Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Eleven A – Top 10 Questions Asked by Elite Athletes and Coaches the World Over - Part A
Hello, and welcome to Brain In The Game!
Brain In The Game is a Podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents looking to do their sport smarter. I'm your host Dave Diggle. In this episode 11, I'm going to revisit key questions you listeners have sent into us – the top 10 from parents, coaches, and other listeners. Brain In The Game is being downloaded in 69 countries, and we have thousands of people listening to the way we teach the mental aspect of elite performance. To you guys, I'd like to say thank you for believing in what we do. We get so many emails telling us each week what you're doing with our programs. We also collate questions together to see what the common issues people are experiencing are. The things you are struggling with. That allows us to either apply what we're doing, or to become innovative about certain issues and come up with new techniques.
Before we get into the top 10, if you do come across something you want to contact us about, or let us know what you're doing with the Smart Mind program, you can always go to www.BrainInTheGame.com.au.
In episode 11, I'm going to go into great detail about how to overcome some of these problems you’re experiencing. I'll split Podcast 11 into 2 bite-sized chunks. We're going to look at questions 10-6 in part A, and then the top 5 questions in part B.
What was the 10th most common question we got? It's about “how to set goals”. Before we get into that, let's discuss the difference between a goal and objective. The objective needs to be our driver, the reason we get up in the morning – and it's because of this emotional association, whether to become an Olympian, a world or national champion, or just the best you can be – that emotional investment is the differentiation between a goal and objective. It's the end step, the trajectory you're traveling on, to get to that destination. It's like going on holiday – the journey there is fun, but you want to get there. Your objective is just that, what you're looking forward to.
Because you have that destination, you have a build-up of a drug in your body called dopamine. That's the “chaser” drug, it's a chemical that makes you feel that emotion and motivation to get to where you want. The excitement and driver to reach the end objective. Goals, on the other hand, are our short-term stepping stones to that objective. It allows us to stay on task, and give us freedom and flexibility that when one goal doesn't go to plan, we can change direction and get around something that's not working, while still staying on trajectory to our end objective.
We talk about dopamine being the reason we get up in the morning with that end objective, and we use the same motivation for our goals – yet, it's serotonin, the short and sharp reward chemical that makes us feel good that goals give. If we can set short, achievable, but rewarding goals along the way that we can reward, that creates the forward movement from one to the next; and enables us to overcome the hurdles. It's the foot soldier. In enabling us to get somewhere, it's almost expendable. If it doesn't work, we can just replace it. Yet, if we don't reach our end objective, that's a big let down. Not reaching a goal isn't the end of the world, it just means we need to tailor and work a little differently.
Back to the question, “how do I set a goal”, what we did, we created a template that enabled our athletes and coaches to build this path we're talking about, the process of getting from where we are now to our end objective with all the stepping stones in between. We call it our “decision matrix” and you can sign up at our website and we'll give you a link to download all the templates we talk about. The decision matrix is specifically designed to walk you through the steps of building your goals so you can keep a tight framework on achieving your goal. We first work on identifying what the end objective is, and the emotion associated with it – that big driver, the reason we get up in the morning and put ourselves through the physical and emotional torment to become that elite athlete. Once we've identified the emotional driver, we work backwards to build our stepping stones.
I'm often asked why we work backwards. Let me ask – when you're faced with going somewhere in your coaching, your training, or your education, what's often the hardest step? The first step. Knowing what step to take first is often the sticking point. If you say you want to be an Olympian, that goal may look so far away, at the first step you may say “I don't want to get it wrong... if I make a mistake on the first step, I'm going to go off-path and I'm not going to make it to my end objective...” Yet, if we start at the end objective and think of what happens right before that, then you know what's on track. You know that goal is in line with your objective. If we apply that same philosophy working backwards, it enables us to be precise about crafting our trajectory. We can be specific about what our goals are. That doesn't mean we can't change; once we have our framework, a new trial may come up, and we can slot it in within the framework – but it allows us to have control and see a specific path from the end objective to our first step.
We've had phenomenal results with this at the BITG institute. The success we get with athletes, the way they feel at ease and in control with this template, as it not only allows them to see what they need to do and completely control how they do it, it also makes them feel at ease and reduces their anxiety. This process alone allows them to perform smarter. All the anticipation is no longer about that first step, but spread out through the whole journey. You now know where you want to be and where you are, you just need to create a framework in between.
