Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Eight – Understanding Momentum - How to Craft it, Manage it, Maintain it
Hello and welcome back to another year of Brain in the Game. In 2012 we kicked off this podcast for athletes, coaches and parents who wanted to do their sport smarter. Brain in the Game is like a practical session of mental gymnastics; the acrobatics, the stretching and the balancing of the mind. And I’m your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode we’re going to take a look at how we understand, craft and maintain momentum. So let’s get into our first podcast for 2013 of Brain in the Game.
As an athlete, when everything’s going your way and everything’s going smooth, your training’s going smooth, you’re learning new skills, your competitions are going the way that you want them to go, the outcomes are what you’ve planned for, you can’t ever imagine that train derailing. But in the world of elite and professional sport, in reality that train does derail, and often through circumstances that are unforeseen or unplanned. You can go from deckchairs on the beach to deckchairs on the Titanic in the blink of an eye. When something arises as unforeseen it will often bring your momentum as an athlete to a grinding halt. But it’s not only the unforeseen interruption that brings your momentum to this halt. There are things such as the end of season, the end of a contract, a holiday break, a change in code, even an injury, can often interrupt that momentum that you’d created.
So why is this fickle thing called momentum so important to athletes?
A loss in momentum can mean a loss in personal direction, in career direction, in motivation, and a loss of purpose. It can also lower our levels of serotonin, meaning that we’re less likely to feel satisfied and rewarded from what we do. A healthy sustainable momentum will enable an athlete to keep getting up each day and doing what they do in the big picture, in the big scheme of things.
So what’s the science behind this momentum? How do we create it, how do we craft it, how do we manage it and how do we maintain it sustainably over a career?
The dictionary definition of “momentum” is: the relationship between mass and effort of motion in a given direction. The layman’s term of that is the amount of effort we need to put in to get a result and, when we’re talking about building programmes for athletes we want to make sure that the effort we put in is not only sustainable, but is accountable. So in the sporting world, it’s creating increased momentum in a given direction towards a competition, a skillset or recovering from an injury, even a career objective, with efficient and sustainable effort. So we’re not overworking, we’re not going down a track that’s not giving back or a return on investment, and that’s both physical investment and emotional investment. Everybody understands that the hardest part of momentum is creating that initial change in inertia, going from that still or stagnant position into a direction. So that first step, that first action that we take is always going to be the hardest part of creating momentum. If we think about trying to push a broken-down car, it’s getting that first few inches is going to be the hardest part. Or pushing a log or pushing a boulder, it’s getting that initial motion happening that takes the most effort and the most focused effort. So what we’re going to do today is look at how we create a sustainable momentum with the most precise and concise effort involved.
So as an athlete, momentum is vital to us. It’s there to sustain and manage our physical output. It’s to keep our trajectory and path true. It’s there to manage the constant increase in demand: the new competitions; the new skills; the new routines; the new expectations; the media; all these things that go with professional sports these days. If we don’t have an adequate momentum, every time we slot one of these new things in it’s going to slow us down and it will take more effort to get that moving again. It’s also there to help us manage and maintain our emotions and our moods when we’re training. We want to make sure that we’re not up one day and down the next day, because that is really emotionally fatiguing. But it also enables us to take in our stride the unexpected, the unforeseen. When things do arise that are going to potentially slow us down, we can stride through that process or we can traverse through that process with the minimal disruption to our programme or our trajectory. Understanding that this momentum is what’s going to drive us forward is going to maintain the pace for us, the carefully structured framework that we’ve built. We need to have a momentum to make sure that we’re not having to stop and then reinitiate that inertia. So as an athlete, we want to make sure that this is carefully structured so we can maintain our outcomes, we can project the amount of effort required, and we can structure the input to give us the best rewards or return on investment. Of course, when I’m talking about investment, I’m not necessarily talking about financial; I am talking about effort and emotion.
So how do we do it?
