Mentally Tougher

2 x free sport psychology info nights

2010-09-07T13:32:00.000+10:00

There are a couple of free “sport psych” events coming up that you may wish to attend and forward to people...one in Sydney and the other in Darwin!

Event 1 is being organised by Sydney University
Topic: What Makes a Champion? Tracing and Facilitating the Development of Elite Athletes
Speaker: Professor A. Mark Williams
When: Weds 15th Sept from 5 – 7pm
Cost: Nil but registration is essential
Where: Lidcombe, Sydney (E101, 75 East Street Lidcombe, Cumberland Campus, University of Sydney)
How to sign up: http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/fhs/628.html?eventcategoryid=49&eventid=6512

Event 2 is being organised by Condor Performance (www.condorperformance.com)
Topic: Questions, Answers, Myths and Truths about the mental side of sport and performance.
Speaker: Gareth J. Mole (MAPS)
When: Monday 20th Sept from 6 – 8pm
Cost: Nil but registration is essential
Where: Medina Grand Darwin Waterfront (http://www.medina.com.au/medina-grand-darwin-waterfront/hotel)
How to sign up: email info@condorperformance.com

Plumbers, electricians and handymen

2010-04-08T19:36:00.000+10:00

One of the Condor Performance team drafted an exellent letter recently and it's too good NOT to be shared. Here it is, with all clues regarding who is was sent to removed. Enjoy and comment below. GJM

When sporting teams underperform a large number of well intentioned people come out of the woodwork to present ‘the solution’. They may be fans, former players, members of the media, board members, family and friends of the players and so on.

Few, in fact close to none of them, have the expertise to offer a solution as they have no idea what goes on at the club during the week; they only see what happens on the weekend. Their ‘solutions’ often include: sack the coach; pay the players less; train them harder; punish them for poor performances; drop players; work harder on technical and physical areas and so on.

To answer the question ‘How can a team play so poorly, then so well, then so poorly again?’ there are only three areas to look at: Physical, Technical and Mental. Physical and technical abilities don't change overnight so inconsistency must be a menal issue. Poor execution of technical skills under pressure falls within the mental element, as does motivation, concentration, feeling nervous, expectations, pressure and so on.

We spend 6 days a week working on these with athletes at all levels. So, it must be asked: Who has the necessary expertise in this area? We do, as sport psychologists. We work with the technical and physical experts (in a wide range of sports) to make sure that the mental element is properly covered. Anything less is guess work, and we don’t guess.

Quite often, having a technical coach work on the mental side is like having a plumber or handyman do the electrical work in your house.

SD

Is it impossible or do you just think it is?

2010-03-19T09:48:00.000+11:00

At Condor Performance we love our golf analogies. In fact, we often use golf examples to explain concepts to performers from other sports. For example to our rugby league and union goal kickers and our soccer penalty takers we use the example of putting. Man (or women), ball, target. In fact, golf is such a mentally demanding game I’ve often thought about getting non golfers of others sports to play it as a form of mental workout. Maybe that’s why some many of them do?

But my favourite golf example is used to try and get performers to redefine the concept of “impossible” (e.g. it’s impossible for us to come back from 3 – 0 down, it’s impossible for me to train in these conditions etc). If you ask a room of golfers if it’s possible to score a hole in one on a par 5 they will unanimously say NO.

But they would be wrong (use the internet to find out how and post your reply here). Interestingly, such a score is called....you guessed it....a CONDOR.

Australian Tennis - thoughts?

2010-03-03T12:44:00.000+11:00

In case you missed it or didn't know it was on there was a rather revealing documentary about the state of tennis in Australia on Monday night on ABC television. You can watch it online by clicking on the below link.

www.abc.net.au/4corners/

Please use the COMMENT box or link below to give your opinion. I'll add my thoughts as I respond to yours. GJM

How young is too young?

2010-02-15T10:24:00.000+11:00

Last week we ran another of our free Q&A sessions (email info@condorperformance.com to attend the next one).This time for some local tennis coaches and one of the questions was 'how young is too young to start work on the mental side?'

The answer we gave on the day was 'our youngest private client is 8 years old' which is true but could imply that is the minimum age of performer we will work this. Earl Woods began working on Tiger’s mental game at about the age of three – where he would famously try and distract his son during his new backswing (Harder Practice) and play games like 'see the putt' (classic visualisation).

The great thing about sport psychology is the ideas need to be simple to be of any use and therefore the only factor that determines the minimum age to start work on the mental side of sport / performance is the creativity of the sport psychologist teaching the mental skills. I often think of mental toughness like speaking a second language. Imagine you spoke English and Japanese from a young age and you knew thinking in Japanese would make you perform better under pressure. Now, who do you think is more capable of actually learning a second language – a 3 year old or a 23 year old? The obvious answer is the 3 year old. Tiger Woods' father knew this.

