Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Six – Calibrating the Mind
Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game, the podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who want to do it smarter. Brain in the Game is a practical look inside the mental Rubik’s cube that is elite sports people and I’m your host, Dave Diggle.
In the world of neuroscience and cognitive behaviour there are many different ways of measuring the capability and the capacity and the output of our memory, each with their own unique take on this and unique ideas about what is and isn’t accurate. But what all of these behavioural disciplines agree on is that there’s more and more information coming into our brains than ever before. There’s more information for us to process than 10, 15 or 20 years ago. When I was an elite gymnast back in the ‘80s I thought I had it incredibly tough. I thought the amount of information that I was processing on a day-to-day basis was astronomical. As I flew through the air doing twists and somersaults and trying to get the spatial awareness and always land on my feet, I thought the information that I was processing couldn’t be topped. But if we think about the elite athlete of today, even the youth of today, for that matter, the amount of information that they have to process is massive in comparison to what I was doing back in the ‘80s. You think about the television, the internet, the advertising, iPhones, Blackberries, Androids, iPads - and the list goes on - all that information, that stimulation that is getting processed in our brains constantly.
Not only is there more information, there’s far more visual and audible information coming in than ever before. Gone are the days of the Walkman. Everything coming into our brain visually is higher density colours, it’s HD, it’s everything that we have been looking for in stimulation, but we still have to process all that information coming through and, as advertisers get better at it and they throw far more detail at us, all that information is coming into our brains and needs to be dealt with efficiently. I’m old enough to remember the days when you went out and you needed to contact somebody you had to wonder for a few miles or kilometres to look for a public phone. So if you desperately needed to get hold of somebody and you were out then it was a commitment, there was time involved in doing that, you had to go somewhere specifically to do that. I also remember the days that when you left work, you’d left work; work stayed there until the next day when you came back. Today, however, I’m called, emailed, texted, Sykped, tweeted and Facebooked before I even reach my car. We never switch off. We have so much accessible information coming into us at every given point. This increase in incoming information has a massive impact on how we effectively and efficiently process that and how we access that and that stored information when we need to recall it.
We spoke in Episode 4 and 5 about how emotional tags influence our neurological points of reference. Today, having such a massive amount of information in our brain makes it very difficult for us to access the right information at the right time, the emotions associated to those without us taking the time to really process it and categorise it and put in the right place. If you add into that complexity being an elite and professional athlete, with physical and mental training, competition and selection pressures and the chasing sponsors and answering the media and fans, then the mental and emotional overload is a real threat. Clearly this constant bombardment can have a rather overwhelming impact on us if we don’t have a strategy to manage it and, let’s face it, most of these athletes don’t have an effective strategy to manage that.
So there is a clear need for a better template for information searching, sorting, categorising and storing, if we want to handle and manage all of this information that we’ve got at our fingertips better. You never know when that golden nugget of information is going to come in, the one piece of information that is going to make a massive difference to your performance or your career. You never know who’s going to tell you it, who’s going to show you it, what you’re going to stumble across, so you’ve got to be switched on all the time, you’ve got to be processing with the same capacity every waking second of the day. And if we don’t have that efficient template to do that then we do run the risk of losing or missing that one piece of information that could really make a huge difference to us. But there’s more to it than just better processing. We’ve all seen the craziness surrounding athletes who, when they’re let off the leash and are allowed to react and not behave, what happens then, what goes wrong. It’s splashed across the media, across the internet, it’s on YouTube within seconds. When these athletes don’t do the right thing and they go off the rails everybody around the world instantly sees it.
Now I’m certainly no advocate of some of this really disgraceful behaviour. Some of these athletes go way beyond what is acceptable mistakes and when I’m employed to work with these athletes after the event, after the fact, one of the things that I insist on them doing is taking full ownership of that mistake, of that action that they took, of the decision that they made, be it a bad split decision or whether it’s something that’s more ingrained into that athlete, they need to take ownership of that. But what if they’ve never been taught how to react or how to respond? If they’ve never been taught how to process the information? Or how to even really behave in the environment that they’re now performing in? Many of these young athletes haven’t, they simply come through the system, get spat out into the public domain, and are expected to perform. Like I said, I certainly don’t advocate the way that some of these athletes behave, but I do see the behavioural side of it where they make decisions based on the information they have, it’s just poor information.
So how do we manage this train crash long before it leaves the tracks and plummets into the waiting media’s arms? Well, the answer to that really is, as soon as we see a little wobble we need to take action. But most people caught up in this circus don’t see the wobble until there’s some kind of massive consequence that comes with that, until it’s almost too late, and then we get the knee-jerk reaction where they go into damage control. We can’t change or replicate anything that we do not first measure. What I mean by that is, we often react to a catastrophe, something major that happens with that knee-jerk, we go into this damage control. How often do we see these athletes taking behavioural modification classes after they’ve done something absolutely atrocious, either driven by the manager, or the coach, or the sporting organisation and club? These ‘closing the gate after the horse has bolted’ training programmes are just purely and simply media satisfiers, to keep the public happy that they’re doing something. What needs to happen is, these athletes need to have a better education, a greater structure around them that enables them to make better decisions before they make the poor ones.
