Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Twenty-Two – Understanding Mental Imagery in Sport - Seeing isn't Always Believing
Hello and welcome back to Brain In The Game, the podcast for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain In The Game is a cognitive tonic delivered directly between your ears.
In this episode, we'll look at performance pitfalls of thinking that what you're seeing is really what you're seeing. It's probably something many athletes haven't contemplated before, but it can have a far greater impact on your sporting performance than you may think. As an athlete, we rely heavily on getting our bodies to do certain things, based on our brain's understanding of that skill; also our internal image and interpretation of what it should look like, and then how we correlate that look to performance with our own bodies.
As you probably know, I'm a huge advocate of visualisation. When we visualise, we inform our brain what it is we're expecting of it, and how it's supposed to look. It's effective, efficient, and reliable. This not only dissipates the physical, mental, and emotional fatigue that comes with repetitious training – “The more you do, the better it will get” – but where you physically and emotionally break down. Visualisation manages to bypass that physical workload, and allows for specificity and replicability.
The specificity is being able to mentally perform a skill perfectly, no ifs or buts, whenever we want to . The replicability is that we can perform that skill 5, 10, 20 times flawlessly, ensuring what we embed into our brain is the purest mental command. We know our emotions are the ultimate cataloguing system, so by being able to add the desired emotion in a controlled format, we ensure the replicability of that whenever we need to. It's the ultimate mental engineering.
For me, visualisation is a #1 confidence-building strategy that every athlete should be using. That being said, there's much more to it than just imaging what you want and waiting for it to arrive. And even visualisation can have its weaknesses – like being out of sync or misaligned with what you think something should look like, and what it actually does. When you ask most coaches and athletes what visualisation looks like to them, they'll tell you “I just close my eyes and see myself doing the skill.” That's disassociated visualisation. When you then ask the same athlete “How do you own that?”, that often struggle to make the connection between what they feel, see, and produce. This means even though they know what it should look like, they have little understanding in getting their body to own that process – to replicate, efficiently, what you see in your mind into an output.
Watching something is, relatively speaking, much easier than doing or feeling that something. To overcome this inability to see the skill from within, I recently strapped one of my GoPro cameras onto the chest of one of my ice skaters who was having this “skill ownership” issue. I wanted her to live the skill and get her senses stimulated by understanding the 3-dimensional nature of the skill. What she saw in her brain needed to correlate to what she'd see when she completed the move.
Once we complied the video and played it back for her, she gained a completely different perspective on what it should look like. She could also hear the ice, her breathing, and even her heart beat, which gave her a new perspective and stimulated all the different senses in her brain. When we then returned to visualisation, she not only owned the process, she also had emotional control of the triggers. It's important for the athlete to correlate what they're going to see, stimulating all their senses, so they can embed that trigger. It adds reality to the visualisation, and is not just creating something in our mind we think is perfect. It enables the athlete to go out and say “That felt the same way I pictured it in my brain.”
There's another weakness we can encounter, and that's embedding a less-than-desirable pattern. This comes when an athlete doesn't necessarily correlate reality to the mental imagery they've created, so they start to settle for second-best with the visualisation. We need to understand a perfect pattern holds no more weight than a flawed pattern, cognitively; and once triggered both just follow the pattern – good, bad, or ugly. If we create a less-than-desirable pattern in our brain, our brain doesn't understand that it needs to disregard it, it just does it anyway.
Creating a pattern takes a system and time. Re-patterning a broken system takes even longer. It's important we embed the right pattern at the start. I have a gymnast client working on a style issue. When I asked them to visualise the skill disassociatedly, they mentally performed the skill perfectly and saw excellence and detail every time. However, when I asked them to perform it associated – seeing it through their own eyes, with their own senses – they performed the skill with the limitations they believed they had. What this told me is that in their mind, they settled for second-best. “This is the ideal for the skill, and this is my limitation, so I'll settle with my limitations.” They'd lowered their benchmark in order to achieve the outcome they had in their mind.
When I asked that athlete why they chose not to see that image in their mind in the most pure format, they said “I thought I did...” It was a clear disconnect between the skill's potential and their potential. The athlete limited the outcome before they even tried the skill. Do you think the athlete saw the limitations of the skill, or of themselves? Obviously they saw their own limitations, settling for the worst-case scenario instead of shooting for the best-case one.
We see this all the time on the competition field. When athletes go out to compete, even though they believe they've done the right thing in training, if they get to competition and don't have confidence or belief in the system they've created, they'll settle for second best. I hear some of you saying “There has to be a reality to this; the chances of anyone going out there and doing perfection is minimal.” I'd say to you “Absolutely,” however, those limitations should remain in the realm of the physical. If you're physically restricted, you have something tangible to work with. Adding extra goals for strength and flexibility can create that momentum.
However, if you allow your thinking to be stunted, then there's an impact on your confidence and momentum that not only affects that skill, but every skill. If our mental imagery influences our performance and ability to replicate, and the quality of the output is governed by the quality of the input, then the importance of understanding the technical and mechanical is imperative; but also understanding the triggers, desired outcome, and emotional tagging is paramount. We need to create the perfect image in our brain of what we want our body to strive for, and encase that in such a positive emotion that it remains part of our motivation and momentum, and increasingly feeds our confidence.
We need to understand how we neurologically embed them, and how to use our natural ability to search and recall patterns based on our emotions, and how to assign the correct emotional tagging. Let me ask you that question again: Is what you see really what you see, or what you think you see? That clearly depends on the quality of your mental imagery.
Until the next episode of Brain In The Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle, and I'm the Mind Coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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