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 looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is a shot in the arm that we all need from time to time and I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 58, we're going to take on the whole new year in a whole new way. So today's one is all about a good start can equal a strong finish. Now, I've been off the air for over two months, partly because I wanted to take some downtime and partly because I've been finishing off my new book, Growing a Champion's Mind. But I also wanted to make sure that I spent some quality downtime, something that I preach to all my clients all the time, that the time we spend away from our sport or away from our coaching is just as relevant to you as the time you spend in training or in competition. So after taking the two months off over summer here in Australia and spending a great deal of that time at the beach, we're back into it full swing.
And I hope you enjoy this episode because we're going to look at how so many athletes don't start the way that they plan out to start. So let me just set the scene for you. I'm, as many as you would know I'm a tragic tennis fan, and I was watching the Australian Open finals this year. And as with most sports, I get a lot of text messages when certain sports are on, sometimes from participants in that sport, some from my clients, some of my clients' parents, and some completely out of the box are different sports, different locations. Anyway, I was watching the men's finals between Andy Murray and Djokovic. I got a text message from one of my clients' fathers who's turned around and said to me, Why does Murray take so long to get going? It's a relevant question because you see it in so many different sports. You see it with so many different athletes. Tennis is one of those long drawn out sports. You get to see it in its all its glory. Some athletes just look like they struggle and they struggle and then, bam, they switch into gear and into performing.
If you look back over many of these athletes' performance history, you'll actually see it's quite a pattern for them. There's a very famous Australian tennis player who got the brand name of the Little Aussie battler, because he always started from behind the eight ball. He always lost a set and had to fight back to win his place in winning the eight tournament. Part of that became very much his identity within the sport. He would often go out and it almost looked like, and I'm sure he didn't, but it almost looked like he would lose the first set to set himself up to be able to come back from behind and perform.
So why does that happen? Why do we see in so many athletes, in so many different sports, and it's not just tennis centric, you see it in cricket, you see it in golf. I've seen it in gymnastics, even triathletes. A lot of these sports, the athlete sets themself up to have to work harder than they need to. There's lots of reasons or excuses that are put out there for this to occur. As I say, sometimes it's the athlete setting themselves up to blindly be behind the eight ball to give themselves that oomph, that motivation to dig deep and to perform.
Which if we think about that logically, it's an absolutely crazy place to be. Why would you set yourself up to have to work harder than you need to? There's no physical reason to do that. Has to be a psychological reason. Whether you believe you have to be pushed, whether you believe you have to dig deeper, whether it's just a habit. Which brings me to the other excuses or habits, and they can be just nerves. If you're nervous and you lose that clarity on what you're trying to achieve. We've all been there and had that performance amnesia. We've talked about that in previous podcasts, where you go out there, you have all these great intentions, you've got your plan set, and you step out onto the competitive arena and it's gone. You don't know what you're doing, you don't know your routine, you don't know your game plan, and the amnesia or the emotions have taken over and the logic's gone flying out of your ears and you have no idea. So these nerves do play a part in that, and they can completely derail you as an athlete if you don't get control of those.
There's the unfamiliarity. So if you're in a final and you've never been to a final, so you have no idea practically what a final looks like, feels like, even smells like. When you're standing out there and you're used to playing in front of 20, 50 people, and all of a sudden you're standing there in front of a couple of thousand people, that unfamiliarity can really derail your performance. Sometimes athletes set themselves up to be over-cautious. They set benchmarks that are way beyond just being smart about your sport. They're over-cautious. So in cricket, sometimes I hear cricketers turn around and say, once I hit these many runs, then I know I'm in for the whole innings, so I can settle in and start playing my game. Again, that's no different to the tennis player who says I have to be behind before I start playing. Logically, it doesn't make any logical sense. Why would you have to play cautiously just to prove that you're there and you deserve to be there before the real you, the best you, steps up and performs? There is no real rhyme nor reason behind that application or that thought process.