So what if we had a mechanism to constantly calibrate and adjust? Something that allowed these athletes to self-manage and assess their progress and their behaviours and their decision making, so these athletes learn the important skillset of better processing all this incoming information; know how to look for it; where to get the information; what relevant information; where it should be categorised and how it should be categorised; how to emotionally tank in a positive structured way, rather than a reactionary way, rather than something that’s driven by negative impact or negative attention. To also have accountability, a system to constantly assess, adjust, and manage behaviour. It’s that accountability, it’s the consequences that are really important. If they don’t know or understand or associate the consequences of their behaviour, then there’s nothing to keep them on track, they need to understand that they’re in control, they have the decision making process very deep within their brains, they need to be able to process more efficiently.
So we are looking for something that is going to help filter incoming information into relevance and priority; help standardised behaviour responses based on an early warning system; allow for constant assessment and calibration; has an infrastructure that is accountable and replicable, that is so important, they need to be able to do it time after time after time - because we know that’s where our habits come from and when we’re rewarded that way we’re more likely to choose those great decisions, rather than those negative decisions; and enables the athlete, coach and crew to recognise that wobble long before we have the crash. So if we build on the concept that we cannot change or replicate what we do not first measure, then we must first accurately build a system that records and measures our progress, something that calibrates constantly, something that we input to every time that we train, every time we have interactions, every time we make decisions. Within my company, the Smart Mind Institute, we have a journaling programme that is specifically designed to meet these needs, with very, very specific structure and format and framework around it that enables the athlete to record and assess. So that they can look back over a period of a week, a month, even years to see the patterns, to see the decisions, to see what they’ve done before in the past in similar situations and how they responded then and what kind of reaction they got, what kind of outcome and consequence they obtained from that. This is part and parcel built around the concept of the athlete having control and an input, and a self-assessment process so that they can not only see what’s happening, but respond to what’s happening so that they can correct and the minute those wobbles start appearing, can correct it, keep it back on track.
I’m big on stimulating our neurology to seek out the right information that we need to build our programme, to build our training, our competition preparation, our performance. We need to seek out very, very specific information. Like I said before about the nuggets of information, the golden nuggets that are out there that people are handing to us constantly, every day someone will give you some information that is vital for you and your performance. If you don’t see that or you don’t hear that, or you don’t process that, that’s a lost opportunity, that’s something that just sailed straight past you that you’ve got to wait for the next one to come along, and we just don’t know when that’s going to be. It could be tomorrow, or it could be next week, or it could be a year’s time. If that one piece of information that we’ve just let sail past us is going to hold us back for another 12 months then there’s a massive loss there from us as a performer and in our career development. We need to search for the right information. We need to be constantly priming our brain to look for that specific stimulant, that specific piece of information, but if we don’t know what the information is how do we know to look for it? By identifying what we need to develop ourselves as athletes, as performers.
So if we’re looking for key things, we’re specifically looking for this kind of information, that kind of direction, this kind of input. If we’re looking for those we’re more likely to see them, to be accepting and responsive to them. If we’re not looking for them then it’s very haphazard, isn’t it? It’s like I talk frequently about are you a sniper of information or are you a machine gunnist? If you’re a machine gun of information then you just fire off information and hope that some of those nuggets hit. If you’re a sniper you’re looking for accuracy, you’re looking for specific landing of information. From a coach’s perspective, I wanted to deliver what I have to teach in such a precise and wrapped format that the athlete just takes it onboard, absorbs it, uses it and integrates it. So that’s being a sniper. I don’t want to waste energy. I don’t want to waste information missing the targets. I need to be precise and the athlete needs to know what they’re looking for, they need to know what needs to be added to them and their programme to make them a much more replicable and precise athlete.
So we need to build a specific programme. This journal programme that we have, it has all of those key things built into it: a specific set of questions; building a framework that trains the brain to seek and sort for what we need; it helps you to categorise and store the information in such a way that allows you to recall it far more precisely. If we think about how our brain absorbs information currently with the masses of amount of stimulants that are going on – visual, auditory, millions of pieces of information every second – if we don’t categorise and sort those and we just absorb those then when we go to recall that or we go to search for that as part of our blueprint, it’s going to take a really long time to locate and access it. Then, if it’s a short time that we need to react and respond to something, then we’re going to choose the next one in line and it may not be what we want to use to perform, it may not be the best choice for us. And when we don’t make those good choices we impact on our performance, we impact on our performance, we then impact on our select ability and that may mean we don’t make the team and that, in today’s competitive environment, has a financial consequence too. So we need to make sure that we’re good at what we do when we process information, we store information. We need to categorise it in such a way that we know precisely where it is when we need it.