So let’s start at the start. If we want to create momentum, momentum is something that one thing leads into the next that leads into the next. So once we create that initial motion of inertia then it’s going to pull the next one in line along with it. If we think about the tracks on a tank, if they weren’t linked together as soon as the tank started going forward all the track would fall apart. So that whole structure, that whole pattern that’s been built around the wheels, the track, would just completely fall apart. So we need to understand that the first thing we need to do is understand the linkage, how one leads into the next, the connectors between the two. So we want the same scientific principle as moving bodies of water, the flow of water. Once you have that first piece of water that goes over the edge of the cliff it drags the rest of the water with it through the surface tension.
If we think about this in a sporting context, once you have opened the door to a skill being completed, that skill then enables you to do the next skill. And then once you’ve completed that skill it will enable you to do the following skill. So that whole connectivity between the skills is going to enable you to pull yourself along. So that first step of understanding and identifying the connections between what you do, the action that you take and the consequences that’s going to give you. So that’s the relationship between a physical skill leading from one skill to the next; an event leading from - if you go into one competition and you do well in that competition it’s going to open the door for you to go to the next competition. So that’s the linkage that we’re talking about, that connector. And also the beliefs: if you believe that you can do one thing, that opens up possibilities for you to believe that you can do more things. “If I can win this competition, then I can go on and I can win that competition and maybe the nationals, and maybe the Olympics.” If we shut the door at the first competition and go “Maybe I can’t do that, I can’t win that” then it closes the opportunity on all the other activities.
So how do we do that? How do we do that in a practical and tangible way? How do we understand the connectivity of skills, of events, of beliefs?
We need to look at what does connect them. So, for example, when I learn to somersault, it will enable me to multiple somersault. If I can understand and physically perform a single somersault, then I can open the possibilities for me to get better at that skill and do multiple somersaults. When I learn to pass a ball, I can set up a try. Okay, so once I can pass that ball really efficiently and effectively to where I want it to be, the possibilities there are to put the ball in the right place for another player to pick up the ball and create a try. Or even when I learn to corner, it enables me then to accelerate much earlier and much faster out of that corner. So the connectivity between each of these initial skills has enabled a much bigger possibility for us. This is going to enable us to build momentum. If I can do one I can do the next; if I can do two I can do three; if I can do three I can do four. And that understanding that the connectors are the vital aspect. So when I put my runners on, it increases my cardiovascular training. I can get up and once those runners are on, the next step is I can go out and I can start running. When I can go one mile I can do two miles; when I can do two miles I can do four miles. And it opens the possibilities for increasing my cardiovascular. When I do my stretching it reduces my likelihood of injuries, so if I can get up every day and I stretch, that connector then leads to I’m going to reduce the amount of injuries that I incur. When I initiate my visualisation programme it will enable me to consolidate my routines without physical fatigue. What this does do is give me a reason to do the first action. This gives me a belief that if I do A I can have B, and if I have B then I can have C, and if I’ve got C then D is just, you know, the next step in the process. So stage one is all about connectivity and association.
The next step, stage two, is about building the triggers. Just understanding the connectivity, the reason, isn’t going to enable me to actually produce that. It doesn’t give me the control over the outcome. Triggers do that. I need to be able to fire off these initial actions myself. I want to control that. I want to make sure, as an athlete, the most important thing to me is when I get up and I do that skill, knowing what the next skill is going to be, knowing what the consequences of that domino effect are going to be, of course I want to fire that off at the most optimum time for me as an athlete not wait for it to happen by happenchance or wait for it to happen by someone else’s crafting. I want to be able to fire that myself. So that comes down to creating and crafting really precise and specific triggers. So if the trigger is for me to be able to do one somersault leading to the next one, I want to make sure that the trigger I fire is going to mean that I’m ready and I’m in the best place and the skillset that I have is not going to then stall or slow down. So if I learnt that single somersault but then it takes me another six months to double somersault, then in that period, in that six month period, then my momentum is going to slow down. Then I’m going to have to apply more effort to get it moving again. I want to create the linkages so incredibly close together that when I fire one all the others fire off too.