The goals need to be achievable yet challenging, you need to understand both the positive and negative consequences. What will it enable you to do once accomplished? What won't I be able to do if I don't achieve it? How can I move past it if I fail the first time? How do I continue on my path? They need to be concise and precise. Specific details and dates about how you're going to achieve them, to hold ourselves accountable. If I say “between now and the next 4 years, I'm going achieve 3 different goals” – when? What will hold me accountable and on-task? Nothing. I need to say “at this competition, I want to be at this standard, and achieve this goal. If I don't get there, what are my options – I can try out 2 weeks later to stay on my path”.
Then I need to overtly state the goals, and tell people like my coach, about what I need to do to get from here to my end objective. Once you have the verbal contract with someone else, not only are you holding yourself accountable, but you have people external to you holding you accountable. The goal-setting process is vital for us to understand, but it also gives us freedom. It's a personalized structure where we can maneuver within it.
Number 9 is “Why can't I keep myself on track?” This question is dovetailed into the previous one. We've talked about the reward-processing chemicals in our brain, dopamine and serotonin. The first question if you’re having trouble keeping yourself on track, I'd say “What track? How specific have you build your structure? Do you know what your next objective is going to be, and what it means to you?” The second question I'd ask is how are you holding yourself accountable? What are your benchmarks, and what are you doing to enable the creation and taking you on that path? The third question is “on track to what?” What's the emotion for you? If you're having trouble staying on-track, maybe you're not identifying with that driver that gets you out of bed. If you're not seeing what the objective will meant o you, you're less likely to buy into it and have an accountability to yourself.
Then, what is your reward process? What are you doing when you hit a goal? What investment in you, are you doing? It doesn't have to be a big financial investment like “oh I'm going to buy myself a Ferrari every time I hit a goal”. It comes down to acknowledging. Are you recognising when you hit a goal, or do you just go “okay now I'll move onto the next one”. If you don't take time to recognise yourself, you're unlikely to get others around you to see the importance of that goal to you, and it won't enable you to keep on track.
Also ask yourself “how often do I re-calibrate my track?” It's okay to sit and say you're going to build a decision matrix between today and the Olympics 3 years away, but lots can happen in 3 years. There can be injuries, selection issues, international representation that comes between it, a change in venues, a change in coaches – all these external influences can alter the goals you've set along the way. Do you monthly, weekly, by season, sit down and re-calibrate the path that you've chosen? I tell my athletes that I work with at the end of every single week “Did I reach my daily goals, and my week goals? If I didn't, what do I need to do different next week?”
Once a week might be too infrequent for some who need to do it daily, or too frequently for someone who may need to do it monthly or whenever. Whatever works for you, to say “I've applied this process, and now I am or am not on track”. Even if you don't change any of your goals, it's just a constant touching base to know that the process is working or not. You can tweak some things, or give yourself more freedom somewhere, etc.
I'm often asked if people who are disciplined are more likely to achieve their goals. I have a different take on discipline. Some people are more disciplined, but to me, it's just a reason to do something. If you see the value in getting out of bed every morning at 4 AM and doing a 10K run, people would say you're disciplined – but you'd probably say you do it for a specific reason. It's about a reason for doing something. The people who appear to be more disciplined just recognise the reason why they do something. Discipline isn't innate to some people, it's just a mental muscle that some people are exercising more than others.
Both of the previous questions are very intertwined, and the decision matrix will work great for them. The 8th most popular question we get asked is “How do I get the vivid memory of my last bad competition out of my mind?” When people ask us to help eradicate a bad experience, it's one of those processes that people go “really, is that what I have to do?” Though we use hypnosis with our clients, you can't snap your fingers and say you no longer remember it. It's just a neurological point of reference. Your reference for a performance, a contest, a venue, etc. It's what you feel, sense, hear, smell – how that whole thing with the emotion is categorized in your brain. If it's in the front of thought for you when you perform, that's where the fear comes from.
It gets cemented in your head for the next time, but it's just your imagination trying to protect you. At the root of this process is back to our primal days where we had to create scenarios in our head of possibilities. We didn't have internet, TV, radio, or newspapers to tell us what was going on around the world. We had to imagine what the consequence would be. If we went to do something and Joe A next to us died because he failed to do something, our imagination would kick in and say we could possibly die too. That same imagination process is what helps build our fears and the consequences we fear may happen. Most of our illogical fears haven't happened, or if they have, they've happened on a much smaller scale. We build them up to a massive thing that's going to engulf us and take over our entire life – “if I step out onto the competition floor, the roof could cave in, or I could break my legs, or I may not get selected” – it's just our imagination doing its best to keep us from getting hurt, whether it be physically or mentally.