This is no minimum age to start improving the way you think and do things – which in a nutshell is all we, as sport psychologists, are trying to do. Cheers, GJM

How Fabio Capello changed England

2010-02-04T13:36:00.000+11:00

One of clients had just forwarded us a link to a very recent article about the mental skills the current England football / soccer manager has used to improve the team's performances. Regardless of if you follow soccer or not it's well worth a read and if you do please put you comments up on the BLOG for others to read:

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/feature?id=732672&cc=3436&ver=global

My one comment would be how the top coaches are actually more like informal sport psychologists now than technical coaches. Things will get really exciting when this “old school” mental conditioning is combined with the new, science based principles (that we and other qualified sport psychologists use). Cheers, GJM

Which sports need the most amount of mental toughness?

2010-01-18T10:58:00.000+11:00

Two questions we get from time to time are “how mentally demanding is my sport” and “which sports need the most amount of mental toughness”? First, as scientists we try and answer these types of question using evidence rather than guesswork. However, the literature has yet to try and answer this question. So in turn we do the next best thing...make a hypothesis as experts.

There are two ways of looking at this and I’d be interested to hear you opinion on which sounds the most sensible. Theory One is that all sports and performance areas have variables and these variables change the amount of mental toughness required. For example, how long a match lasts for is a variable with the 100 meter sprint at one end and test cricket at the other. Then if you know which side is mentally harder you can start doing some maths. So in the previous example the sports that take longer are mentally harder as they require greater concentration and there’s more time to think. If this is correct then on the variable of duration test cricket would be mentally more draining that a 100 meter athletics race. Other variables would be number of teammates, risk of injury, potential earnings, task complexity, environmental factors, how winners are picked (judged by people or measured by machines), speed of tasks etc.

Before you sit down and try and work out how your pursuit rates on all of the above compared to other sports you might like to consider Theory Two. What if all these variables cancel one another out so that in the end all sports and performance endeavours are equal in terms of mental requirements to reach the top? For example, maybe there is much more pressure on the 100 meter sprint that the test cricketer because he / she will not have time to correct any errors made. An error made by a test cricketer on day one can virtually be forgotten by the time the match is over.

As sport psychologists it suits us to operate as if this second theory is correct as it allows us to treat all of our clients equally and not compare a formula one driver with an ultimate Frisbee player. Both just want to get better, don’t they?

Cheers, GJM

There are no magic days and dates

2009-12-14T07:28:00.000+11:00

Non magic days and dates are all the times when we use a specific day or date or holiday or time of year to sabotage our efforts. The most common are “weekends” when people say things such as “I work all week, I’m not going to do anything on my days off…it’s just more work”. Birthdays, public holidays are all dangerous but we’re heading into the most dangerous of the all…the Christmas break. We call them non magic days because of the irrational belief that many people have that these days are ‘special or magic’ in that the normal facts and rules don’t apply. Well they do. Christmas day is a 24 block of time in which going for a jog or a swim will have the exact same effect as if it were any other day of the year. With that in mind, the Condor Performance team hopes that you have much more than just a happy Dec 25th. Cheers, GJM

Practice makes permanent, not perfect

2009-11-30T10:33:00.000+11:00

Practice makes perfect is a myth as perfect is unobtainable. Much more accurate is practice makes permanent in that the motor skills you’re practising become so ingrained and natural that nothing can get in their way. One of the biggest dilemmas we face in sport is that to get something to become truly permanent you have to practice it A LOT (estimations suggest around 20 hours a week) and yet doing the same thing over and over will soon become boring. The solution is not to compromise on the amount you practice but vary the types and intensity of the training blocks. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to introduce some mental rehearsal into each practice session where you are either watching clips of how to do it correctly or imagining the same.

Another excellent way of preventing boredom is make sure every training session is challenging. If you don’t already know how to do this then I suggest asking how to add Pressure and Harder Practice to your current regime. It’s gold. GJM

I bet you over-practice what you’re bad at

2009-11-16T11:23:00.001+11:00

So you played / participated in an event on the weekend and it didn’t go well. Come Monday you decide you’re going to practice all the things you did poorly and ignore what you did well.

Sound familiar? Well it is and it’s a very bad idea for two main reasons. First, by practising what you’re not doing well you’re actually reminding yourself over and over again that you suck. Imagine if after school you got a select group of kids and made them only do extra maths practice. They would think it must be because their maths skills are poor.

Secondly, by practising what you did poorly on the weekend you are risking swapping your strengths for your weaknesses. One of our aims as sport psychologists is to remove strengths and weaknesses from the picture. How do we do this? You spend your time getting better at the elements of your sport / performance area as they relate to their importance. For example, only about 5% of tennis shots are lob shots so regardless of how good or bad you are at playing the lob you’ll want to spend 5% of your practice time on this shot.

Exact ratios for each sport are rare (golf expected) so please feel free to email us your thoughts for your sport or add a comment below. Cheers, GJM

Why are we still guessing?

2009-10-19T09:50:00.000+11:00

Over the weekend we did somewhat of a spring clean...actually it was more like a spring organisation and I spent quite a while going through my books, my journals and all matter of printed material related to sport psychology. Whilst doing this a couple of things come to my mind that I thought was good ‘blog material’. First, I was amazed at just how much information about sport psychology there is and how the more specific scientific information we have can actually have the opposite effect (i.e. information overload despite the information being excellent). There is definitely such as things as too much of a good thing.

