Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is like a friend that sometimes you forget, and I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 61, we're going to look at Balancing Consequences with the Three-Legged Stool. Now, as an athlete, I remember one of my particular competitions when I went out and I've just come back from an injury. And my coach and the physio and the doctor had said to me, You were good to go. You were good to get back into competition. You were good to get back into training. But I had this negative thought in my head. What if I wasn't? It would have been a particularly bad injury. I'd fallen off and I'd had my elbow reconstructed. And I was very, very tentative about my competition, about performing, and certainly about doing that skill again, which was part of my routine. I remember sitting there the day of the competition, despite training for weeks prior to the competition and my coach saying, You're good to go, you're ready.
I remember sitting there on the day of the competition in the morning thinking, But what if I'm not? And this little thought, this seed of a thought was in my head of, What if I damage my elbow again? What if I end up not being able to compete ever again or not being able to use my arm again? And it had grown from this little niggling thought in my head to be in this massive mountain that I just could not get past. And as a young athlete, I remember doing the competition and doing particularly badly. I hadn't done anything that I had trained. I didn't do any performance preparation that I would have normally done. I just went out there with this thought in my head that made me feel really, really bad, that made my emotions really negative. And I ended up performing terrible, absolutely disgustingly. I remember walking away from the competition and feeling really bad about myself. When we think about these thoughts that come into our head and how quickly they can grow to not just be a concern, but be something that can completely derail you as an athlete, despite everybody telling me I was ready, and they were right, by the way, I was ready.
I had no further issues, and I've never had an issue with my elbow since the reconstruction. But in my head, I had this little thought that grew and grew and grew. It made me feel really, really bad, really scared. Then that scared feeling made my performance completely derailed. What's going on in there? How do we manage that differently? If I'd have gone back in to a time machine now and come back to that time again, what would I have done differently? How could I have managed that really negative thought that was the first thing that jumped into my head? How could I have managed that in a completely different way to bypass that, to take all the reference points that my coach, my physio, the doctor had given me. The surgeon had turned and said, You're good, you're fine. There's nothing wrong with you now. Yet I didn't believe them, and I'd created this negative thought And that's it. I'd created the thought. I know that now. At the time, I had no idea. So how do we manage that different? What if it isn't a negative thought that's the first thing that comes into your mind?
What if it's a feeling? If you get up in the morning, and we all have that nervous butterfly in the tummy of competition days. What if that feeling inside your body isn't just normal nerves, but it becomes a debilitating thought, which becomes a poor action. What if you've got habitual behaviours that you do that completely derails you, that sabotages your performance? Despite all the training, you go out and you a skill or an action completely different to what you've trained. That's habitual. You do that all the time. When you do that, it makes you feel really bad. When you feel really bad, you have these negative thoughts. For those of you who are listening to this and you're thinking, All right, I've done enough of these trainings now. I've listened to this guy speak often enough. I'm starting to see a pattern here. You're right. There is a pattern here. If you think something like, I can't do this, that thought of, I can't do this, something's going to go wrong, or don't fall is a classic one with as a gymnast myself, I hear gymnasts today saying, I just don't want to fall. I don't want to fall.
I don't want to fall off. What's the most front of thought thought that's going through your head is that negative, don't fall off. It's not, how do I do this right? It's, what's the consequences of doing it wrong? So that negative thought in the brain can then lead to you feeling a certain way. That feeling could be of not having enough preparation, not being good enough, not have had a good enough feedback from your coaches, which can then lead to you going out there and performing below your best. And as a performer, whether you're an ice skater, a football player, a rugby player, a golfer, we've all been there and had those performances is at the end of the day when you walk off that competitive arena and gone, I could have done that so much better. I didn't do what I trained. I hadn't performed the way that I knew I could perform. We've all been there. We've all done that. We just need to know how to navigate our way away from that and around those blockages to not have that influence us as frequently. Ultimately, what we want is to never have those negative thoughts, those debilitating emotions or performance actions that don't give us the outcome that we want.
