Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Thirty-Three – The Top 5 Things we can Learn from Sport
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 a little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is an informed perspective on our reality. And I'm your host Dave Diggle.
In this episode 33, we're going to look at sport and life – and, are they really any different now? When I work with athletes, I choose to work with the athlete, the coach, and the parent – and often, the siblings – that go along with that. One of the things I observe along the way is often parents will see their child's athletic career as something that is either playing out or is different from reality; from the real life from their schooling and then through to their jobs and their careers. From my perspective sport is such a great learning ground for life. Some of my greatest skills have come from my sporting days and skills that I still utilise today. If we don't take the opportunity to see them as an opportunity to learn then we tend to just lose those in perspective. We don't get too call on those skills. In reality when we go through life and go through our careers, when we’re in relationships, sport can offer us a great ground for learning about ourselves, about socialisation, about achieving, and how to deal with the positives in life and not so positives in life. So, in this episode 33, I want to look at the top five lessons sports can share with us for our life.
People tend to compartmentalize: “This was when I was an athlete.” “This was when I was at school.” “This is now that I've got a job.” And all these different aspects of our life tend not to cross platform because we have compartmentalised them so stringently. If we choose to put them in a box then it makes it very difficult for us to access the learnings – the good, the bad, and the ugly that comes with that. So, let's talk about what we can achieve from being able to access all these different parts of our lives now.
As a professional mind coach today, some of the skillsets that I utilise with my clients come from my days as an athlete; they come from my days when I was teaching. I had some military background. I've had a couple of different careers along the path here that I can utilise and call upon that enables me to do what I do today just that bit better. And if I didn't choose to access those parts of my life to gain those skills that I already have and use them with my clients then I, quite frankly, think I'd be short changing some of my clients.
When I am, problem solving I don't only look at the science I've studied – the psychology and NLP, the CBT, the hypnosis – they're all great skills that I use in my day-to-day business. But I also utilise the skills I gained as an athlete. All those years ago when I was much younger and I had no idea what I'd end up doing as a career. I was learning skills that today are critical for the success of what I do.
If you ask an athlete about their sporting career, it becomes isolated for them. “This is what I'm doing right now. This is my world right now. I drink it. I eat it. I sleep it. I live it.” And they don't tend to see beyond that sporting career.
Look, in reality, most youth and young people don't see beyond the now. However, if we – as adults and coaches, their parents, their influence around them – if we teach them that in everything they do, there's a lesson in that, that will enable them to see as a skillset rather than a need. Something I need to do right now to get my result. It's an important learning curve for everybody. So one of the greatest things I learned as an athlete was to be solution-based thinking always thinking about how do I solve this problem.
Now, in my career as a professional my coach, that's what I do all day every day. I come across other people's issues and we solve those problems. We have to think laterally outside the box and help people create strategies that can create successful athletes and coaches. So being able to be solution-based thinking has enabled me to help the majority of my clientele now.
Where did I learn that skillset from? To be quite frank with you, I think it came from my childhood. I think it's a skillset that I learned both as an athlete and as a youngster with my use of my imagination. Because I don't necessarily constrict myself to only going down the normal path, the well-trodden tracks of getting athletes from one point to the next. I get creative in getting them from one place to the next place and making it fit their lifestyle and their lives and their personalities in order to do that. I have to be creative. I have to be able to use my imagination in a way that most adults have switched off. So, by me accessing the lessons I learned as an athlete from all those years ago and being able to go, “Right, this is my problem, how do I get from here to here?” And I have no limitations because when we're young we don't see limitations. When we get older we tend to see limitations. So, if I can access that region of my brain that doesn't have those constraints then the people that are going to benefit from that are my clients. So that's a skillset that I have learned as an athlete: to use my creativity to solve problems; to be solution-based thinking.
The next thing is to look at the long game; the importance of building a plan and the investment in that time to get there. Now, as an adult we tend to see again people being very I need this done now. I want this result now. As an athlete. We plot and we plan. We look at our competition schedule. We look at how we integrate skills. We look at how we develop our physiology and our physicality. We get our strength and conditioning program on board. We get our plan: “I need to learn this skill by this date. By that time, I need to have a routine construction. By this point I need to be consistent.” This is a skillset that we need to utilise, and want to utilise, in our careers.
If we have a plan then we have a structure.
If we have a structure then we have accountability.
If we have accountability, then we have the ability to calibrate.
And if we can calibrate what we can do we keep efficiency.
This skillset of being able to future pace ourselves, to plan and to plot, is a skillset that is incredibly ingrained in the sporting world.