The second pondering was why, in the presence of all this information about how to help performers via mental conditioning, some many people with this job still guess based on their own experiences. It can’t be cost as the peer reviewed journals in sport psychology are easily accessible via most university libraries. I believe the reason is that the real experts best suited to dealing with everyday concepts like motivation and attitude and how to response to adversity are outnumbers by those who think their individual experience in these areas are empirically valid.

Unfortunately from a scientific point of view they are not and it’s a bit like trusting a pill your mate made in his garage to help with a headache rather than taking an aspirin. One might work if you get lucky (and could have the opposite effect if you’re unlucky) while the other one will work as long as you follow the directions.

Use of time - The Holy Grail

2009-10-05T12:35:00.000+11:00

Twice a week I drive to Campbelltown and back to lecture. The combined driving time is 3 hours per week or 42 hours over a 14 week semester. Rather than simply listening to garbage on the radio I have one of these great little gadgets that allows me to tune my MP3 player to the car radio and I use the time to listen to a number of audio recording that will, in my opinion, make me a better sport psychologist. These include audio books (try “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell), audio recordings of my own sessions to listen for ways to improve as well as sessions of Condor Performance’s other consultants. Arguably the most important mental skill of them all is how you use the 168 hours we have in a week and it is not surprisingly that so many of the ideas we pass onto athletes and performers are designed to improve the quality and quantity of TIME. Are you doing the right things, for the right length of times, in the right order, at the right time of day with the right people in the right way?

The Motivation Myth

2009-09-21T10:24:00.002+10:00

One of the odd things about our work is we come across certain words a lot and we’re often amazed at how they are misused or misunderstood. From this list the undisputed king is the concept of ‘motivation’. I often explain the myth that some of us have more of it than others with a little story. Imagine we knew someone who spent all day, every day sitting at home on the couch watching TV and eating chips.

It would be tempting to call this person unmotivated, wouldn’t it?

But we’d be wrong. In fact the couch potato is a highly motivated individual albeit towards activities you and I might not think are very productive. The fact is, until we die, we all have the same amount of motivation and it’s the direction of these efforts (eg. choice of how we spent our time) that differs from one person to the next. Have a think about that the next time you hear or use the terms motivated / motivator / motivation.
Cheers, GJM
PS – feel free to comment on the above or make suggestions of future posts by submitting comments below.

We can not guarantee you’ll win but...

2009-09-12T11:20:00.002+10:00

One of the questions we get asked most is “can you guarantee that I / we will win” after doing some mental skill training. The answer is no but we can guarantee to increase your changes. How and why this is the case is best told by the story of why we called ourselves Condor Performance.

A few years ago I was in Peru with my partner and we heard about this place called “the valley of the condors”. The most common way to get there was via tour group so I asked a few of them “as it’s a two day drive are we guaranteed to see some condors?” They replied that there was about a 50% chance of seeing these massive birds during the hour at the viewing platform.

We decided that these odds were not good enough so set about trying to hire a car (easier said than done in Peru). In the end we managed to find a local willing to lend us his truck for 2 days and set out (with a hand drawn map) to find the valley. At about noon on the second day we arrived only to discover that there were about 500 tourists and no condors. We waited. Slowly, the visitors were told that there tour buses were leaving and the 500 soon become 50 but still there was not a condor is sight. By about 2pm there was only a single bus left plus the two of us and the dozen or so tourists finally threw the towel in having spent all that time and money only to see nothing.

As we were the only people with our own transport we had the option of waiting a little longer. Not five minutes later we saw three black dots on the horizon. Partly in disbelief and partly in sheer wonder we saw as the three dots came towards us. There were Andean Condors and gave the two of us a private show by flying above us, doing a couple of laps of honour and then flying off over the mountains. We could not believe our eyes.
We were not guaranteed to see any Condors by deciding to go alone...but we did increase our chances.

Cheers, GJM

Yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery

2009-09-04T23:52:00.003+10:00

One idea that we are constantly trying to get our clients to focus on is the here and now. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? Huge amounts of emotional energy are wasted on thinking about the past and the future. Unless you have a time machine the fact is what is in the past - good, bad or ugly - will stay there. What will happen in the future is best influenced by what you do today (also known as now). So if "yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery" then the best time to focus your mind and your efforts is....you guessed it...today.

Stay tuned, GJM

With pressure, comes opportunity

2009-08-31T09:51:00.003+10:00

This has to be our first Thought of the Week because it’s also our slogan. Pressure, unlike a table or an apple, cannot be seen nor touched. What this means is basically the amount of pressure you feel and what you see pressure as is more or less “up to you”. So many performers get into trouble when they think of pressure as an obstacle to success when in actual fact it shows you have an opportunity in front of you. If you don’t want pressure, stop trying to achieve anything and it will soon go away.