Hello and welcome back. It's a very cold, very chilly Dublin, Ireland morning. Last time I did one of these podcasts, I was in the streets of Tokyo. Very different feel, very vibrant, very happening place. These very chilly cold streets of Dublin are a little bit different. In my last podcast, I wanted to really talk about diving for the line, and we spent 15, 20 minutes just talking about the the values of making sure you got a plan and making sure you've got a strategy and you stick to it irrespective of where you are in your cycle. Coming up to the end of the year, many people were talking about diving for the line. In this podcast, I wanted to talk a little bit more about belief. And I'm here with the Quantus Wallabies for the Australia versus Ireland game, which is tomorrow. I've been here all week working with a couple of the guys, and I get to see a lot of different behavioural dynamics in people. I get to see people when they're relaxed and they're training, and I get to see people when they're under a bit more pressure towards the selection for playing.
And I also get to see people when they're a bit put under pressure, and they are playing. And part of that system and that process allows me to see people when they're confident and when people start to have self doubts. So what that does for them in a performance spectrum is when they have those self-doubts, they start to question things that they know. So if they know how to play a specific role within a team, when they get put under pressure, they start to or can start to question that. And when they question that, it brings that process, that subconscious, that subsea process that they've been training for years and they're confident and comfortable with into question. It brings it into their prefrontal cortex, and And they begin to overanalyze it. Now, I don't know if that's you or you know somebody like that, that they overanalyze things. They look at what they already know, and then they try to recreate it, try to look for the flaws in it. And let's be honest, if you're looking for a floor in anything, then you'll find it. And that's purely and simply because, Pardalia, we like to see patterns.
We like to see things that sometimes not even there, just because we We want to justify having that pattern. So as we head towards being put under pressure, being a competitive environment, what we're looking to do is to trust that we know what we need to know. And that's an important aspect of consistency in performance. If we don't trust that we know what we need to know and we're trying to recreate it, then we're going to slow that process down. If we think about our subconscious, our subsea, that works around about three times faster than our conscience, because there's no need to go through processes. There's no need to reanalyze it. It is what it is. It's what you do. Once you bring that back into your pre-final cortex and you start to overanalyze it again, then you start to slow that process down to the point where it becomes unproductive. It becomes It becomes very difficult for you to do what you do and what you've trained purely and simply because it's in the front part of your brain again. It's the part of the brain that makes up the strategy in the first place.
It's restrategizing something that's already been strategized, if that makes sense. So what we want to be able to do is to trust that we know what we need to know. And we do that by... I use a thing called positive stacking. I teach my athletes to recall the times it has been successful, make sure that they are so detailed in the way that they recall those successes that it allows their brain to increase the serotonin and dopamine and reduce the amount of cortisol in a brain. This allows the athlete to be comfortable, confident, to feel familiar with what they're doing. And that familiarity allows us to subconsciously perform. That leaves us the cranial space in the front of the brain to be able to process things that arise out of the norm, things that we have had no idea were going to happen. And we want to make sure that we don't overtax our thinking process, our prefrontal cortex. And I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you go to compete and you get that performance amnesia. You go to do something, you go, I can't remember my routine, or I can't remember what I do here, or You make silly mistakes that you would never normally make in training, or you never normally make in a competition that's in your mind not as important or not as high value.
We make those mistakes or our brain shuts down and we get that performance amnesia basically because the prefrontal cortex gets overwhelmed and it goes into shutdown mode. Once it goes into shutdown mode, there's nothing we can do until it reboots and restarts itself. That reboot process can take anything from a couple of minutes to 10 minutes, 20 minutes, maybe even half a day for your brain to get back into the flow, into that default position again. That essentially is the competition over. The event is probably going to be over by that time. So we don't want to have to push our brain to the point where it shuts down or shuts us out or shuts out the information that we We need to know. We want to make sure that we can perform with comfort and confidence each and every time. That's subconscious. So I've already talked a little bit about positive stacking, that remembering what you've done in the past has been successful, what that did for you and creating that comfort and that familiarity. The other aspect to that, and we've talked a lot about this in the past, is visualisation. Visualisation is such a critical aspect to everybody's performance.
If we teach our brain what we need it to do, then it knows what it needs to do, and it's not trying to recreate it at the time. That recreation process can take away much of the comfort and the confidence that we've created in training. Training essentially becomes none and void, purely and simply because your brain is trying to make it up as it goes along. So there's visualisation and there's visualisation. When I speak to coaches and athletes and I say, Do you visualise? And they go, Of course I do. When ask them to explain to me how they visualise, it's very, very basic. 90% of the time, it's very, very basic. Some people get it right, but the vast majority of people get it very wrong. And they then start to undervalue visualisation, not because the skill doesn't work, but because they're not applying the skill correctly. So there's two forms of visualisation that I teach my clients to begin with, the foundational visualisation. And that's disassociated and associated. And both of them have very different skill sets and very different rewards you get from that. Now, you probably hear I'm a bit out of breath here walking through streets of Dublin and trying to find my way to the next place.