But that's not a reality, is it? In reality, we know there's always going to be those bad days, those days where it just doesn't go right. We want to minimise those by having a strategy in place that recognises this pattern that we've just recognised. Is it a thought? Is it an emotion? Or is it an action? Which one of those is the trigger here? And then having a strategy energy in place that negates that as often and as frequently and as strongly as we possibly can. Do you have those negative thoughts? Are you the person that thinks something that triggers it? Are you the person who has the emotions, that feeling, that deep down in your stomach of, This isn't right. I don't feel ready. I don't feel that I can do this today. Or are you the person that goes out there and goes, You know what? I know I can do this. I feel great. And yet you don't perform or you don't trigger the performance the way that you would do in training or the way that you know you can do. And you self-sabotage with actions. All of these strategies Thinking something, feeling something, doing something, are ways that we can sabotage our performance and our confidence.
So do you wake up in the morning, turn up, and feel negative? If that's you, I want you to think about the time when you did that and what the consequences were. Did you have 100% of your thoughts, your actions, and your feelings towards what you wanted or away from what you didn't want? Were you the person that you woke up and you had this really bad thought inside your head? Was there a picture inside your mind of what could go wrong. Again, think about that right now. What was the consequences that day to that performance? Was it your Was it the most stellar performance you've ever done? Probably not. What you'll find is you spent a great deal of time thinking about what you didn't want rather than what you do want. We've done this often enough now to know that we get what we focus on. If you're focusing on not falling, then the most prominent, the most front of thought for you there is about falling, and you're more likely to fall. If you go in there to catch a ball in baseball or in rugby or in football, or in soccer, whatever it is.
You're thinking, Don't drop the ball, don't drop the ball. The likelihood is you're going to drop the ball because that's the most front of thought thought inside your mind, dropping the ball. Consequences of. It has a physicality shift in the body. Our body is going to fight or flight so that actions that we've trained are then inhibited by the fight or flight process. The cortisol in the body, the epinephrine going through the body, all of these things are impacting our performance. What do we need to do? We need to first understand that there are multiple different things that can have an influence on our performance. When we look at inconsistency, and I've said before, the holy grow of any elite athlete in any sport is consistency. That's what makes champions. It's not the ability to perform because at that level, the vast majority of the people you're competing against can perform. They can do the skill. They're just equally as talented as you, probably, sometimes even more talented. But what makes a champion isn't the person who is most talented. It's the one who can do it most frequently, who can turn up, who can perform the most consistently.
So that's what we want to be able to do. Our performance needs to be that consistent. And often there's three things that play a massive role in this. One of those is no reliable performance patterns or triggers. Now, you've heard me say a squillion times, humans essentially are just patterns and triggers. We learn a pattern, a good pattern, a negative pattern, a positive pattern, a strong pattern, and it doesn't necessarily need to be the one that's going to give us the best outcome. They're just patterns. We have triggers, certain actions, certain thoughts, certain beliefs that make those patterns initiate. If we don't have a consistent pattern and trigger process, then consistency is unlikely to be the outcome for us. That could be number one. Number two is fear of consequence. What if? What if I dropped the ball? What if I can't perform? What if I'm not good enough? What if I haven't done enough preparation? What if I hurt myself? All of these fears of consequence can then make us inhibit our performance. We play it safe. We don't go out and push beyond the boundaries. We stay well and truly away from the boundary, just in case for that fear of consequence.
So we've got no pattern or no consistent pattern. We've got fear of consequence, and we've got the behavioural loop or the CBT triangle, which is what we started talking about today. Negative thoughts, negative actions, negative feelings. So In this episode of Brain in the Game, we're going to look at balancing that consequence of performance with the three-legged stool. We're going to look at number three. The three-legged stool, and you've heard me say that a couple of times now, I want you to picture in your mind a three-legged stool. And that three-legged stool is standing on a very strong flat ground. With all three legs equal and equally as strong, you can stand on that stall and reach higher. Of course we If we think that in our performance context, if our platform, our three-legged stool is strong, reliable, and consistently equal length of legs, then we can stand on that platform and perform the way that we know we can perform. I'm using this as a metaphor for our emotions. When we're emotively strong, we can stand and we can perform. We can go out there, we can trust ourselves. We have confidence, we have consistency, we know exactly what we need to do.
