Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Three – Building Confidence and Overcoming Fear
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 at the mental minefield that is elite sport and how having a strong mental programme can make all the difference in the results of you, your club and your athletes.
In this episode we’re going to take a look at a really common set of issues. As an athlete, what would you say your biggest mentally-driven issue is, or has been in the past? The majority of athletes would list confidence and fear as the biggest obstacles they come across in their mental game. Interestingly enough, both confidence and fear are influenced by the same thing: our own imagination. We know our confidence is a history of success; we’ve spoken about this before. When I work with athletes who are experiencing confidence issues we just sit down and we recognise and reward the successes we’ve had along the way, the things that we’ve done really, really well, so that we get that history of success. By acknowledging and recognising those things that are working we’re starting to get our brain to dump a rewards chemical into our body, and the more goodness we feel the more confident we feel. The more we recognise how good we’re doing things and how frequently we’re succeeding, again, the more confident we become. That’s how we manage and we structure confidence issues, by getting the athlete to recognise and acknowledge their own successes.
So setting ourselves up for these constant success hits enables us to have sustainability of performance; enables us to keep our emotions high and perform at a constant output knowing that our emotions are being fed by our successes and our recognition of those successes. We spoke in the last episode about the internal/external referencing, so does the athlete recognise this success internally or does it need to be acknowledged externally for them to be acknowledging? If we are not emotionally feeding the confidence monster then our imagination kicks in. So if we’re acknowledging some successes and then there’s a big void between the next success our imagination monster kicks in and starts to create doubts. These doubts are driven by “Am I good enough? When was the last time I got that hit? When was the last time I had success? What’s happened in the gap between? Am I not performing as well as I did when I last succeeded?”.
So these doubts are brought into play by our own imagination and the more we play on those, the more we recognise the doubts over our successes, the bigger they become. They become bigger than the rewards we were getting from success. So the bigger the doubts become, the smaller the success hits become and so the doubts come over, they become stronger; they become far more as the reference points for how we think we will go; how we evaluate our readiness for competition. These doubts have very little to do with reality, so we don’t often step back and look at the performance and look at it for what it really is. Can we perform? Are we ready? Have we ticked all the boxes? This emotion-driven doubt monster is taking over and because our imagination is feeding the emotion monster and the emotion monster is feeding off the lack of success points, it’s growing bigger and bigger and bigger and becoming this big hairy monster that we just seem to not be able to move past. If we don’t step back and look at it in perspective it then dictates how we perform, it dictates how we perceive the competition, the readiness, our ability to be. The same doubts and the same imagination process is how we create our own fears.
So if our emotions are managed by a better structure of acknowledgement and recognition, how do we manage fear?
I think the first thing we need to do is understand what fear is. We’ve dissected and unpacked what confidence issues are, so let’s dissect and unpack what fears are and where they come from and why we have them. I’m often asked to eradicate fear by athletes who are experiencing debilitating fears and I’m kind of loathe to do that, I don’t want to take away an athlete’s ability to have fear or recognise fear because that can become quite dangerous. If they’re doing a dangerous sport I don’t want them going out there and not experiencing fear, they can then put themselves at risk of injury. So what we want to try and do is lower the impact of fear, to use it like any other emotional or cognitive tool that we have, as an evaluation. So we don’t want to take it away, we want to be able to control fear, we want to be able to control what it does and what it gives us and how we use that in our training and our competition environment.
So let’s have a look at what fear is. Fear is a process of imagination. The same kind of process that dictated how our confidence was, dictates the significance of fear for us too. So if we look at the history behind fear, if we go back to the days where we were living out of caves and being chased by the sabre-toothed tiger. When we went out and we witnessed somebody being chomped on by a sabre-toothed tiger that was a red flag for us, we don’t want to be eaten. So we wouldn’t go back to that same location where we saw that person getting eaten. But then our imagination needed to kick in and say “Okay, I’m not going to come back to this watering hole because last time I was here Johnny got eaten by the sabre-toothed tiger. But what happens if that same sabre-toothed tiger is at the other watering hole?”. That’s where our imagination is supposed to kick in and say “Right, if the sabre-toothed tiger can be here, let me imagine if it could be there as well, or over here, or is it hanging out the front of my cave?” that then enables me as a caveman to go along and be aware of my environment; to be able to assess the dangers of my environment; to be able to assess the comfort level.