Now, as a father of three children – all three children involved in sport – this is a concept that I constantly integrate into their world. When they're talking about their schoolwork I ask them to ask, “If you want to get from here to here, how do we structure that? If this was your gymnastics, softball training, or your Tai Kwondo” – which are the three sports that my children do – “how would we develop this skillset? How would we get to our end objective?”
And we build a path, and we build accountability, and it enables our children to have that skillset that they learn in their sport, in their education. And it's incredibly successful. Having something that we can associate to something that they love – they love their sport – it then doesn't become a task, it becomes fun, it becomes familiarity. It's something they've got a grip on. They know how it works.
I use it in the sport that they love doing, and they get a result. And we then just cross-platform that from their sport into their school and that will be a skillset they'll take from school into university and into life. So, it's a cool recognition for us to enable them to feel empowered, to feel in control.
Number three is: reward equals momentum. Now when we're doing sport we get huge amounts of success. There could be learning a new skill; it could be achieving a team and being selected. It could be winning a competition. There's so many aspects of our life that are reward driven. When we hit these rewards, we get dumped with serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline. Very addictive drugs from our own natural chemistry in our brain. This enables us to go, “Wow that was great! I really want more of that. What have I got to do next, in order to get that next hit.” This creates momentum, a great driver for us. We want to move forward. We want to achieve again. Sport is renowned for this. It enables us to have that that movement forward, that momentum, that we create and own.
Then if we think about our lives as adults a lot of that reward process has dissipated. If we fall into a normal nine to five kind of career, then often that the big end objective, the big goals are: did you meet your yearly objective, your KPIs? Well, that's a long stretch to go without feeling that momentum without feeling those moments of success.
One of the things that I do in my business for me is I do set myself those constant benchmarks and I have a calibration process. When I hit that this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a day off, take my family out for a meal, or I'm going to have a holiday.
So, throughout the year I've got a number of touch points to enable me to reward myself for my input into my business. The momentum I create for my weekly and monthly objectives – the goals I set along the way – create such momentum for me that I find myself constantly over achieving what I am doing because I feel so good about what I do and this is a skillset that I have learned and I've taken from my sporting career. I need and I want to have those emotional hits of success.
So, when you're thinking about helping your children learn from something, such as their sport, teach them how to set a structure that rewards them. That makes them feel good about the journey they're on.
Number four is: emotional management. Now there was an excellent documentary that was done by Freddie Flintoff who was the England cricket captain back in 2006. And Freddie Flintoff, in recent years, has recognised that he was suffering depression during that period. And that depression was caused by expectation. Now, one of the things that we do today incredibly well is we add different support specialists to our sports careers. So, chiropractors, physiotherapists, we add strength and conditioning programs, nutrition programs, into the education of our athletes. No longer is it just about a coach teaching an athlete techniques to perform. The environment we put around our athletes is there to encourage them and support them and educate them. One of the skillsets that is becoming more and more prevalent and relevant is mind coaching – the mental ability to control their emotions, to make them feel good about everything they do – to be open and communicate more efficiently.
So, when things are great they can recognise those and verbalise those and replicate those. The flip side of that is when things are not so great they get to recognise those and deal with them; have people around them to help them through those sticky points those times where they have self-doubt; those times where maybe things are not going the way they should do and they start to see the negative in everything.
Having somebody around you, such as myself as a professional mind coach, who deals with this. The athlete's mental emotional and cognitive development is going to teach them to be able to communicate the good and the bad in our life. And that's a skillset that many adults don't have in today's society that when, and especially males – the guys out there who don't recognise mental illness, who don't recognize the fact that their moods and their emotions have an influence and an impact on their performance. Whether that be as an athlete, or whether that be in a business, whether it be in a relationship, what we can learn from our sporting career is we need to put the right people around us to help us manage all aspects of us, not just our physical preparation or our physical performance but every aspect of our development. Communication, and open communication, is such a critical aspect of a successful sport that we don't necessarily recognise and take into life, take into our education. How many students do you know out there who struggle through their school certificates who don't open up and talk about, “You know I'm feeling the pressure. I'm struggling here. I'm worried about if I don't get this mark where am I going to go.”
And the teen suicide around this time of year is – there's an awful statistic – that we can do better if we take the lessons from our sport which is, let's put the right team around us so we can achieve and manage not only the physical and the technical of our students and our athletes but we manage the mental and emotional of our athletes too. We're going to get more rounded, more open, more communicative athletes and students and people. So that is a really important aspect and skillset that we can take from our sport.
The last one I want to talk about is how to handle successes and failures. Now as a parent often you hear parents turn and say we've bought our kids a pet so they can learn to deal with looking after something, caring for something, and then eventually dealing with the death of that.