We're going to use that metaphor as we unpack this three-legged stool process. Now, if I said to you, Don't think about a pink elephant driving your car, what's the first thing you have to think about in order not to think about it? You have to think about that elephant sitting in your car so that you go, I don't need to think about the elephant sitting in my car. You can't not think about it. If you're having a negative thought and you You said it right, I'm not going to think about that negative thought. What's the first thing you have to think about in order not to think about it? It's that negative thought. When people turn around and say to you, I know you're worried, I know you're concerned, just don't think about it. That's the craziest thing to say because it's almost impossible to not think about something that you don't want to think about. It's one of those anomalies in our brain where in order for us to have some gauge of where we are, we got to think what we don't want to think about, so we can think about what we do want to think about.
Now, the caveat to this is we often talk about positive stacking, and that's having a trigger in your mind where you run through all the things that you've done and can do really, really well. What we're trying to think about when we do that is the positive stacking process. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, and this, and this, and this, this, this, and this. That process makes you feel better. In part, that's feeding this This CBT triangle. Now, cognitive behavioural therapy come up with this triangle that we're going to walk through today. What we're going to utilise it for is to better understand how we put ourselves in the right place. Part of that is not saying, don't think about what you don't want to think about. And it's when people turn and say, Okay, if you're nervous, don't be nervous. That's, again, another crazy thing to say to you. Well, okay, if you're telling me not to be nervous, does that mean I am really, really nervous? I have a client who we were going into a competition once, and I said to him, Are you okay? Purely and simply, I asked him that because he was spaced out.
You could see he was not connected to the moment. He wasn't in the right place at the right time in order to be able to perform the best way he could. After the event, he walked up to me and said, Hey, can you not say that to me again? I said, Can you say what? He said, You asked me if I was okay. The minute you said to me, Am I okay? I started to think, Do I not look okay? Do I not look ready? And he went off on this tangent. He just needed that trigger of somebody else saying, Are you not okay? For him to buy into all those negative thoughts that were going through his head. Now, he utilised my approach to say that's what caused it. When in reality, when we unpacked it after, when we did our debrief process, all of those negative thoughts were already there. He was trying to avoid them. And it was like the elephant in the the room. He was, Don't go over there, don't go over there, don't go there. The minute I turned and said, Are you okay? I need to go there now to deal with this.
Having that elephant driving your car or the elephant in the room, there's a lot of elephants today. All of those triggers we need to make sure that we have a robust strategy in order to manage them, because we can't ever not think about negative consequences. If you're an elite athlete and you're going out there to perform, it would be unrealistic of me and of you to think every single time I turn up, I am going to feel so confident there is no negativity in my world at all. The reality of that, although it would be absolutely awesome, the reality of that is it's not going to happen. There's going to be fear of consequence. There's going to be that negative thought inside your head, what if? There's going to be those actions when you go, No, I shouldn't have done that. So we're We need to have a really cool strategy that enables us to, one, understand it, and two, negate it. Remember the elephant who's driving your car? Ask yourself, when you've had those poor performances and you retrospectively unpacked what went wrong, what was it? Where did it start for you? What was a catalyst for you?
For me, when I went out and I was coming back from that injury, it was 100% a negative thought that initiated this cascade of things falling apart for me. So that negative, that one single grain of a negative thought, grew and grew and grew to the point where I felt so out of my depth, so overwhelmed, that everything I did was never, ever going to be the best way it could be, which then just fed the cycle again because I couldn't perform the way that I wanted to perform. Those negative thoughts got completely ratified in my head. Yep, that's right. You're not ready. You're not supposed to be here. You can't even do these skills that you could do before you got injured. That cycle just completely fed itself. Is it an emotion? Do you wake up in the morning of a competition or days before a competition with that feeling inside your stomach that said, I don't want to do this. I'm not ready. This doesn't feel right. Or are you the action person? Are you the person to go, Yeah, I can do this. Get there. And it just goes sideways. You can't do the skills that you thought you could do or have done a squillion and seven times before.