Sometimes they're overcautious because they're told, don't do this, don't do that, don't get out. Make sure you're in there for at least 20 runs. They're away-from motivated. They're sitting there the whole time saying, don't let me get out, don't get out, don't get out. And not actually playing towards their best performance, but away-from their worst performance. And they're two very different places. When we think about the best performer stepping up, that's a performer that hits beyond the boundaries each time. And I don't necessarily mean that as a cricket pun, beyond your own internal boundaries, when you know your best is your best and you try and look over the edge of that and push those boundaries. If you're playing away from failure, then all you're looking to do is not fail. You're not looking to become the best at what you do. You're looking to become not the worst at what you do. Two very different applications and processes. We're not doing what we know we need to do or can do. We're just distracted. We're distracted from our application.
This can be a completely, again, derailing place for an athlete because you do feel unfamiliar. You do feel like the process of performance that you've trained so hard and so diligently isn't the performance that's turned up. Again, those of you who've listened to my podcasts in the past know I talk about taking a little bit of your competition and your competitor into your training so that you can take your training and your trained competitor into the competition. And that is a really important place to be if you want to create familiarity. If you want to go out and perform consistently at your best, each and every time, whether you're a footballer, sprinter, tennis player, cricketer, or golfer, you want to step up onto that performance platform every single time the way that you know you can compete. So doing what you know you need to do is important. It's important for you for consistency and replicability. We know consistency is a holy grail of every elite athlete. We know that when you step up to perform, it's not about winning once, it's about winning every time.
When I was watching that tennis match, and Djokovic, I don't think performed outstandingly, but he performed consistently. I watched Andy Murray completely derail himself, and in part, I believe, watching that had so many external influences that were going on that they were derailing him, that was taking away his focus from the job at hand that he didn't turn up in the way that he should have turned up.
A lot of the commentators were talking about, Why does Andy Murray always take so long to step into the best performance, take a long time to warm up, to get into his swing? All the different analogies they were using made me think about why does he do that? Why does Andy Murray, in this instance and in their eyes as the commentators, really take such a long time to get into the swing of his performance? It's a really good question. Why does he do that? We're going to look through a couple of strategies that we can apply to be able to rock up and every single time have that performance familiarity to step into the performer, out of the student-mode and into the performer-mode, the competitor, just like that. We've talked about anchors, we've talked about performance, preparation. All of these key aspects of our preparation and funnel are critical.
If we flip that coin and we look at the Williams versus Kerber final, the women's final, that was an unusual performance dynamic. Serena Williams has been in so many finals around the world for so many years now that she has that familiarity. So that really can't be an excuse for her. However, she didn't turn up in the best performer that I've seen her play in the past. And Kerber seemed to be incredibly focused and on the money. When you look at their warm up back of house, when the cameras are watching them warm up, Serena Williams was stretching, she was doing all of her usual things, and Kerber was doing mental exercises with some bouncey balls, something that if you've ever seen me work face to face with clients, you'll see we do a lot of those hemisphere training exercises. She seemed to be incredibly switched on, incredibly focused. From the minute that Kerber stepped out onto that centre court, she looked much sharper than Williams.
When we look at the Djokovic and Murray game, I don't think either of them looked particularly sharp. However, Djokovic just looked that bit sharper.
Let's get back into the mental aspect of this. I've used the analogy here of the Australian Open in 2016 as why some athletes appear to take a long time to step into that performance mode. And sometimes we look at there's some strategies or some excuses that are put out there. As I said, we've talked about nerves, we've talked about unfamiliarity, or being over-cautious and not doing what you know you need to do. But also there's fear of consequence and I think this is a big part of why many, many athletes do not turn up and perform out of the gate, from the get-go. It's that fear of consequence. Our imagination kicks in and goes, But what if? What if you got all the way to the final and you go to perform and you underperform? Our focus isn't on performing, it's focusing on what if we don't perform? It's a consequence of failure. As any athlete will tell you, myself as a former athlete, if you're listening to this and you're a coach and you're a former athlete, or if you're an athlete yourself, you know in the back of your mind every single time that you step up to perform, there's a little voice that's saying, Don't mess up. It doesn't matter how diligently we say, Shut up. That little voice is in there, niggling away at us and talking that negative talk to us. We're also going to look at some strategies to silence that little voice in the back of your head that's getting you to focus on things that you don't necessarily need to focus on, hence the fear of failure or the fear of consequence.