The process of how to eradicate, well, we really don't. Eradicating it fully would be dangerous. If you took away all fear, the likelihood of you getting hurt increases. We're after doing it smarter. Taking a lesson from what went wrong and applying it for the better next time. If you've had a bad experience, whether an injury or a poor result, you need to go through that process and ask “what did I do that worked?” You may have got injured on round 2, but what happened in round 1 that went well? That enables us to break the perception that everything in that venue was negative. Then you have to ask “what should I do differently?” It becomes a learning process. The problem-solving process dilutes the emotional impact of the bad result. If you learn from your mistake, you now have a reference point to go forward with.
Once you have that strategy, you need to impregnate that into your brain as an option. At the moment, our brain only has a reference point of what just happened, what went poorly. So we need to visualise a new reference point from this strategy, to give our brain an option to use this visualisation. We do this visualisation from both an associated and disassociated perspective – seeing things both through our own eyes and perspective and senses; and also through what the coach, the audience, and others would see of our performance. Once we have those two, we ramp it up and increase the vibrancy of what we would see, hear, and feel from emotions in that situation, so that it becomes a more selectable, front-of-memory thought. We also pay particular attention to the reward we'll get once we've realized that outcome: sticking that landing, winning that competition, etc – the medals, the photographs, whatever makes it feel rewarding.
When we step into that venue to compete, we want the thing that's most accessible for our brains and the most memorable for us, to be the memory we've created. It's more front of thought at that point. This process becomes a blueprint that we follow. If you want to eradicate a memory of a performance or event that didn't work for you, then you need to create a better option for your brain to use as a neurological reference, and then ramp it up as much as you can so that it's memorable and your brain will want to select that memory. The more times you visualise that sequence, you create familiarity. We tend to follow things we're familiar with, even if they're not great habits. If we visualise the best option that we craft and ramp up the attractiveness of it and keep visualising it, we create a neurological pathway that is familiar, vibrant, and readily selectable to us. That process will create an ability for you to go out next time without that old neurological perspective being picked.
The 7th most selected issue is “How do I motivate myself?” We handled this a little with the first set of questions, in understanding our big objective plus building a structure towards that. But it's more than that – the big picture, the emotions, the rewards all add up to motivation. If we have a couple of those missing, the motivation deteriorates. The first step is to identify the “why”, why are we doing it? What do you want to stay motivated to? Getting up to run every day? If that's the case, what does that give you? “It makes me fitter so I can compete better because I want to become a national champion”. So getting up to run isn't the motivation, it's just the action step. What makes the motivation is the reason, the end step. Identifying that, acknowledging that and revisiting it will help identify your motivation.
Then you need to identify what you're willing to pay to get that, to see the value in it. Are you willing to sacrifice your time in the morning to get up to run? Are you willing to sacrifice legs that you can feel and not jelly, so you can do a 10K run every morning? What are you willing to pay to get that end objective? Once you do that, you understand the value of what you're doing, and that in itself is motivation. You're taking the time, energy, effort to achieve something, and you've added value and importance to that. That will help motivate you. If someone just gives you something, it has less value. You haven't earned it or invested in it emotionally, physically, or mentally.
Then you need to identify the steps required to get to that path – this comes back to the decision matrix. “How do I eat an elephant? One piece at a time”. If you want to become an Olympian, which is a massive undertaking, you need to do this step, this step, this step – so that each one is achievable. We need to create that momentum and reward process so that we're continually buying into our end objective.
I want to explain this practically – when I'm lecturing, I often get a couple people up to stand in front of the audience, then I'll ask them to take one step forward. I'll give a reward to one of the athletes. Then they'll take another step and I'll reward the same athlete again. What people see is that the athlete I'm continually rewarding is enjoying the journey. The athlete who isn't getting the reward is getting anxious – “what's my reward? If I'm not getting something, why am I here? Why am I stepping forward?” A big end objective could be a four-year process, which is a long time to go without any internal or external recognition. At the end step, I give them both a reward, but one has enjoyed the journey and the other hasn't. When you reward yourself along the way, not only do you enjoy that journey more, and you take ownership of that journey, but then that creates the motivation that the journey becomes pleasurable, and they want to do it. You're not behind them, pushing them – they're motivated for themselves.