So the disassociated visualisation is the first one we teach people, and we teach them that because it's a mechanical perspective. It's not in motive at all. And that's where the athlete stands back and they watch themselves perform something in a way that is very, very mechanical. It looks at how I do what I do, the mechanics of that position, the mechanics of that skill or that move. When we do that and we just look at it from a skills-based perspective, then we can make sure that what we're putting into our brain is purely and simply the skill. Not the emotion, not the expectation, not the reward, just purely and simply the skill. When you do that and you stand back and you watch yourself perform something in such a pristine pure format, you're teaching your brain what you expect it to do. And some of you who have come along to some of my trainings will know that the science, a really cool science behind visualisation, is the fact that our brain doesn't really know the difference between physically doing something and imagining doing something. When you imagine you do something, you've got way more opportunity to do that right.
When you do something physically, there's so many There are variables involved. If you get fatigue, you get equipment failure, you get dynamics of different things, of people being around you, different environments. So then the information you're putting into your brain can sometimes be multiple different messages. We want to put the one pure message inside our brain. We want it to be as optimal as possible. Us stepping back and visualising that in the best format we possibly can is the smartest way for us to do that. There we go. Someone going for a jog in the morning, the frightening of the jeebies out of me. So the second format of visualisation is associated. So we've got disassociated where we watch ourselves. So then clearly What we're associated is when we are in our own body, we see what we see, hear what we hear, and feel what we feel while we're doing that. What we're now doing is engaging the emotion, the buy-in, the way that the emotion then categorises that into our brain as something that's selectable. When it's selectable in our brain and it's the purest format, we have way better opportunity to perform the way we want to perform.
So visualisation is such a critical aspect of replicable performance, making sure that we perform the way we want to perform. When we get put under pressure and we revert back to a primal behaviour, which we all do, when we get put under that spotlight or everything goes up a notch around us, going from maybe a club competition to a international competition or even a world competition on the world stage, then what our brain does, it goes like that octopus I talk about big tentacles when it's brave, it goes really small tentacles when it's scared. We do the same thing. We go through that process and we start to bring everything in to try and control the outcome as much as we possibly can. We want that process to be when it controls that performance to be the optimal performance. And that will only ever occur when the information we put in is of high quality. So remember that whatever you put in is what you get out. If If you put a rubbish blueprint in, you're going to get a rubbish blueprint out. We want to make sure what goes in is the highest optimal quality.
And that comes down to the visualisation. People ask me, how often should you visualise? For me, you can't undervisualize. As long as it's always quality, you can't undervisualize. So by making sure that you know what you need to do, you're embedding it correctly, you've built familiarity around it, what you're going to end up with is an optimal performance blueprint or neurological point of reference. These neurological points of reference are seriously the things that we, as athletes, are trying to achieve when we train. We're trying to create those blueprints in our brain that are going to sustain us when we want to perform the way we need to perform. So the quality in is a direct result to the quality out. We've got visualisation, we've got visualisation. We've got positive stacking. The positive stacking is going to raise our positive emotions, a recall and familiarity of the things that we've done in the past. Yeah, I know I can do this. Then we come back to the trust, which is where we started this conversation this morning, probably about a couple of kilometres away and a little bit colder, a bit warmer now. So that format that of trust gets put under the microscope when we get the expectations of others, we start to doubt what we know.
We all do this with human nature. If somebody questions us, we may defend it straight away, but subconsciously, what we might do is then begin to doubt it. We want to make sure that we don't doubt that. So when we get put under pressure, we can step up and believe in what we believe in. We've talked about positive stacking being the way we remember it in the past. We've talked about visualisation, about creating the future. But how do we know what we do right now and trust what we do? We need to have behavioural triggers. So when you go to perform and you fire a trigger, you want to send the right chemical concoction through your brain that's going to say, Yep, I've got this. I'm comfortable, I'm confident, I'm familiar. I know what I need to do. I've done it before. Let's go do it. And all of that comes down to you having specific triggers that trigger your performance. We've talked in the past about the non-athlete, the student-athlete, and the performer-athlete, and the importance of the balance of being an athlete. It's just as important to be the non-athlete as it is to be the student in training as it is, obviously, what we all strive for, the performer.
Maybe what we haven't talked about enough is is how do we trigger between each of those phases? What do you do to go from the non-athlete into the student? When you go from being at home to go into training, how do you tell yourself, this is the time I step up and become the student. We want to have both a physical and a verbal trigger. We want to make sure both of those are fired every single time we're going to train, so our brain knows how to switch from one level to the next level. We also want to do the same process when we go from training into competition. We need to know how to step up. I was talking to an athlete yesterday, and I was saying to him, Right, when you are training, how much of your training is you are 100 %. And they were very proud to tell me that they trained 100 % every single time. Sorry, just running across the road there. They trained 100 % every single time. I said, Okay, so when you come to competition, how do you step that up? How do you step it up to be the optimal you?