So slow competition start is a multi-dimensional, multi-layered animal to deal with. And if, as I say, you're competitor, you've competed in the past, then every single time that you step up to perform there's probably a different influence or environmental situation that's caused your slow start. It just then becomes a habit. Like the Australian tennis player who always appeared to lose the first set before he stepped up into that performer mode and came firing back as the underdog, it becomes a habit. And it's not always, as in all habits, not all habits are positive habits. Unless we set them up to be positive habits or replicable performances, then it's a potluck thing.
Let's look at that. How do we initiate stepping up and performing every time? That consistency of performance, and as we say, consistency is a holy grail of every athlete. We want to start with some objectives. Of course, whenever you go out and you're in a final or in any competition, win, the objective is to win. Otherwise, you can't progress. You can't go past that level that you're currently on. However, very, very rarely with my clients do I talk about winning. Often, I talk about being the best them. If the best them is good enough to get the result, then focusing on them rocking up and doing the best they can do is going to give them the result anyway. The reason I do that is because if I say to a client, We've got to win. We're going to go out there and we've got to beat everybody else. In the same way that we talk about don't lose, our focus then is on other people. It's on the other competitors. Naturally, in order for us to beat them, we got to know what we're trying to beat. We have to focus on them to overcome them. What that does is makes our game plan their game plan. Now, what I ask all my clients to do is let's set an objective, and the objective needs to be about you, not your competitors, not the competition, but about you. Number one, set an objective. Understand why it's our objective. So if your objective is to go out there and just keep on the tennis theme and you want to own every single one of your serves in the first serve, then you're thinking about productivity, you're thinking about specificity, you're making sure that your focus is on your performance, things that you can control.
And again, those of you who listen to my podcast in the past, we talk a lot about controlling what you can control and letting go of those parts that you can't control. If we've got 100% of our focus on 100% of what we can control, then we have better return on investment for our time and effort. Understand why that objective is that objective. What is that value to you? If you get every single one of your first serves in, then you're focused on growing yourself as an athlete, and your consistency speaks for itself. You've got to have clarity on that objective. You've got to not just say, Yeah, I want to focus on my first serves. I want to focus on my first serves getting in every single time. And wherever I want to put the ball, that's where the ball goes. Again, if we keep this tennis theme that we've got here, when you look at some of the greatest players in the world, and I'm a huge Federer fan, they put the ball on pinpoint accuracy. And you see that sometimes when they question the line calls and they'll go, No, no, no, that was in. It's because they're not hitting the ball and hoping it goes somewhere over the net. They're looking at where specifically they want to put it.
When we set our objectives and we have that clarity, that specificity, we're looking for fine detail. Now, we talked earlier about that negative nagging in the back of your brain. If we fill our brain or cranial spacing, as we call it, fill that brain with positive, key, fine details that we have to think about the things that we need to do to get what we want, then we limit the amount of space for that negative self-talk to nestle into our brain. Now, I always say to my clients, what I want you to do is once you've got your objective, I want you to be able to verbalise it. I want to be able to verbalise it in such a clear and concise way that if you told your mum, she would get it. Yep, I get it. Just like that. Now, this is no reflection on the quality of your parents. It is just an opportunity for you to say, if I had to communicate this to somebody else, how on Earth would I do it with such clarity that they would get it first time every time?
