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 a podcast that just keeps on coming back time after time. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 59, we're going to take a look at our internal emotional monster and what we can do to utilise that monster for a good rather than evil. However, Before we get into today's podcast, I've got some really good news. As of the end of this week, I'm back on the road. And first of all, I'm travelling through the States. While I'm doing that, I'm going to be interviewing some of the key athletes I'm working with. I'll be able to bring you those interviews, something It's nothing for you to sink your teeth in and have a listen to what other athletes are going through. So stay tuned for that. So today we're going to talk about our internal emotional monster. What do I mean by that? Let me start off by describing a scenario that I came across a couple of weeks ago.
I was working with a professional athlete. Now, this athlete is in their mid-20s, they're 26. They represent their country. They have been representing their country for several years. They're very seasoned athletes. They know exactly what they're doing. They've been there, they've done it, they've experienced the highs and the lows. However, I was talking to this athlete's coach, and the coach turned around and said to me, It's like working with a teenager. This moody teenager has got a really bad attitude. Can you help me and get him out of that place so we can get back on track and start producing great performances again? I took this athlete to one side and we started to have a little chat and we started looking at what key things they were doing right, what wasn't working for them, so that we can start to unpack what we can do different. Before we get into any mental processing, I need to understand where the athletes act, both physiologically, are they physically capable of doing the skills? Have they had a change in the way that they're preparing? Is there something physically that's inhibiting them? Or as often happens with younger athletes as they go through their growth spurts in puberty, their centre of gravity changes, so therefore the physical dynamics of what they do can change.
All of these can have an influence on the ability of the athlete to perform. We looked at that and realised that the way that this athlete had been preparing for this season was very similar to what they've done in previous season. They're unlikely to be a physiological reason why they had this really inconsistent performance. We then started to look at their age. This athlete is 26, so he's past the prefrontal cortex founding stages of life. We all know from previous podcasts, or you might know from other studies that you've done, that our prefrontal cortex, the decision-making part of our brain and the filtering part of our brain, doesn't actually develop fully until we get to our mid-20s, which explains a lot of the stupid things we do when we're teenagers, because our brain hasn't developed that logical philtre and processing system that we rely on. This athlete, he'd gone past that critical stage just being stupid, well and truly on the road to a consistent mental formatting. We knew that it wasn't physical, we knew that it wasn't age-related. Why was this athlete behaving like a teenager? Real bad attitude, inconsistent performance, inconsistent arriving and training processes, would miss training, would be very verbal with the coaches.
What was going on with this athlete? We decided to sit down and have this conversation with them. I was asking them about their preparation. I was asking about their competition, their objectives, where they're going. It was very interesting for me to listen to their language. Now, when we think about attitude, it's one of those words that are thrown around so frequently, and especially by coaches. When I was a coach, I used to do the same thing. Is, Oh, they've got a bad attitude, or, They don't have the right attitude, or all of these tags that we tend to throw around. But an attitude, all an attitude is, is a culmination of our beliefs and our values. The things that we inherently believe in, they're the things that could be passed down through our culture, passed down through our experiences, things that we've experienced in our life and gauge our own belief system around, things that are of importance that we believe to be relevant to who we are. We've also got our values, and these are things, obviously, we value. There are things that are really important to us. It could be fair play, it could be honesty, it could be winning.
Whatever is of key value to you, along with the things that you believe to be true, form our attitude. When an athlete comes to me and a coach says, They've got a really bad attitude, we initially have to look at, Okay, what's your belief system? What are the key things that you believe in and believe that you're capable of? What do you value? What do you value above everything else in your world? If it is valuing just winning, then you could have a disbalance between approach and outcome. If you believe and value winning and you're not winning, then you've got this incongruency in the way that you're doing what you do. So attitude is a broad term that we use to identify what our beliefs and our values are. When I was sitting down with this athlete and we were talking, and we was talking about what they believed, what their values were, what they were looking to achieve, their objectives, both short, medium, and long term, it became very apparent to me that it wasn't anything external that was causing this teenager behaviour in this grown adult professional athlete. It was their language. As we started to unpack their language, and I was sitting there and I was making notes, mental notes and physical notes on some of the key language they were using, it become very apparent to me that the language is a thing that had shifted and changed.