So when we build a very specific trigger to action we know what the first action is going to be and we then know what the chain reaction is going to be. So examples of this is when I put my runners on training has started. I’m not going to put my runners on and sit on the sofa and watch the TV. Then I’m going to have no connectivity between putting my runners on and my cardiovascular input – my runners just mean my runners are on. But if I create that trigger that runners are on, bang, I’m out the door and I’m running, then that connectivity is there, that trigger has happened. Or when I say a particular phrase or anchor phrase, you know what that means, the game is on. When I step out onto the pitch or step out onto the ice or step out onto the track and I say my targeted trigger word, bang, that trigger needs to mean that that is game on, that’s what’s happening now. I don’t want to say my trigger word and then go “Right, I’ve got five minutes to wait before it’s my turn” and that dissipates and I lose the intensity of that trigger. I want to be able to fire these where and when I am ready, where and when the most optimum time is for me as an athlete to get the best return on that investment. So these triggers really need to be personal, targeted and specific to the action.
So how do we embed a trigger? If we understand the linkage, we understand the first skill and then the second skill and we want to build that trigger to fire the first one to start that domino effect, how do we do that the most efficient and effective way?
The trigger needs to be recognised, so we need to know that that’s a trigger. It needs to be unique enough to be a particular trigger. You don’t want a trigger like shaking a hand or tying your shoelaces up, because you always tie your shoelaces up or you should always shake hands when you meet somebody so that would dilute the effectiveness of that trigger. So we need to know what that trigger is and it needs to be a unique trigger. It needs to be repetition. So every single time that I do go out and I do that run and I put my shoes on, my trigger might be “Right, game on”. When I run out that door, if I do it every single time it becomes associated to that action. I know it’s a trigger and it’s associated.
And the third and most important thing, it needs to be rewarded. So when it works, you need to recognise that. We need to make sure that “You know what? That worked today. That made me feel really good. I felt motivated, I felt like the momentum was there. I could do that again tomorrow. Gee, I did a good job”. This recognition process kick-starts the serotonin in the brain, the reward chemical that we have that makes us feel good, and our brain then turns around and goes “You know what? I quite like this. Let’s do this again tomorrow”. So that momentum and motivation is created. I can get out of bed the next day and put my runners on and go “I can go for a run again, I feel good, I want that reward, I want that serotonin”.
So stage one was the linkage, stage two was the triggers, and stage three is the emotional buy-in. Our emotional buy-in is probably the most important thing when we’re creating momentum and looking at sustainability. If we don’t believe we want to do this, if we don’t have an emotional desire, then there’s going to be no investment, there’s going to be no personal ownership. You’re not going to get out of bed and go “Right, I want this because it’s going to give me a shot at the Olympics” or “I want this because it’s going to give me the opportunity to become a World Champion.” It’s going to be “You know, I’m not really that invested today so” “It looks cold outside, it’s wet” “In actual fact I can feel my ham is a bit tight so I’ll give it a miss today”. If we have the emotional investment, if we have that emotional buy-in of “I need to do this because I want this at the end. I feel passionate about becoming an Olympian. I feel passionate about becoming a World Champion and everything that goes before that is an investment in me and my desire, my dream and my outcome”. And we understand and we build this emotional buy-in, this emotional investment, by first “What does it mean to me? If my big objective is to become Olympic champion, what would that mean to me? What would that give me personally? How would that make me feel?” Of course it would make me feel proud, but what more, what specifically to you would it mean? What would it give you as recognition inside? What would it enable you to feel about yourself? What emotions would that fire off inside you? If it’s not important then you’re not committed.