Because when you understand it in such a clear and concise way, your application becomes very detailed. Now the second point is the tipping point. And it's no point in setting an objective until you know what it is once you get it. So if you're, again, let's keep the tennis theme, and it first serves in the service box where I want the ball to go 75% of the time, not 74, not 73, but 75% of the time. When you know that's what you've done and you say, Right, that's my objective, and you hit that objective, whether it be 75 or 76 or 77%, whatever it is, over and above your benchmark, then you get the opportunity to reward it and say, Yep, I achieved that. That was my objective. That's what I achieved. This is my rewards. Coming back to that replicability, we set off that serotonin and dopamine and epinephrine in our body. And it goes, party time. Let's do that again. That's what we're trying to encourage. The replicability is a chemical compound, that's all. Something that we can set those same chemicals each and every time.
The third phase that we want to focus on when we want to go out and perform every single time from the get-go is a springboard. Now, we've not gone from tennis into the pool and into diving, but an opportunity to springboard us further forward. We want to use these objectives not as an endpoint, but as a springboard to a bigger point. So when you think about that objective, the one that you've had such clarity that you could verbalise to your mum and she goes, Yes, I've got it, ask yourself, once I achieve that, what's it going to give me? What's it going to allow me to do from that point forward? Is it going to allow me to go, I'm way more consistent with this now, I want to grow that skill so it becomes 85% accuracy or 95% accuracy. Is it I want to increase the speed of my serve? It's got to have an added bonus value to you. When you hit that objective, not only does it make you feel good because you've got to that point, it also wants to be able to push you further forward to the next point. So it grows exponentially compounds to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So we're growing you as an athlete. That should be your focal point.
We want to make sure that that springboard is practiced. So when we see that objective, we want to make sure that objective becomes so familiar to us, so detailed to us that we own it. The only way we can own it is either by performing it, which we'll get to do. However, we don't want to rely on the only time that we're performing it is in the final. We want to make sure that it's something that's so familiar to us that we have that ownership of that comfort level too. That comes down to visualisation. Again, in the past, we've talked a lot about visualisation. It's a cornerstone of a lot of mental preparation strategies and techniques. We know that that neural pathway in our brain gets created exactly the same as when we compete something or perform something as when we visualise something, using our imagination to create the same sense in our mind. Also, with visualisation, we know that it curbs the physical fatigue and the mental and emotional fatigue that comes with practice after practice after practice after practice.
If I asked you, as a tennis player, to go out and serve 10 services, is that what it's called? I'm not sure it's what it's called. They're called 10 services, and ask you how many of those 10 would be identical? Of course, none of them would be identical. What you've got there is 10 different options, all with a very shallow neural pathway. If I asked you to go out there and imagine 10 services, each of them being crystal clear in your mind with great detail, you now have one very ideal option that has some depth to it. We want to make sure our visualisation is incredibly accurate. We want to make sure that we stimulate every sense that we possibly can. Our sight, our sound, our smell, our emotions, all of those things need to be engaged when we visualise. We want to walk through our normal visualisation strategy of, first of all, doing disassociated visualisation. We're standing in the audience watching ourself. When we watch ourself do those 10 services, we're looking for fine detail, the mechanics of the action so that we understand what our brain is asking our body to physically do.
Then we want to do the associated visualisation. It's not necessarily about what we see, it's about what we feel. We get that ownership to that visualisation or that neural pathway in our brain. It becomes familiar to us, that sense of, Yep, I've been here before. I know what that looks like, what that feels like in my mind.
We also want to do the technical visualisation. And if you jump onto smartmind.com/podcast, there's an opportunity to download all these templates that I talk about. Be it the non-athlete, the athlete, and the pure athlete, which is the off you, student you, and the performer-you, that's a template that teaches you the balance of performance. Also, the visualisation is about eight or nine different visualisation techniques I talk about, and they're all in the document that you can download from smartmind.com/podcast.
The technical or the flags visualisation is a agreement with yourself. When I go out and I do this at this point, I'm going to get this outcome. Now, what I use this a lot with is racing car drivers. I had a massive year last year with a lot of very successful racing car drivers. With seven of them now, with two of them actually living in the States and performing incredibly well.