The number 6 top question is about performance fear. “I'm a high-board diver and I have all of a sudden become scared of diving off the 10 meter platform” Well, first thing's first, that's understandable. Recognise that it is a really high starting point – when you do it, you're doing something that others can't or won't do. That's a reward in itself. Jumping off that platform is an achievement in itself. Now, this whole pre-event recall process is what we talked about – is the even I'm creating in my head from an accident or event, or is it something just imagined? Is it because the last time you got injured, or you scared yourself; or is it because you were told you almost hurt yourself? All of those things have a point of initiation, a catalyst, that caused the fear to be grown.
Or, is it something you just started to imagine? As you get a little older and more aware of consequences, sometimes we start adding into our process “oh.. I could actually get hurt doing that...” If you're a coach and you work with juniors and seniors, you'll see this often. The juniors will just go and do it because they have little understanding of consequence. Then when they become older, they change their outlook. The only thing that's changed is their awareness of consequence. It's our imagination creating possible scenarios. When you're 10 you don't, you don't think “If I over-rotate and land on my back, I could break my back”. When you're a teenager, you go “what's that going to do... I could spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair...” You understand consequences. Your imagination adds a new dimension to possible outcomes.
Let's handle these in different ways. If it's from an accident, the first thing is to understand why that happened. Give it a reason. If you were performing a skill, what cause the injury? If you were a high-board diver, did you not lean back enough or lean too far forward? Did you not bend your knees enough? What was the reason, so you can understand the outcome. I don't believe in luck – there's actually a real physical reason why you would injure yourself. Whatever it be, once you understand the reason for that and that the outcome was because of an action, it allows you to put it into perspective. “If it was because I didn't spot the water, I've got to make sure I spot the water!” If it was because you opened too early or too late, you need to change that. It becomes “of course that's what I have to do!” You have to put that action right the next time.
Once we have the in perspective, we need to visualise the successful skill. We spend a long time doing associated and disassociated visualisation of you doing that perfect skill every time, with the acknowledgment at the end of the perfect score, the screaming crowd, and the people around you that you hold in high esteem cheering you on and acknowledging your success. You change your emotional perspective around that skill. No longer is it just the skill you got injured at, there’s another option of “when I do it perfectly, this whole great thing comes with it too”.
Then we need to recall a successful attempt. That injury wouldn't have likely been the first time you tried that skill. There would've been other skill sets you'd done before that that you didn't get injured in. You have to change your neurological point of reference. This is the same kind of memory, it has emotion around it that's negative. You need to create another, more desirable memory – one that our mind is more likely to select as our neurological point of reference. Our next step is to use our key point visualisation process. Back in step 7, we used it to recall something really successful. We have our brain go “You know how to do this, you've done it before, you even have a memory of it – proof!” Then we lay that process, that template over top the time you didn't do it successfully. You replace that old, negative blueprint with a trusted memory of success. You already have that perception that it was you that did that great skill or move or competition. Then we visualise the reward from that.
That process of understanding why it happened. to visualising a successful skill to recalling a successful skill to recalling a successful attempt to doing the key point visualisation where we layer it over the top – each time we go through that process, it's replacing the negative neurological point of reference. The fear starts to dissipate. We have better, more reliable templates to choose from.
If we don't have an even that caused the fear and it's predominantly our imagination, like when turning from 10 to a teenager, then we need to create a visualisation that overstimulates with sounds, sights, and the outcome. We need to craft a better outcome. The imagination that's created this negative outcome and created a world of negative possibility needs to create a world that's all positive. As we do that, we increase our senses and our perception of what's happening – increase the colours, the sounds, the emotions, the adulation that come with that. It's a bigger-than-life realization. We need to become bigger and more creative than our imagination was on its own. Our brain will select the bigger, better, brighter option if we build it up enough. These two processes will help manage fears, whether it be created from an event or just imagination.
That brings us half way through our top 10 most frequently asked questions by our listeners. For the notes to part A, go to our website, www.braininthegame.com.au. Until our next training session, part B, train smart and enjoy the ride. I'm Dave Diggle, the mind coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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