You go out there and approach it in a completely different manner, physically. Which one of those is you? Or do you do all of those in different times within your performance? And that's perfectly normal, You don't have to be an emotive trigger. You don't have to be a thought trigger. It doesn't have to be an action trigger. It can be all of those at different times. However, each time it unravels for you, one of those would have been the initial trigger. Something to keep in mind, now when you're playing back in your mind, I'm sure, those performances that didn't work for you, what becomes It became evident to you. You may have thought a negative thought and gone, Oh, that was it. I just started to think negatively. Caveat here, be careful. That may not have been the initial trigger. You may have felt uneasy. Ready, which made you question, Am I ready? You may have done some habitual action that you always do at a competition, which have made you feel in a certain way, which have made you think in a certain way. Each one will knock onto the other. Being able to step out of the emotion of it and look at it from a mechanical perspective and unpack that performance, that negative performance, and go, Where did that start to unravel?
What was the first piece that came away from the picture for me. As I said, for me, I know now that it was that negative thought. It was that negative thought of, I'm not ready, that unravelled everything for me in that performance. Now, in my Gymnastics career, there was a number of times where I didn't perform the way I knew I could perform. Countless times. Each one of those could have been a completely different trigger. Sometimes it could have actually been, I wasn't ready. I wasn't prepared enough. And that's a completely different podcast. We'll talk about preparation in another podcast. But let's look at when we know we're ready, when we know that we've got the skillset, when we've done all the training and it unravels on the day. So once you've asked yourself that question, where did it start? Let's better understand the CBT triangle or the behavioural loop. So when we look at that, if you picture in your mind a triangle, and you will be able to download this template that I use here. It's a screenshot from one of my slides from a lecture. If you think about this triangle, at the top of the triangle, it's got thoughts.
On the left-hand side of the triangle, it's got emotions. And on the right-hand side of the triangle, it's got behaviours. And there's interlinking arrows in between each and every one of these. So if I I had a negative thought, did that make me feel uncomfortable and then behave in a particular way? Or did I have a negative thought, which made me behave in a certain way, take action in a certain way, which then made me feel uneasy? Now, that might sound a little bit over complicated of how one starts, it leads to the next one, which leads to the next one. But in a minute, when we look at the strategy to negate this, it's important that we understand what direction This is unravelling in. Let's look at that from my experience. That competition, I had that negative thought that made me feel a certain way, which made me then perform, take actions in a certain way. Started with a negative thought led to a negative emotion, which led to a negative performance. If we think about our three-legged stool, my negative thought took away one of my legs, which made me completely unstable. I couldn't perform the best way I could because I just lost one of my strong legs the way that I think.
If it had been an emotion for you, you would have lost that emotive leg, the way that you feel. If it had been action, you would have lost the action or the behaviour leg, the way that you perform. So the minute we lose one of those legs, we're going to fall over. It's inevitable. We're going to fall over unless we have a strategy to better manage. So that negative thought. In your mind right now, when I had that negative thought, what do you think I should have done to negate that? I'm sure the vast majority of you are saying, Think positive thoughts. And that's the most logical thing anybody, any coach, any parent, any other athlete would say to you. If you're having negative thoughts, think positive ones. But remember we talked about the pink elephant driving the car. Don't think about that pink elephant driving your car. You can't not think about the negative in order to think about the positive. When you think, I need to think positive, what's the counteraction to that is, Oh, that's a negative, so I need to be over here. You have to think about the negative in order to have the positive thoughts.