So, when we think about teaching our kids how to manage death in the family, we tend to give them something like a pet and educate them on how this is how it grows, this is this is a cycle of life. But how do we teach our children how to deal with success and with failure.
In sport, we often are bombarded with that dichotomy. Those top athletes who achieve more than anybody else has achieved and we put them on that pedestal. And then we see them in the newspaper, constantly on the TV, and on the Internet, those athletes who fall from grace. Those ones who fail in such a big way that it makes the front page.
So how do we teach our children that it's not just this dichotomy view on life. How do we teach them and give them a skillset that you can achieve and you can have successes? And then this is how you deal with being successful. This is how you have humility to what you do, this is how you can go out there and maximise on your success without putting yourself out there and having the Internet take everything from you. And this is how you deal when things don't go right. What do you need to do when you have a run of poor performance? How do you pick yourself up, how do you get yourself back on track? One of the skillsets that I teach all my clients, and something I learnt from my sporting career, is when things go wrong people tend to try and fix it from the crash site.
You may have heard me talk about this before. If we're going along on a track and then the wheels get wobbly often we don't recognise that because we don't have clear calibration systems around us and we don't recognise something's wrong until it's completely come off the tracks and the train we're travelling on is crashed and we're standing in the middle of a crash zone and everything seems overwhelming around us. We don't know which way to turn. We don't know how to get ourselves out of this. So, we start to piece it back together at the crash site. What we're doing is putting together broken bits. We're not designing it the way we wanted.
So how do we do that. What's the lesson that we can learn from sport about managing, not only the successes, but also the failures. We need to have that clear calibration process that we have in school when things are going well. Our coaches and environment around us are telling us you're doing this right. That's doing that. We have competitions. We have selection trials. We have game days. We have race days that are a constant reminder of – yep, that's working.
So, you can now go out and replicate that and that same philosophy and structure as when things are not going right. We got the game days, the race days we got the competitions that go – hey, this isn't working. This is an opportunity for you to put this right. None of these are earth shattering, world stopping events. There’s an opportunity in our day-to-day world where we can go right.
Let me assess how I’m going. Let me recognise what's working, what's not working, and what I can do different. As adults out there, and you're listening to this, and you're in your own business, you're at university, or work for somebody else: how often do you have that calibration process? How efficiently do you put that into your structure? And if you don't, and I'm guessing that the vast majority of you don't have that structure in your life, is that not a great skill or that we could be teaching our children so that when they get into this situation – when they're working for somebody else, or running their business, or their school, or university – they have that instant calibration structure around them? And when the wheels start to go wobbly, they know they can put it right, there and then, not wait for it to crash.
So, they’re just five aspects to an athlete's world and skills that we learn in sport that we can take into the real world. So, is the real world and our sporting world really that different? I think, no. I think our opportunity to learn from our sport the skills that it gives us can change a perspective of how we see our sporting years. How do we take every single lesson that we can learn and apply that, not only to the now, not only to get me to the next competition, but to get me through life?
So, change the way you see your sport; the way you see your athlete's sport; your children or your students and think: where do I apply these same lessons outside of the competitive environment? Because school is a competitive environment. Our job is a competitive environment. When I get to work with CEOs the thing they want the most is: how do we manage our business the same way that you manage your athletes? How do we get that competitive mindset and that structure so that we can have consistent and replicable results? It's the lessons we learned as athletes that we can then apply in life.
I have a template that I use which is called the Input Matrix and what that does it teaches us to unpack the things that we've done throughout our life and get the lessons from that and then recognise how do I take these lessons and apply them moving forward? Be it in my sport; as a coach, or as a parent, how do I manage those lessons in real terms?
I'll put that Input Matrix with this episode of Brain in the Game. I hope you got some great learnings from this and see our sporting career timeframe a little bit differently; given a bit of a different context and perspective.
Everything that we do is an opportunity to learn and grow and move forward. And it's only relevant to us and is only important to us if we use it, if we choose to take those and go – right, there are skillsets that I now have that I can apply in so many aspects of my life. We want to recognise, we want to learn. We want to make the most of our sporting career. It's not only about those years where we're gaining medals or the opportunity to travel around the world and compete for our country. It's life lessons.
And, as always, I'll put the transcript from this episode on to our website braininthegame.com.au or you can go straight to our main website which is smartmind.com. There you'll see all our live trainings and our articles I write. Hope you've enjoyed this episode. I look forward to our next session of Brain in the Game. And until then, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle and I’m the mind coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
https://www.smartmind.com/