Let me ask you a question. As you listen to this, if you was going to get somebody to do to do something for you, so maybe to move a box from point A to point B, how would you get them to do that? Would you turn and say, oi, move that from here to there? Or would you turn around and say, can you pick up this box from here in this specific way, take it over there, place it in this specific way, and make sure that it does this, this, and this. And then, thanks very much, that's really important to me, and off you go. Which one of those is likely to get you one, the best, most reliable, consistent, and replicable outcome? And which one are the other people that you've asked to get involved and do this task for you more likely to repeat? So if you speak to those people in a such a manner that has no clarity, no objectivity. So there's no objective to doing what they're doing, and there's no perspective on why they're doing what they're doing. And you then just bark and order and say, move that from here to there, go do it, the likelihood of wanting to replicate that is completely diminished.
The possibilities of you getting a very specific and reliable outcome is also completely diminished. The language we use to get other people to do things for us is no different to the language we use internally in order to get ourselves to do stuff. If we are barking orders at ourselves with no value, no belief system, no return on investment, no reason to continue to do what you're doing, then the likelihood of your performance being consistent, replicable, and the best outcome that you could possibly have is minimal. Our internal language, and we don't necessarily often think of the way that we speak to ourselves as being important because we think, Oh, I know what I mean. However, you probably don't. Because we react to what we tell ourselves. We don't process it and go, I know you've just told myself to do this, but what I really mean is this because I'm having a bad day today and that's okay. You know what? It's okay for you to talk to me that way. We don't do that. We don't make those assumptions or processes in our brain. We just go, Oh, that didn't feel great. I don't really want to do that.
When we understand the language we use externally to ask people to do things for us, we have that understanding that, You know what? If I don't ask in the right way, the likelihood is they're not going to want to do it for me. However, we don't necessarily apply that same process to the way we talk to ourselves. When I'm sitting down there and I'm talking to this athlete, and the language, the denigrating language they were using about themselves, about their preparation, about their performance, about their ability to stay in the sport, about their age, was a clear indicator to me that he had lost value in who he was as an athlete. His belief systems had changed. He no longer believed that he was capable of achieving what he had set out to achieve. He'd put himself in a situation where, one, he was miscommunicating the messages because of frustration. Two, the message was no clarity to it because he didn't really recognise what he wanted anyway because he'd lost the value in that objective. So it was, Oh, well, just go that way anyway. I don't really know what I can do. I don't know if I can really do this.
So he had a hand on the exit handle. He's looking for an exit the way you get out of this. And he would just point himself in a generic direction, hoping that something would work. And clearly, no one can expect to perform under those conditions. So therefore, the way that he was talking to himself had a direct impact on the way that he was performing. Our language patterns become incredibly important when we're trying to look at performance. Enter the emotional monster. Now, when I talk to any one of my clients, I talk about our internal emotional monster. We've all got one. We've all had one ever since we were a young child, and we'll have one until the day we die. Now, we don't necessarily, For those of you listening, we don't necessarily have a monster inside us. However, the way that we interact and feed this emotional monster is a way that we can understand, we can manage it, and get a best out of us. I just like to think about having inside you this emotional monster. Now, the emotional monster's role is to react to emotional stimulants. Yes, I know I don't often talk about reacting.
I talk about responding. However, in this case, it does. It completely he reacts to the emotional environment we're in. So this communication that we have with ourself, we assign this emotion to. So if the emotion that we're feeding ourselves is a negative emotion, then we assign that negativity to that, and therefore this emotional monster gets fed more and more and more this negativity. Now, when people talk to me about an athlete behaving like a teenager or behaving like a spoiled little brat, which is what I've also heard. Now, look, I've got a couple of teenagers at home. I know what teenagers are like. The way that we depict that and show that is this defiant, moody young athlete that just does not want to do what they're told to do. In fact, they'll do the complete opposite to what they're told to do just to prove that point. Certainly, when we were looking at this performance of this 26-year-old professional athlete, that did appear to be what was going They were moody, they were defiant, they were not doing what they believed that we should be doing. They were doing something completely different, almost trying to derail themselves and the coach along the way and give the coach even more grey hair.
We've got this emotional monster. The question I ask you now is, if you've got a teenager and you constantly feed this teenager junk food, the soft drinks, the chips, the pizzas, all of that, and you never give them any healthy food or balance, what do you get? You get this spotty, moody, struggling teenager that does everything they possibly can because there's no clarity or focus. They'll lose the ability to think clearly. They'll lose the ability to process efficiently. We know that. We know that through our education in school, through our education as parents, through through everything that we do, that if we only feed our teenagers junk food or crap, then the likelihood is that's exactly what we're going to get back. Now, if you go onto my website, smartmind. Com. Au, We can download templates. One of those templates is the mental cycle. In the mental cycle, I talk about the search, sort, store, and recall process. This is a cycle that our brains consistently go through the whole time. What we search for, what we sort for, what's relevant to us, that is what we store, and then what we recall. Our recall is our performance, how we do what we need to do.