Coaches often associate success to an athlete performing a particular set of skills or winning a particular competition or overcoming an adversary that’s beaten them before. But I’ve seen enough top elite athletes lose unlosable competitions because they were not emotionally bought-in, they didn’t have enough emotional connection to what the outcome was. And so when things got hard or things didn’t go the way they’d planned, it was very easy for them to step out of the competition, to disengage and move away. And so an adversary that, you know what, didn’t really on paper have the right to win could easily win. So emotional buy-in enables you to traverse those difficult times; to keep that momentum going; to enable those skills that you’ve got, that talent that you have, to do what it does best. Those athletes didn’t have enough emotional real estate in that outcome. So in putting the runners on in the morning for a 4am run, what does the end step mean to you? By increasing your cardiovascular, what’s that going to give you, what’s that going to mean to you as an athlete? Is it going to enable you to last longer in the octagon? Is it going to enable you to outrun your competitors? Is it going to enable you, when you get that ball, to know in the back of your mind no-one’s going to catch you? And what will that give you? It will give you your end step. It will give you your outcome. So the 4am run, all of a sudden it doesn’t mean it’s dark and it’s cold and it’s wet out there, it means “Man, this is going to give me an advantage. This is going to make what I do easier in the long run”. That’s the emotional buy-in that we’re talking about.
So we need to understand the emotional investment to outcome and we do that by visualising the end step and all the adulation, all the emotions and all the rewards internally and externally that come with that. So we can identify and recognise and put a tangibility to that emotion because if you ask most athletes “Okay, if you want to be an Olympian, what would that make you feel?” they go “Oh it’ll make me feel great, it will make me feel proud” but what specifically to you? Because everybody will have that individuality to that end step. Everybody will have that one thing that means something to them that means nothing to anybody else. Those individual steps, those individual recognitions are what make it unique. So when looking at momentum, the more structured and controlled emotion you associate to the outcome, the more likely you are to get up each day and trigger those specific triggers to the first action that you’ve created.
So those first three initial stages were the connectivity and the association, it was the building of efficient and effective triggers, and it was the emotional buy-in. It’s all about the behavioural leverage. And the missing secret piece to this is uniqueness, because even the most motivated athlete in the world wouldn’t want to get up every single day, 365 days a year, year in year out and do exactly the same thing. They would become bored or they would become disassociated, disconnected from that pattern that they’d created. And then when something comes along that could leverage them out then it becomes quite easy to go “I’m bored, I’ve had enough of this. I’m out”. By having a uniqueness, applying something each season, each year, that’s completely unique, a unique target over and above or buried within, so that uniqueness gives it that little sparkle, gives it that little buzz that it didn’t have last year or is different to last year and you know it’s going to be different to next year. So it keeps it fresh in your mind, it keeps it exciting. So when you think about long term, each season or each session or each compartmentalised part needs to have a uniqueness in it.
So when you think about these phrases, these processes, these stages to manage our momentum we initially looked at it as something that ground us to a halt, that’s coming back from an injury, an off-season or an overly-indulgent festive season as we’ve just come out of Christmas here. But what if we don’t want to start from that stopped position, that stagnant, that hard work? We don’t want to have to put all that effort in each year or each season. How do we manage this? How do we craft our programme so that we never come to a stop, we keep that rolling along, even in the off-season, even in our down-time? So when you’re thinking about coming back from a break or coming back into pre-season training, think about the next break, think about the end of this season. How do you maintain that input, that momentum forward? What do you need to put into your off-season programme that’s going to not enable you to stop, that’s not going to give you a long enough gap where you start to stagnate or slow down? What uniqueness do you need to add to your off-season? Are you going to do something completely different? Are you going to build your cardiovascular, so are you going to take on sand-dune running or are you going to take on long-distance swimming? Something that’s not going to impact your sport but it’s going to keep you moving forward, going to keep you growing, going to keep your emotional buy-in to the big picture outcome.
And the same concept when you think about injury. Every elite and professional athlete knows at some point in their career they’re going to have to deal with an injury. How do you maintain that? What do you need to do mentally to make sure that you stay mentally tough, to make sure that you stay on the ball, keep your momentum moving? I know when I was an athlete, if I had an injury and it was in the lower half of my body my coach would always say to me “Right, you can come in and do upper body training and you can help the other athletes with their routines”. Or if it was an upper body injury then “Okay, you start running, and when the guys come to train you come in, you drop your bag in the gym the same as everybody else and when they go out into the gym, you go out and hit the pavement”. So there was always that interactivity, there was always that connection. There was always that, whenever I’m training I still start at the same point as everybody else and they’re going to do one thing and I can go and do another thing. So a smart athlete will have a plan to manage their off-season, to make sure that their momentum is keeping moving. We don’t ever want that rock to stop.
