Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Eleven B – Top 10 Questions Asked by Elite Athletes and Coaches the World Over - Part B
Welcome back to Brain in the Game, the podcast designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who want to do their coaching and sport a little smarter. I'm Dave Diggle, and this is part B of the Top 10 questions asked by you, our listening audience. In part A, we looked at questions 10 to 6: How do we set good goals, how do we keep ourselves on track, how do we get the memories of our poor performance out of our minds, how do we motivate ourselves, and how do we get rid of performance fears. In this episode, we're going to look at the top 5 questions you've sent to us on www.braininthegame.com.au.
Question number five is “Competition scares me!” This is something every single athlete goes through. If you went into a competition and didn't have some degree of nervousness, you don't see the importance of the competition. A small amount of nerves just proves to you that there's value to it. It's natural, and on some level, helps you up the game a bit. But when it becomes incredibly overwhelming and you have fear around the competition, and it scares you to not wanting to be there, then there's an issue. We can handle that by creating a framework, familiarity, and a sense of having done everything in your power to perform ideally.
We have a 2-step process I take athletes through, and that's the Funnel Process. It's split into days “7 to 2”, and day 1, “Competition day”. What we need to do is identify everything you need to do before a competition: training, uniforms, organising meals, travel, accommodation, doing visualisation training, seeing your chiropractor or masseuse – all of these things need to be listed. Once you have that list, we need to put them in day 7 to day 2. What we want to do is stack them higher at the top, so day 7-4 have the majority of things to do. Days 3 and 2 will have 2-4 things only. This funnel progress will enable us to tick boxes and let us mentally say “on day 7, I had all these things to do and I have most of them done. On day 6, I'm making progress, there's even less to do”, and so on, down to day 2 where there's only 1 or 2 things to do. It makes it feel easy, like you have everything under control.
When you get to that stage on day 2 and get to reward time, you say “there's nothing left to do, all I need to focus on is competition day.” On competition day, day 1, we follow the exact same process. Make a list of everything that needs to happen, so that when you come to compete, and actually step on the field, the only thing you're thinking about is performing. Everything else has been done, all the boxes ticked – acknowledged and rewarded. You feel great, and all that's left to do is perform. That enables you to take control of competitions. On day 7, you can't think about competition, there's so many things to get done. Same with 6 to 4 – but as the days tick down, you feel better and better with the reward process done by acknowledging what you've done in the funnel process. When you step in to compete on day 1, when it's your time to shine, you recognise you've done everything and you can perform.
On to number 4, “Why does my coach treat us all so differently?” I can't tell you the number of times I've heard this – “my coach favours him/her” or “speaks differently to that person than to me” or “they're stricter to me”. My answer every time is “good”. If your coach is treating you exactly the same as everybody else, then they're not taking the time to understand you, and know what makes you tick. What will make you perform as an individual. Even if you're in a team dynamic, you're all individuals coming together for a common goal.
If your coach is treating you different, I'd see that as a positive sign. Now, if they're treating you differently but you're not understanding them, or you're not being stimulated or directed or firing on all cylinders, then that is an issue, and means they're not taking time to understand you as an individual. Coaches out there, listen up: in episode 4, we looked at “All athletes are not the same”. The idea behind this for coaches is to take the time to know your athletes. Investing the time at the start of the season is far more productive for you than getting to the point of competition and saying “ugh, this athlete isn't doing what I want them to do”, or finding one of your athletes completely out of sync. You need to invest the time and create a journal of how all your different athletes work, what makes them tick, and what their core values and beliefs are.
I can't tell you how many times I speak to a coach who's having an issue and says “I have an athlete with an attitude problem, we're not connecting” and I ask “okay, what do they value?”, and the coach will say “...I don't know”. If you don't understand what their values are, how can you speak to their values? How can you turn around and say “I know winning is important to you”, why it is, and speaking to that? That gives you far more leverage than “Pfft, I don't get you, I thought you wanted to win!” Understand their emotional drivers behind their end objectives. What makes it so important for them? What's their emotional buy-in? What images are they using? Do they see medals around their neck, or being able to buy their parents a house? That's leverage and enables you to talk directly to what's driving them.
Listen to their language patterns, understand the language they use. Are they talking about winning, being fair, team dynamics, themselves? Talk about those things. Using commonality will make them feel more at ease and connected, and enable you as a coach to get inside their head far more efficiently. Understand their family dynamics – do they have family on the sidelines or siblings you need to bring on-board? Understand their social dynamics – do they feel part of the team, or disjointed because they're a different ethnic or religious background, or whatever it may be? Not segregating, but bringing them all together by understanding their issues, enables you as a coach to get a better result.
The most important thing to understand is, are they internally or externally referenced? This is the most important thing because it enables you to acknowledge them and make them feel important. If they're internally referenced, that means the most important thing to them is their own internal acknowledgement. They go “I don't care what anyone else thinks, I know I did a great job”. This is as opposed to someone externally referenced – they're the ones that go “How did I do, coach? How can I do better next time?” And of course, there's grey areas in between; those that need some external reference and instantly take on that they did a great job, and ones that need a ton of external reference before thinking they did anything well at all.