I often talk about the quality of our search and sort process indicates the quality of our performance, so our recall process. When we think about that in most logical, most clinical perspective, if we're putting negativity in, the likelihood of us trying to get positivity out is virtually none. We want to make sure that what goes in is relevant to us and incredibly useful to us. If it's not useful, Then we can't get useful stuff out. This is where our emotional monster becomes a pain in the backside. If we're only putting negativity in, so we think about this athlete when he was listening to his language, the language was very negative. What he can't do, what he hasn't been able to do, what he won't ever be able to do again, what was broken, what other people said was broken. This was the only things that were going into his head. The language he was using, the only thing he was feeding his emotional monster was negativity, and then expecting himself to perform in a positive way, which just fed the negative cycle because he then recognised that he couldn't do what he wanted to do.
Therefore, he beat himself up even more and turned and said, I'm than I thought I was. I can't perform anymore. I'm over the heel. I might as well give up. All of these language patterns were being shoved into his search and his salt process. Therefore, what he was storing internally was completely empty negativity. This emotional monster that we feed junk food to, or crap, or in negativity, or in negative emotions to, is going to behave like a teenager. It's going to want to buck the system. It's going to want to want to get out of there. It doesn't want to conform. It doesn't want to perform. It doesn't want to replicate something because it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel healthy. It doesn't feel strong enough. The flip side of that coin is, sure, we feed it healthy stuff. If you start to feed your teenager good, healthy, nutritious food, you'll notice that their clarity of thought improves, their Their ability to focus improves, their physicality improves. Our internal emotional monster is no different. Our search, sort, store, and recall process then becomes more productive because we're searching, sorting, and storing way more positive, useful, relevant, important parts to who we are.
Then our recall or our performance becomes way more productive, way more efficient, and something that we want to replicate because it makes us feel good. And ultimately, all of this comes down to what makes me feel good, what gives me the serotonin, the dopamine, the epinephrine impact in my body that I go, Wow, I want to do that again. We don't get those when we feed it crap. So therefore, it becomes deeper, darker, gloomier, instead of becoming brighter, stronger, and faster. We want to make make sure that our emotional monster on the inside is being fed the best it could possibly be fed. Because the thing about our emotions are they're incredibly powerful. If they don't want to do something, you won't do it. If they really want to do something, they will push, poke, and prod until it gets done. Let's make sure that what we feed our emotional monster on the inside is going to be something that's going to replicate performance best we possibly can. We need to make sure that the language we're using on the inside is as direct, as purposeful, and as motivating as we'd like to use on the outside.
The next question for you is, what diet are you feeding your emotional monster? If you're an athlete, if you're a coach, if you're a parent, what diet are you feeding on? Is your diet made up predominantly of positivity, or is it made up predominantly of negativity or away from motivation? I don't want this. I don't want a bad performance. I don't want to fall off. I don't want to trip up. I don't want to drop the ball. What are you feeding yourself? Because we know we get what we focus on. If our focus is on negativity, we're going to get that annoying teenager on the inside that just doesn't want to conform, doesn't want to perform. Is your diet good enough to produce the performance you want to produce? If you was a runner and you were always feeling fatigued, if you was always having such little energy in focus, you would look at your diet. What am I putting into this machine so that I can get out what I want to get out? If you're not putting the right nutrients inside your body, then you can't expect that nutrient-deprived body to perform. It's logical, isn't it?
If we're not putting the right emotional nutrition into our body, then we can't expect our bodies to perform. When you imagine this emotional monster on the inside, it makes that personification of that much easier for us to go, Right, what am I feeding it? If I'm feeding it, negativity and expecting positivity, then I'm not going to get what I want. I'm fooling myself. If I'm feeding it positivity and it's not performing the way I want to, am I specific enough with the positivity? Am I direct enough? Am I believing in it? Do I value what I'm doing? Is my attitude a result of a good, healthy value system and belief system? If it's not, then that's where we need to start focusing. We need to focus on what do you value? What do you believe? Is Is your language feeding what those values and beliefs are? As we wrap up this episode of Brain in the Game, I'd like you to, when you leave and you're thinking about this podcast, think to yourself, what diet do I have? Is it a good enough mental and emotional diet? What are my values? What are my beliefs?
And how good are they for feeding my attitude to win, to be that champion? Hope you've got a lot today's episode of Brain in the Game. I look forward to sending you my next one, which will probably be an interview with one of these athletes throughout the States, and getting back to you with some more interesting stuff about mental preparation for athletes. Until then, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