What we haven’t spoken about is the chemistry of the brain. What we haven’t spoken about is why we need to create momentum. We initially spoke about the possibility of depression because of a lowering in serotonin. And with that we’ve got the dopamine part of the brain, the dopamine drug that goes through our brain whenever we have anticipation, whenever we get excited about something. When you were a child and you thought about Christmas coming, it was only a couple of weeks away, and that anticipation you had in your body and the excitement and the buzz that flowed though you is dopamine. If we maintain a healthy amount of dopamine in our body, that is the “chaser”, as I call it, that is going to drive you forward. The anticipation, the looking forward to and doing whatever you need to do to get that outcome. If we embed that within our programme, if we embed that within our structure, the excitement, the big picture outcome, always recognising what the end step is going to be, visualising the end step so you get the emotional association and the emotional attachment to it, we’re going to get that dopamine fix. That’s going to enable us to keep that momentum going forward, it’s going to enable us to want to get up tomorrow, it’s going to be the driver to get up and go and put those runners on, fire that first trigger and go out the door and run 10km. It’s going to give us the opportunity to learn that first somersault and then go “Right, I want to do double somersaults” and have that driving process going forward. Dopamine is vital to creating that momentum.
So the whole momentum process we understand is really vital for our athletes and it’s not only about initiation; it’s about maintaining; it’s about ensuring that once we have this something moving, this vehicle of ours moving forward, we want to always maintain that movement. At no point do we want it to stop, at no point do we need it to slow right down where we’ve got to apply more and more effort just to keep it moving because it becomes difficult then, it becomes hard work. It makes it less enjoyable. It stops us getting up in the morning and going “This is what I do for a living and I love it”. It’s get up in the morning and go “Oh, not again. I’ve got to kick-start this thing again today”. We want it to keep rolling forward. We want it to make sure that every single time we do it it’s because we want to.
So this brings us to the end of yet another episode of Brain in the Game. I hope this has given you some tangible techniques in building your own momentum, in understanding why momentum is so incredibly important to you as an athlete, and how we make sure that it never stops, that vehicle never grinds to a halt, be it the end of a contract, be it the end of a season or just be it an injury, to the point where the effort required to get it moving again is greater than the reward. The reward always needs to be the big picture, the big driver for you, that dopamine fix, that daily recognition of “This is why I do what I do”.
And, as always, I’ll put show notes from this episode on our website, which is www.braininthegame.com.au. And a special something I want to give back As I say we started this podcast back in 2012 and we’ve had an incredible number of people who have supported us over the last year, who have listened to our podcast, downloaded our podcast all around the world. It’s been quite humbling to see the amount of people who have found what we have to say and our coaching philosophies really interesting and interesting to the point where they’re downloading them in the thousands. So as a thank you from us to you we wanted to do something a little bit special at the start of 2013. We run a number of face-to-face training programmes for coaches and athletes and support crew. So these two and four day programmes are specifically designed for you as an athlete and a coach to come in and go “This is my sport, how does this work in my world?” It also enables everybody to get together, so you get different sporting codes come together and say “This is working in my world, it could work in your world too”. These two and four day training programmes, the Smart Coach, Smart Athlete programmes, are run at the moment throughout Australia and throughout New Zealand and in 2013 we’re going to be taking them into the US. So if you’re interested in coming along to these hands-on training programmes then go to our other website which is http://www.smartmind.com.au/braininthegame, where we’ll be listing all of our dates and venues throughout 2013. And as a special gift from us at the Smart Mind Institute to you, our first training in 2013 – which is at the end of January in Sydney, Australia – we’re giving it away at half price, 50% discount, just as a recognition from us, our way of rewarding you, as our listeners and our followers, and rewarding us as a job well done. And so until our next training 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/
