Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Thirty-Six â Consistent Preparation = Consistent Performance
Hello and welcome back to Brain in The Game. Brain in The Game is a podcast that has been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just a little bit smarter. Brain in The Game tackles those topics others avoid. My name is Dave Diggle, the host of the show.
In this, episode 36, weâre going to look at how we can build performance strategies that last and weâre going to do that through understanding the human mental cycle. Now, the way we understand how we build strategies that last is to understand the consistent preparation equals consistent performance â meaning, the better we build the strategies that we use, and the more we understand them, the more we embed them, the more likely weâre going to get consistent replicable performance.
When we set out to build a strategy, whether it be a competition strategy, whether it be a skill strategy, whether it be a performance strategy, we want to create something that is not only optimal but is replicable, and we do that by going through a very specific cycle. This cycle is called the search, sort, store, and recall process or the Mental Processing Cycle. And at the end of the podcast, you can download a template that shows you how this works.
But letâs work our way through that. We start off with the search. Now, when we think about searching, what weâre looking for is specific things that are designed for us. With the increase in the amount of things that stimulate our environment, be that the internet, be that our mobile phones, our tablets, our computers, the advertising that goes on around us, be it TV, be it radio, thereâs far more information that our brain has to process than ever before, and thatâs only on the increase. Not only do we have whatâs in front of us now, we have whatâs subconsciously stimulating us too. So when we are on the train and you see those signs up there or the now illuminated signs or TV shows when you go to fill up youâre on the pump. Thereâs so many things going on around us our brain has to process, and look for is that relevant to us?
So if we want to do something and we want to get the right information, the most important thing for us to do is in our search process, is be aware of exactly what it is weâre looking for. So if youâre learning a skill or you want to put a strategy around performing a skill, then itâs important to understand what is that skill exactly, how does it work, why is it relevant to me, what have I got to do to make that skill work? Thereâs going to be a lot of stimulants around for you to process, be it what your coach tells you, what you see other athletes doing, things that you try and understand yourself.
So, number one is understand the specificity of what youâre trying to get the information for. So if we are looking at a twisting exercise, how specifically will you twist and what will you gain from twisting that way. Is it going to enable you to twist faster? Is that what youâre after? Is it going to enable you to stand up and get more height before you twist?
Is it going to be how you kick a ball? Are you trying to go for speed? Are you trying to go for height? Are you trying to go for accuracy?
By recognizing specifically what youâre trying to achieve will help you understand what it is you need to search for.
And those of you who are regular listeners to this podcast would know I often talk about red cars. If you know exactly what youâre looking for and you go out there, youâll see it more clearly and more frequently. The same way if you buy a red car, you see more red cars on the street. It doesnât mean thereâs more red cars on the street. It just means youâve built an awareness of what youâre looking for. And the same goes with information that weâre trying to create for our strategy. When you hone down and you nail into this is what I want it for, this is what I want it to do and look like and feel like and sound like, then youâll be able to recognize the information more readily. So thatâs the search area. Know your needs and your wants. What do I want and what do I need to do to get it.
The second part is sorting. So, within all that information thatâs now more relevant to you, you have to find the thing thatâs more specifically relevant. So what we want to do is we want to know when, how, and why. So we want our brain to go through the natural filter of deleting things that we donât want. We donât want all the stuff that can clog up our thought processes. We donât want the things that have been distorted. They are almost what we want but not quite right. And we donât want to generalize. We want to be as specific and relevant as we possibly can. Why is that important to me? When will I use that? And how will I use it?
The precision process. The first part of the search was specificity. This part is precision. Be really precise about the relevance to you. Donât just take on a skill or a strategy that others have done just because you donât have one of your own. The likelihood of that being as relevant for you as it works for the other person youâve taken it from is very limited. Build your own strategies for you. So we search for awareness, we sort by relevance, and we store through our emotions. And again, everybody whoâs a regular listener to this podcast will know I talk about our memory being like a library. When we have an event, we choose to store it in categories in our brain. Itâs the sport one or itâs the work one or itâs the school one or itâs the interaction with the family one. It gets categorized like a library in different genres.
If you have a young child who is learning this concept, I wrote a book that might help, available here: https://amzn.to/3HFceXw
And the last thing that we do is we associate an emotion to that. Now, this is positive and negative. It makes it much easier to find, âoh thatâs a great day that we did thisâ or âthat was oh, no, that was a horrible day, that happened.â So we have our emotions that enable us to categorize the whole event. The flipside and the more negative side to that is everything that is associated to that event gets coated in that emotion. Now, that can make it difficult to learn from it if youâve given it a negative emotion because what we try and do for most negative things is avoid them.
So we want to be very careful with the emotion that we associate to the information that we find. We want to give it an emotion that has positivity to it. So when youâve worked out what you want to look for, when youâve found it and youâve found the relevance to it, we want to give you a positive emotion. âOh that technique that Iâve just learned is great. I can see how I could use that. Iâll visualize the way that that system works specifically for me and what itâs going to give me, my outcome. Iâm going to twist better than everybody else or Iâm going to kick the ball better than anybody else.â So weâve got that positivity associated to that skillset.
Thatâs great. Weâve got the first three steps of the four-step process. We know what we want to search for, we know what we want to sort by relevance, and we know we want to store via emotion â so that categorization.
The fourth step is how do we use it â because the other stuff is just core information unless we use it. Thereâs no point in clogging up our brain with just cool stuff unless that cool stuff is usable. So the recall process is the way that we get that information out and use it. And we do that by the actioning process. We get clarity through creating a trigger that will fire that behaviour. And again, often I say humans are just patterns and triggers. What we want to do is have the right pattern, we build the right pattern through our search, sort, and store process. What we need to do now is trigger that pattern. And again, we do this through the visualization process. We want to create replicability. We want to create distinct options and we do that by rewarding the correct one by making it feel good. The trigger process is in-built with the visualization and we can do that by creating the perfect outcome using all the strategies that weâve just put together and the outcome that it gives us, the positive outcome, and then associate either an action or a word or a phrase. What happens then is the two become associated in our brain. The pattern and the trigger become one. So when we fire that trigger, our brain goes, oh, thatâs that pattern. That makes a strategy that weâve just built thatâs very tailored to us completely replicable.
The mental cycle is our strategy and recipe for building performance strategies that last. So these strategies are ideal for when weâre under duress and stress during a performance or a competition or just during training where weâre trying to create the familiarity to the strategy and the performance.
So letâs just recap those very very quickly. Search is our awareness. Know your needs and your wants, and this is the area for specificity. Sort, this is the area for relevance â when, how, and why, being incredibly precise about how it is important to you. The store is the emotion, giving you that positive feel to it, that making more fun to thought for you and more reliable and desired performance. And recall is actioning and we do that with clarity by using our visualization and our triggers, making memorable memories. Those triggers are replicable, they are options, and they are rewardable.
So, the mental cycle is something every athlete, every coach should be incredibly aware of. And Iâll put a link on our website, which is www.braininthegame.com.au. Or you can go directly to our main website, which is www.smartmind.com.au. There, youâll get a lot of our templates, youâll get access to our trainings, our live trainings, and some of our articles that we write.
I hope youâve enjoyed that short sharp look at the mental cycle. And donât forget, consistent preparation equals consistent performance. And until our next episode, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle and Iâm the professional mind coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
https://www.smartmind.com/