One of the key strategies that we used for ownership and control and focus was these technical visualisation, how they embed the flags at certain corners at certain points, 'When I get here, this is what I will do.' It's that agreement and commitment in your mind that that's exactly the ownership point, the accountability point. Those three visualisation strategies are critical visualisation for increasing that familiarity, that ownership, and making sure that there isn't any nerves because you've been there before, you know exactly what is expected of you. There is no unfamiliarity because you've done it time after time after time. From the minute that you walk out onto that competitive arena, perform your set of skills, and get the reward, the objective. What we've done there is gone through the whole strategy in your mind. So when you do walk out in that final, you've been there. You may not have physically been there, but in your mind and in your sense of your ownership, yeah, you've been there. You feel good about it. Your focus can be 100% on what you are going to do rather than what is going to go wrong. So that practice, that application set up process is so critical.
The application needs to be daily. And we talk about the funnel process, the 7-2 process, which is the day seven all the way down to the day before your event. We want to embed a lot of these visualisations, a lot of this ownership, a lot of that familiarity into that process. So when you go into day one, the competition day, you've been there before, you know exactly what is expected of you. Now, that's the 7-2 funnel, but I also have a funnel for the funnel. We walk back another three weeks before that. A month before an event, we create a very slow feed into the week before an event. That's designed very specifically for you to own that comfort zone, for you to turn around and say, Right, a month before my event, these are all the key things that I need to do to get what I want. And then you get down to the specificity of the week before and then the specificity of the day of. Now, just as clarification, the day of a competition is, and should be, the most least things you do in that whole competition preparation. When you rock up and you perform, the only thing that you need to do is do what you know.
You're not there as a student, so there's none of this pushing boundaries, none of this learning process, none of this but what if. The only thing you've got to do on game day is just do what you know you need to do because you've practiced it. It's familiar in your head. All the preparation, if it's done correctly, should lead you to the point of ultimate comfort on event day. Now, that sounds strange, I know. For any of you that are competitors and you rock up on competition day and your mind's going a squillion a miles an hour saying, Have I done enough of this? Have I done enough of that? And, should I have done these? And what about that? All of those things shouldn't be in your head. If you've got a tight enough structure and framework, the moment you rock up to perform, it should almost be like, Oh, I'm here. Excellent. Now I just need to do this. Those application processes are, again, critical mental frameworking. Critical structure all the way down to performing.
Now we want to calibrate, and calibration is an ongoing process. We've talked about calibration in previous podcasts, and the whole point is to make sure that we stay on track because things change. Sometimes our investment may seem right at the start, but as the event goes along and you're preparing for a competition, you get to a stage and go, Oh, I didn't anticipate this, or the ball parks moved, or the goal post moved, sorry, or whatever it is, something comes along and changes what your initial trajectory was going to be. We want to make sure that we understand that and we respond to that way before it has an effect on us. Those of you who've heard me talk about chevrons, and they're the things when you come off the motorway or the freeway and you're coming up to a roundabout or a slip road and you get the on the ground. The early warning systems let you know as a driver, you're coming towards something you've got to do something different with. You can't keep that same speed that you've gone down the freeway or the motorway onto a roundabout. That early warning system is designed to say, right, you've got one of three options. You can keep doing what you've been doing down the freeway, and the consequences are going to be catastrophic. You're going to hit somebody else, you're going to go flying over the roundabout. It's not going to be pretty. Or second option, you can keep doing what you're doing, but slow down. You take more caution, you apply a different set of guidelines towards it, and hopefully have a much more favourable outcome. Or step three, where you get to change your plans. That early warning system, I don't want to go flying into the roundabout, I'm going to take this other slip road off to the left and get back on the motorway. Whatever it is, that early warning system is part of the calibration process. We talk about journaling, we talk about feedback, we talk about results, we talk about preparation and bringing part of your competition and your competitor into your training and having those as part of your preparation, so you can gauge how am I going? All of that feedback are part of our calibration process.