That's not the answer here. If I'm having negative thoughts, it's not jump into straight away, think a positive thought. It's a little bit more complicated than that. If I'm having a negative thought that led to a negative emotion, end up a negative performance or a negative action, I need to go backwards on that. I had this negative thought, which means I need to do something positive. I need to break that cycle and do something physical that is positive. That will make me feel better, and when I feel better, I'll start to think differently. If you have that picture in your head, I was going negative thought, negative emotion, negative action. In order to counteract that, I had that negative thought, so I went positive action, positive emotion, which led to positive thoughts. I re-did that cycle in the backward motion. Now, if you had negative emotions that led to a negative thought that led to a negative action, which way would we go? We would go positive action, which would make me think differently and more positively, which make me feel better. We unpack it in the other direction. When you get to download this template from smartmind.com/podcast - You'll get to see what I mean. You'll get the visual picture of what direction do I need to go. Now, this strategy is an incredibly powerful strategy because not only is it designed to unravel the things that are unravelling in a more positive outcome for you to back it up and recalibrate it, it allows you to have better control of things that are going to happen. So if you start to get that little seed of a negative thought, again, that competition for me coming back from injury, it started off with the most minute grain of a negative thought for me. If I had applied this three-legged stool philosophy or the CBT triangle philosophy, at that point, bang, it would have gone and recalibrated so that I didn't go down that winding negative path. If I'd have known this strategy back then and started to apply the more positive strategy instantly, I would have had a better control of the outcome from me on that day and many other competitions after that and before that. So this is an awesome skillset for you to keep in mind. It's like every other skillset. It takes practise.
Today, I can see not only in me, but in other athletes, the minute each one of those starts to initiate. So when they have that little seed of negative thought coming into their mind, I can then initiate with them a counteractive process. When they start to feel a certain way and I see a physicality in the way that they're standing, the way they're approaching stuff, and I know that they're getting nervous, kick in and go, Right, let's go backwards on that. So I would suggest that you download the CBT triangle off our website, look at it, think about where it's gone wrong in the past. Did I have a thought? Did I have an emotion? Did I have an action that was the initial trigger? And then what did that lead to? Did that action lead to a thought or did it lead to an emotion? That would dictate how would I have unpacked that strategy at the time in a way more efficient and effective way. Ultimately, what we're doing here is, if you ever seen those people at a circus where they were big round silver tin, for want of a better expression.
They've got a board on top, and they're standing on the board and they're balancing. As the tin rolls, they have to counteract that. They're moving side to side to balance that board so they don't fall off. What we're talking about here is having that same micromanagement and balance with your emotions. When those negative thoughts came in, for me, I should have counteracted that with, Right, I need to do something different, which will make me feel differently, which will then in turn make me think differently. Instead, I waited till I fell off. Now I know different. Don't wait to fall off. The minute you recognise you're going down a path that you don't want to go down, what's my strategy to manage that? Is it an action, an emotion, or a thought? Each one of those have very, very clear strategies. Many of you have heard me talk about the bouncing of the balls. That's a clear action to go away and focus, refocus. So initially, by doing a physical action that breaks the cycle, something that's positively stacked for you, you will do something different to break that negative cycle. If it's an emotion, if we then Turn around and say, if I can remember a time I felt really, really comfortable, really positive, really in control, what did that feel like to me?
If you feel that same positivity, it's very, very difficult to have the negativity there. It's the same with the thoughts. We've talked about positively stacking stuff. If we have to change the way that we think, that needs to be our first point of call because there's an action or an emotion that's negative. By having a triggered, trained, positively stacked process in our mind, I can do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. Again, you're going to change the way that you think. Then you might behave differently or have a an emotion to that. So this is a little bit more of a complicated, a little bit deeper process than we would normally talk about in our podcast. However, I think it's one of the cornerstone skillsets that any elite athlete should have because we're always going to be that person on the round 10 balancing on the board. There's always going to be influences that are going to come into our world that's going to upset equilibrium that we've already got. Hope you've enjoyed this podcast, and I hope that although we've gone a little bit deeper and a little bit more technical into the behaviours, I hope you got a lot from it.
I hope you now can look at some of the things that have gone wrong in the past for you, how you could have done that smarter. So in the future, you have a better control over your outcomes. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
