is what you want to be doing deep down. It is about being clear about what your values are and then acting on them.
There are many activities and techniques to help build each pillar, which we will explore in future articles. To get started, let’s look at the barriers to your performance.
Start with writing down what you struggle with. Actually write it down though, using pen and paper. Writing it down on paper allows you to feel it more emotionally and physically. We tend to avoid writing it down because it feels uncomfortable. Our mind comes up with excuses to avoid it. It is called emotional avoidance and is at the core of what we are dealing with. The subtle, hard-to-detect attempts to avoid can hinder our performances.
Write down your answers to these questions:
What do I struggle with?
What I feel
What I think
When is it bad?
When is it better?
Triggers or signs for the worst
Triggers or signs for the better
The record sheet
The next activity is to complete the below record sheet at least once a day.
Step 1 - Write down a situation that happened and the day it happened
Step 2 - Write down the body sensations you felt
Step 3 - Write down the thoughts, images and evaluations that appeared in your mind in that situation
Step 4 - Write down your behaviour in that situation. What a video camera would see and hear
Practising noticing your internal reactions to situations and writing them down is a crucial exercise. It helps you become aware of the challenges you have and what you need to work on.
Mindfulness
The final activity is mindfulness. You are going to utilise the grand-daddy of all mindfulness exercises, mindfulness of breath. This is a skill, a developmental exercise and something we need to practice. It is like doing press-ups or bicep curls for the mind. The more you do, the better you get.
It is a very simple activity to do as well. Just find somewhere relatively quiet, where you are unlikely to be disturbed. Get into a stable, comfortable and upright position, sitting on a chair with your hands on your knees will do just fine. Then just pay attention to the physical sensations of breathing. If you notice you become distracted, that is ok, just bring your focus back to the physical sensations of breathing. Practice for 5 minutes a day and slowly increase the time as you become more comfortable with it. That’s it, simple.
Things to do:
Complete barriers to performance questions
Fill in the record sheet once a day
Practice mindfulness of breath for five minutes a day
Doing those things above will provide a solid foundation for your journey to becoming psychologically flexible. The ultimate aim is to be able to respond to the situations we find ourselves in in an adaptive, effective and flexible manner. For performance, that can be hugely beneficial. We realise that in the moment the only thing we can truly control is how we respond and behave. Being psychologically flexible means we respond most effectively to the situation. it means doing what needs to be done in that moment.
Thank you for reading! If you have any questions, or comments, or would like to explore how sports psychology can enhance your performance, feel free to reach out to me at drodgerssportpsych@gmail.com or give me a call at 07475 925 292. You can also check out my website by clicking this link https://www.thesportingbrain.com/. I'm here to help you unlock your full potential.