How do you find out which one they are? You listen to them. If they're internally referenced and they do a good job, you can say “Wow, you did a great job, you need to be really proud of yourself”. If they're internally referenced, you can say “Wow, you did a great job, I'm really proud of you”. You’re saying the same thing, but you're speaking to them as individuals. As coaches, we need to take that time and invest early on in understanding our athletes so we become precise in the way we communicate. I know my coach, when I was an athlete, spoke to me very differently than he did the other kids in the team. We were all good at what we did, we're all the same age, from similar backgrounds; but he spoke to me differently. He understood I needed to know the “why”, the technical. Others in the team, he knew he could say “go and do this” and they'd do it. He knew if he said that to me, I'd always come back with “why? What would that give me?” It wasn't me being facetious, it was me needing to understand what I'd be able to achieve – once I understood, I'd go and do it all day long.
We're on to number 3, “How do I manage the emotional ups and downs?” If you get out of bed some days and feel on top of the world like you can conquer anything, and the next day you wake up and say “I can't get out of bed – I don't want to do this. I'm tired, I've had enough”. That kind of roller-coaster process, every athlete goes through; and the longer the journey, the more of this you'll encounter. How do we manage that and make sure we create a trajectory that grows?
The question I ask everyone is “When are you the athlete, and when are you not?” If you're the athlete 24/7 – those who say “I eat, drink, sleep, and dream my sport”, I get the buy-in and the passion, but it's not sustainable. If you're in 4 years, and every single minute awake and sleeping, that's going to be physically and emotionally fatiguing. It's going to be so draining that you'll never be able to say “I really need to step it up” – step it up into what? Identify when you are an athlete, and when you're not. When you're not, be 100% not, and go out and spend time with your partner or family. Enjoy life. Don't do things that would compromise your sport like drinking, things you wouldn't do; but have down time and turn off. That way, when you turn back onto your sport, you can give 100%. Not only will you know you've had downtime, but you have more downtime coming. You can be more condensed and concentrated, and apply every ounce of you as an athlete during that training or competition period – and then switch off.
Enabling your brain to switch off gives you off-time, and enables peaks to plateau – so you can up them, and plateau; up them again, then plateau; rather than going up and up and up and up to the point where you can't do it any more and then plummeting. You need to manage your emotions better – not only feed them, but rest them. Understand when you are and when you're not “the athlete”, and enjoy the difference between them. We have a template which walks you through the difference between “what's the difference between me as an athlete, as a pure athlete, and me as a person?” And, what are the trigger steps between? How do you go from “mild-mannered me” to “athlete me”? Is it when you come through the door and see the equipment? Is it when you strap, don the helmet, put your runners on? What's that moment you become the athlete, and what's the moment you switch off? Climb, plateau, over and over. That's really important for us to maintain a sense of strength, growth, and stability – not the roller coaster.
Question number 2: “What do I do first?” This is a really common question. Step 1: Identify where you are. If you don't acknowledge where you are, you don't know where you're going to go, or how you’re going to get to somewhere, or what that different location would be. Step 2: Identify where you want to be. We talk about the buy-in and the emotion – what is it about where you are now and where you want to be that makes them different? Step 3: Build a plan to get there. Whether that be the decision matrix, sitting and drawing a plan, sitting with your coach and discussing it. Step 4: Get the right team around you. Make sure you've got everything to enable you being the athlete you want to be. Make sure everyone around you knows what you are, what you want, what you want to do, and that they're on board with you. They need to be able to hold you accountable and hold you up. You can't do everything – if you want to be the best at what you do, you need to be 100% focused on that, and all the peripheral things need to be managed for you. Step 5: Reward each step along the way so that you enjoy the process.
The number 1 question we get all the time, primarily from coaches – and we've been downloaded in 69 countries, thousands of times, and the majority of these people are coaches who want to add to the way they coach – is “Why wasn't this taught when I was doing my coaching course?” That is a really great question – and one that I can't answer. I don't believe it shouldn't be taught. I am 100% convinced the mental aspect of an athlete is just as important as the physical and technical. All of these things come together to create a champion. We've all seen athletes out there who have all the talent in the world, but don't have the mental structure and can't manage their emotions, and they burn out or fall off the conveyor belt really quickly.
Understanding how to manage an athlete’s mental development, cognitive structure, and emotional management, is important. Historically, coaching is a physical and technical activity, and most humans need tangibility to feel that they're getting value. If you go to a doctor and he gives you pills, you feel like you're going to get better because he's given you something. If you go and the doctor says “You just need to think you're getting better, because there's nothing wrong with you other than what your brain is telling you”, you'd say “I need to see someone else”. We've evolved to feel we need to receive something in order to get some value or benefit; when in reality, it's like having this F-1 sports car that's tweaked to perfection, with no driver. It won't be going anywhere, it will just sit in the garage. We need the brain behind the wheel. We can engage our brain without engaging our body, but not the other way around.
So, the number 1 key aspect to creating a sustainable athlete and the performance we can replicate time after time is conditioning our brain. How we can perform without our emotions getting in our way, and learning cognitive structure. Even if this framework isn't part of what you've been taught before, this is a great place to start learning that skill set.
My name's Dave Diggle, I'm the mind coach, and until the next training session, train smart and enjoy the ride.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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