Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Twenty – Your Sport - Finding That Lost Performance
Hello and welcome back to Brain In The Game, the podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sport smarter. Brain In The Game is a weekly wake-up session to stimulate your brain, and I'm your host Dave Diggle.
In this Episode 20, we're looking at lost performance. There's almost nothing as frustrating as losing something, be it your car in a shopping mall car park, your house keys, or even one of your kids at the zoo. There's nothing more frustrating like knowing you know where you left it, but you can't put your finger on it or pinpoint it. You've come out that shop, and there's nothing that references anything like where you parked your car. It's like you've been dropped in on an alien planet where everything familiar has been ripped out, and you've been left there to find your way.
Frustrating, isn't it? We've all been there. But even more than losing your car is losing your performance. If you've had that taste of success where you've had a good season or competition, and all of a sudden in a puff of smoke it's gone. That performance now eludes you. Maybe after an injury, a break in your training, or a change in your coach. It's vanished. It's not like you can't do it because you have done it before. You clearly have the skills. It's just gone. That's frustrating, demoralising, and quite scary. We've all had outstanding competition, that superb tournament or season, and not been able to continue to run with it.
What do we do? What most people tend to do is either flounder around when they realise it's all gone pear-shaped, or they stick their head down and try to push forward. Both these strategies have some degree of merit, but neither have a particularly good success rate in getting back on track. Put simply, if you flounder around, you're looking at the crash site – not where the wheels initially went wobbly and you started going off-track. You had no reference point for understanding when that was. You're just at the crash site where everything has gone belly-up. This means if you pick up the trail from there, you're likely to pick up something that's already damaged or off-trajectory. Within a short period of time, you'll crash again, reinforcing that emotional self-doubt.
Floundering around isn't going to help you get back on track. The alternative that most people do is to get their head down, their bum up, and keep trying to push through that stuck stage. If you do this, it's like attacking your objective blindfolded. You could be heading in the right direction, but you'll never know until you either reach your objective or don't. Who would know? It could be a complete waste of time, energy, money, and your career, only to realise once again that you're not performing.
Let's look at this logically. First, it's important to understand you have not lost it. You cannot lose it if you've done it before – you just can't recall it. Once you've done anything, your brain creates a neurological point of reference so you can replicate it in the future. That's just what we do as a species. We know how to do it again. We describe it like an drawing or image or map; whereas in reality, it's a concoction of chemicals blended in such a specific way as to stimulate the right sequence of actions. We've not lost it, rather, we've misplaced the recipe.
Like any good recipe book, our neurological point of reference is catalogued somewhere in the pages of our memory. Where it is catalogued depends on what we were doing, not doing, experiencing, or not experiencing, during the last time we accessed it. There are of course a number of sub-branches, with an overall big picture categorised by emotion. Herein lies the possible problem: the two most likely reasons you're not accessing the performance or behavioural triggers that you once could is because you're probably not accessing the right stage or state that previously fired those chemicals. Because you're coming at it from a direction of tension, anxiety, or desperation, your perspective on where the trigger is becomes skewed. The already-pungent chemicals are tainting your cocktail by the anxiety and pressure you're putting yourself under. The more you try and not succeed, the more your anxiety rises and the less clarity on that state and trigger that you have. It's a cycle.
The other angle with this being off-kilter is if you're being told where the trigger is. Remember, the cataloguing is formulated by our emotions, which are internal and very personal. Unless well-trained, understanding another's emotion is a tough gig, and the likelihood of you knowing where those triggers are, is low. You need to be in-state to be in-state – you need to be in the right emotional state to replicate the necessary state/emotion that fired that performance trigger. This can be achieved by targeted visualisation or even hypnosis at a later stage; and it can be replicated by understanding what's being said internally and how you feel when things are going well.
Secondly, when trying to re-establish that winning way, it's important we get back on track as soon as possible. Rather than the bum-up, head-down approach, we need to go back to the exact point we performed well and understand the emotional connection. It's here that we can get back on track. I tend to get great results using TLT (Timeline Therapy) – a virtual walk back through your memory and your emotions to where your path was interrupted. Alternatively, if it's been a really long time or there's some fear associated with the performance, hypnosis is an alternative.
There's nothing wrong with making mistakes or falling off track time to time. We all do it. We just need to know how to re-establish the path. It's difficult and takes some serious maintenance, but frequent calibration can inform us when things are starting to get off-track long before the crash.
When our performance becomes wayward, it's not the time to panic. It's the time to rewind and establish the connection; to understand where our triggers are, so we can replicate this performance. The use of the Smart Mind Journaling process lets us pinpoint key behavioural traits and triggers that we've established to take us back to that point. It also allows us to calibrate far more efficiently, so we can recognise when we start to rock back and forth a bit. We can say “Something's not working here – time to put down the anchor, slow down, re-establish, re-centre” and get back into our program.
Anything we want to be precise about, it's all about the set-up. Making sure we have enough touch-points to make sure we understand our performance, what's working, how it works, and have as much tight structure around us to keep us on track. If you're performed to a certain standard before and you're having difficulty doing that again, finding your groove, then it's time for you to stop, back track, and re-establish. Don't panic, and don't stick your head down and just push forward. It can be a waste of valuable time. Take the time to stop and re-establish.
Until the next session, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle, and I'm the Mind Coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
https://www.smartmind.com/