And they didn't have an answer. Now, this doesn't mean that you train less. However, when you're training, It's okay to make mistakes, isn't it? It's okay to push boundaries. It's okay to try new things. It's okay to go there and go, You know what? That didn't work. Next session, I'm going to try this to see if that works. When you have that ability to recognise the different needs of the different situations, you can then gauge the intensity or the quality of the outcome. You wouldn't want to go into a competition or an event and say, It's okay, I can make mistakes today. I'm just going to try something new. I'm going to throw something I've never done before. You just wouldn't do that because it's not productive. It's counterproductive. You want to go in there, and the most simple thing you do as an athlete is is to perform. Now, I know many of you raise eyebrows when you hear me say that, but the most simple thing you do is perform because you go and do something you know and you've trained. Harder than that is to train. Because you're creating it at that point.
It's new. It's not formed yet. The performance is formed. The training is forming that performance. And then you can't do either of those unless what you've done is being rested and the optimal you turns up to perform. So there's a lot of need for the athlete to be well-rested, well-focused, well-balanced, so that they can train at their optimal. When they train at their optimal, they can then perform at the optimal. So having a trigger between each of those, being able to step the intensity up and step the intensity down, will allow you to own your performance. We got what I said about triggers. Now, they can be physical ones. When you walk into a venue, you go, Right, as I walk into my training venue, I become the student. Or when I walk into the competition hall, I become the performer. But we want to make sure there's a verbal command that goes with that. And the verbal command that goes with that is just as critical as the physical. So when you say to yourself, Right, I'm in student mode, or time to train, or or whatever that is, your brain knows what you're expecting of it.
It knows that the format that it's going to be in is the format of, it's okay to make a few mistakes here. It's okay because you're trialling new things. It's okay to be creative and inventive here. Or when you step into the competition, you say, Perform a time. Your brain knows it steps from being that latitude of making mistakes to precision, and it's purest. We want to make sure your brain knows that, so you need to tell it each time. It needs to be as familiar about that as it is about the skills that you do. You wouldn't turn up to a competition and say, I've never trained, but I'll give this a go. If we want to make sure that we perform our optimal each and every time, then we got to teach our brain to be in that place at the right time. One of the things that I tell every single client is we want to take a little bit of our competition into every single training session so that we can take the trained you into competition Competition. What I mean by that is within your normal training environment, even if you're not in competition season, you want to continue to train your brain to be able to step between those three different stages, non-athlete, student-athlete, performer.
So if you're a gymnastic, for argument's sake, and you're in the gym, and you're learning a new skill, at the end of that training session, what you want to do is say to your coach, Right. At this stage, I'm learning a new skill. I want to train to perform that skill now. And you go into that competition mindset, where you perform that skill as raw as it is, as new as it is, what you're doing, you're training your brain to perform it from a very early age, from a very early stage. Once you're doing that, and you're doing that frequently enough, competition or the anxiety that comes with competition gets dissipated because you're no longer anxious about something that you don't know. You do it frequently enough to know what you need to know. You perform often enough that it becomes part of what you you do. And you differentiated between the student and the performer frequently enough that you can have control over that. So when we started off this conversation today, talking about athletes who under pressure didn't perform the way they knew they could perform. They needed to trust they knew what they knew.
We've talked about positive stacking. We've talked about visualisation. We've talked about anchoring for each of the stages, the performer, the student, and the non-athlete. So it's just as important to tell yourself, right, you know what? I'm off-duty now. I'm going to go and have some downtime. I'm going to go and just kick my feet up and watch a movie or whatever it is so that your brain isn't processing. I talk about it like a racing car. If you got in a racing car and put your foot flat to the floor the whole time, what's going to happen? If you don't crash or nothing breaks, weeks, then you will run out of fuel. And you as an athlete is exactly the same thing. If you're on the whole time, something's going to crash. It could be you, it could be your skill set. You're going to run out of fuel because you're going to be fatigued. Or you know what? You're going to get injured or ill because you're on the whole time. We want to make sure we've got balance and quality of balance. And we tell our brain each time that we're going in each of these stages, this is for this purpose.
This is this value you're going to get out of this. So that's a really critical aspect of preparation that doesn't start the week before a competition. That starts forever, for always. Being able to traverse all three of those different stages is going to allow you to have optimal and ultimate control over what you do. Okay, so I hope you've enjoyed this little rant from Dublin, Ireland. As you can probably hear, I've walked quite some distance. I'm now at the stadium. It's 6:00 in the morning and it's still really cold. So I'm looking forward to a good game with the boys this weekend, and I'm sure that the skill sets that they're learning, they'll apply. So until next episode, which I will be doing from London next week in our next podcast, and I'll give you another little teaser and tid bit of information as I walk the streets of London. So signing off from Ireland. Until the next episode, enjoy the ride, and train smart. My name is Dave Diggle. I'm the mind coach.