It also enables us to emotionally tag these in such a way that it’s a positive tag. We understand that our memories are formed on our emotions. Whatever emotion that we apply to our memory and the intensity of that emotion impacts on how well we recall that information. So if it’s something that has a real high emotion and a high intensity, we’re more likely to remember that, the most front of thought response that we have. If we could replace that fear and anxiety with confidence and assurity, then we’re going to have a much more positive choice in blueprint. That’s vital when we’re put under the pump as an athlete, when we’re pressured, when the whistle’s about to blow and we’re behind and we’re just about to make that shot and the pressure is building, we want to be able to be clear of thought, to choose the right response, not just react to the situation. We want to respond in a way that’s going to give us the outcome that we want, not our opponent, and that all comes down to how we choose to categorise and emotionally tag our reference points.
So all of this is interesting information, all this processing of how we take all this vast information coming into our neurology, how we process that and if we think about it from a coach’s perspective, with all these stimulants coming into our athletes how are we going to give the information that we want and then receive it, process it, categorise it and store it in a way that they can use it? How do we compete with the flashing lights and the video games and the internet and the YouTube and the TV and the HD and all the other stimulants that are going in our world at the moment, how do we as coaches compete with that? We need to make sure that our athletes have a very clear and precise sorting template, a sorting process and procedure that they go through that hierarchies their information that’s relevant to them. And if they’re an elite or professional athlete what we have to say as coaches is relevant information for them, so we need to make sure that they’re processing recognises that otherwise what we say gets lost in the massive amount of information coming in. We need to make sure that when they go to make decisions, when they go to make split-second decisions, that they’re choosing wisely, they’re choosing from clear information, from a set of templates that are positive and productive, not reactionary.
All these things need to be emotionally bought by the athlete, they need to believe in this, they need to know and have confidence around the process of choosing the right template, the right neurological point of reference for them, the right information. They need to be comfortable and we do that by them being a major part of this. In our last podcast we spoke a lot about getting athletes involved in their programme, in the design of their programme so that they have an input and ownership. This process of journaling is completely theirs. It’s them inputting, it’s them recalling the information, it’s them then reading the information that they’ve put down and they’ve processed, they’ve taken the information out of their brain and they’ve had to process it in such a way that it becomes legible to put down in the journal. So they’ve not only processed it coming in, they’ve processed it going out again as well. Understanding that they are taking ownership of that and they’re putting the information down and they’re recalling it when they need it gives them back some of that control, that input into their development and their programme. So the journaling process is vital. I think every single athlete, no matter whether they’re a beginner, an intermediate, an elite or a professional athlete, should be journaling. I think everyone who competes should be journaling, and that goes for business people too; I think they should be journaling. I think anybody who has to replicate a performance should have some form of recording that information so they can recall that information next time. Next time they’re placed in that similar situation they have their own inbuilt blueprint based on the information and the processing that they’ve gone through.
So the Smart Mind Institute journaling programme really relies heavily on you building a terminology framework that specifically speaks to your internal drivers, it’s built on the familiarity and continuity of the way that you record the information. So every single day, after every single training, take that 15 minutes to record it, to answer the questions. In the journal process it’s specific questions in a specific order every time. It also requires you to have a neural stimulant that initiates frequent crafting process and what I mean by that is it enables you to calibrate. If something is working it enables you to do more of that. If something isn’t working as well it enables you to be able to tweak that, to make it more specific to you and to get it working, get it accepted into the system. It helps them keep their finger on their own pulse, to see what is and isn’t working, to identify behavioural patterns forming long before they have an impact on their performance, to be able to reward themselves as things happen not retrospectively. Because they’re processing at the time they’re acknowledging when they do things the right way instantly, so they get that serotonin buzz and associate instantly to that action.
I’ve put the Smart Mind Institute journaling programme on our website which is www.braininthegame.com.au and if you put your email address on that page we’ll send you a direct link to download this journaling process. And an opportunity to touch base with us, to send us feedback, to give us your observations about how these podcasts are helping you, you can also go to our training website where we do face-to-face training and seminars and see what’s coming up in 2013, and that is www.smartmind.com.au. And if you get an opportunity to come along to those, that’s our opportunity to give you guys face-to-face training specifically about you and your training and your issues and your performance.
Just as a thank you, we were featured on the iTunes ‘New & Noteworthy’ page this week and we’ve had a massive amount of interest in Brain in the Game podcast. And I just want to say thank you to the new people coming along and those of you who have been listening to me for the last month or so in the really early days where I was stumbling and splatting all over the place, and often I still do. So thanks guys for listening to us. It is about you, it is about the athletes and the coaches and the parents too.
So that brings us to the end of yet another episode of Brain in the Game. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and download our journal and just start that process, start that training of the brain to sort for, seek out, store, categorise and recall information in a really precise and smart way. And I look forward to the next training session and, until that training session, train smart and enjoy the ride.
My name’s Dave Diggle and I am the Mind Coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
https://www.smartmind.com/