Now, last year I had an outstanding year. 2015 was a phenomenal year for myself and my clients. We had a greater spread of elite and professional athletes achieving great outcomes. However, it came at a cost. I spent 187 days overseas last year. My investment was huge, which meant I had to balance my Australian clients because I spent most of that time in the UK or the US or in Asia.
A lot of that time I spent away had an impact on my bigger picture, my bigger objective. Because that came up and those opportunities came my way, I had to change my objective for the year. I had to calibrate those. If I hadn't and I'd stayed on the same trajectory, I would have got to the end of the year and gone, Oh, wow, I haven't done this. I haven't done that. I haven't done that. I haven't reached my end objective, so therefore I can't reward myself. Irrespective of the fact that over the year, a lot of those clients in those overseas environments done outstanding. It would have been very difficult for me to replicate that output if I hadn't have calibrated and changed my trajectory a little bit.
It's important for you to keep your ear to the ground in your performance and your progress. Have key strategy points along your preparation to go, Right, am I still on track? Am I still on target to hit my objective? Are things still the same way that I had anticipated in my trajectory? If they are, awesome. Keep doing what you're doing until the next calibration point, which should be in a couple of days' time.
If they're not, then we slip back into the ant mode. Remember the ant mode? We got the ant and he's got this little pheromone path all the way from his house all the way to the food, and they follow that straight path because it's the most efficient and effective path. If something changes that path, what are the one or two things we need to do to get around that blockage to get back on our path? Once we have that calibration or those early warning system, those chevrons along the way, we can make minute adjustments if we get there early enough. If we wait until we derail and we go, Oh wow, it's two days before the event. And you know what? I haven't done this, I haven't done that. I am not ready for this. I've got to try and squeeze it all into the last two days. That's not going to allow you to have that familiarity, that comfort level, make sure those nerves are dissipated altogether, and we will go out there incredibly cautious, which is not going to allow the best us to step up from the gate.
So let's just do a recap of all of what we've covered.
We've talked about having a key strategy objective, making sure that we know why we're doing it, we understand its value and its clarity, and we can sell it to our mum.
We talk about the tipping point to making sure we know what we need to do when we have it and when we don't have it. That 75%, not the 74, not the 73, but the 75. That was my objective. That we want to make sure that we reward ourselves with that dopamine, the serotonin, the epinephrine, all those kinds of things in our brain, so we go, Yes, that was awesome. I want to do that again. We get that traction and that momentum forwards.
We want to make sure that we have that springboard in place. We know that that objective is going to allow us to achieve the next thing, which allows you to achieve the next thing. We get that momentum forwards each and every time.
The practice, the visualisation, the disassociated, the associated, and the technical, which is the planting of those flags, that agreement with yourself that when I get to this point, this is what I am going to do.
The application that goes beyond that to setting it up into your funnel and your funnel that feeds your funnel.
All of this is incredibly structured, making sure that we have an accountable process from where we are now to our objective and beyond. And then the event just becomes a step in the process. It's not the be all and end all. We don't get overwhelmed and we step out onto centre court because we know, You know what? I'm here. I deserve to be here. I've done everything right to be here and go beyond. That comfort and familiarity allows us to have replicability and allows us to have the 100% focus on what we need to do, not what may go wrong, the what ifs.
And the last part was the calibration, making sure that that system that we've built is maintained and we have complete ownership over that.
So all the way back around to that Australian Open Championship, when my clients and my clients' parents were texting me and asked me, Why do some athletes take so long to get into the swing of it? My answer, They haven't prepared properly. It's all down to the preparation process. If they had prepared in a concise and precise format, they would have been able to turn up and perform straight away.
Let's change the habits of the past into the progressive habits of the future.
I hope you've enjoyed this first podcast of 2016, and I spoke at the start about my new book that's coming up, which is Growing Champion Minds. It hopefully will be out by late March, and I'll make sure that it's available to all you people who listen to this on one of my formats, whether it be on my website or Amazon. I'll give you that link closer to the time.
Until the next episode of Brain and the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