So what’s happened since the cavemen days is our environment has had less and less sabre-toothed tigers in it, so our imagination hasn’t had to imagine the consequences of all these sabre-toothed tigers hanging out waiting to chomp on me. But what has happened is our brains have evolved, we’ve evolved our imagination, but also the amount of reference points we have. Our environment today with the internet, with papers, being able to read, being able to see the TV is there’s far more spectrum for our imagination to create an environment that’s dangerous for us. Back in the cavemen days all we knew was what we saw or somebody had told us, so if we only knew about the one sabre-toothed tiger then that was all our imagination had to work with. What we had today is the massive amount of media that gets bombarded into our brains: people being injured; people being killed. All this kind of imagery that’s going into our brain then becomes part and parcel of what our brain has access to, to warn us about, to create this environment that we have to listen.
So if we think again about how our brain works, what it’s trying to do, why is it trying to make us fearful, it’s trying to stop us hurting ourselves; it’s trying to stop us putting ourselves into a situation that could possibly harm us. And if we don’t take notice, if our brain gives us a first warning of “Hey, you know what? That could be quite dangerous or could be quite painful for you. Don’t go there” and you ignore that and you think “I’m going to evaluate that and that’s a risk I’m prepared to take. I’m prepared to go out there and do that multiple somersault because I kind of believe I can do it” and our brain goes “Whoa, wait a minute. I’ve just warned you and if you’re still going to go and do that I’m going to up the ante, I’m going to create this picture, this imagery in your brain that’s going to make you realise that I know better”. So the fear factor increases. The consequences our brain imagines gets bigger and bolder and more vibrant, and if we still choose to ignore that and we still choose to go out there and do that skill, complete that competition then our brain’s duty is to up it again, to create something so outrageous, something so bizarre and to the boundaries of what our thinking can be that we can’t go out and do that competition, we can’t complete that skill because our brain obviously knows best, it’s created this environment, this picture, this three-dimensional warning system that we just have to pay attention to. So our brain kind of wins over.
So there are two kinds of initiation points:
1. Something that’s actually happened or something that we’ve done in the past or we’ve witnessed; and
2. Something we’ve just imagined.
So if we talk about the first one, which is something that’s actually happened, an accident, a bad result, and the emotional association to that. That actually hurts, whether it be embarrassment, whether it be disappointment, whether it be actual physical pain, that’s something in our brain that we’ve experienced and we have a natural reference point. What happens there is our brain takes that as a base and then increases. We don’t want to go back there, we don’t want to feel that pain, whether it be emotional pain or physical pain, again. So it’s trying to keep us away from doing that skill or that event or whatever caused or whatever it believes caused that accident. So it creates a bigger, more vibrant, more three-dimensional, more scary outcome to keep us away from going there, to make us realise that whatever I thought happened it’s actually bigger than that so I’m going to keep away. So it’s away from motivation: you don’t want to go there because this could happen, this is a consequence; you’ve been here before, it hurt, so don’t go there again.
So the other form of fear is created purely and simply by our imagination. So it’s completely about what we don’t want. So if we’re doing a competition, we’re doing an Olympic Games or a World Championship, and we’ve never competed in that environment before we have all this imagination in our brains saying “Are we really good enough?”. This is where the whole confidence and the fear feed into each other and we have those voids between what are acceptable success points where we feel really, really confident and we know we’re good enough for that Olympics, or we know we’re good enough for that World Championship, and that doubt starts to feed into our imagination which then feeds into our fears and our fear of “Ooh, you know what? Maybe I’m not quite ready. Maybe I could wait for the next four years. Or maybe if I took up another sport, like tiddlywinks, you know what? I could probably do really, really well at that”. So that becomes an away-from motivation too, but it’s completely driven by our imagination because we may never have competed in an Olympics or World Championships before, so it’s not like we have an actual reference point. It’s just purely and simply our imagination and the bigger and more bolder it makes that fear, the less likely we are to approach that competition with confidence.
So now we’ve unpacked and understood how this emotional monster and our imagination dictate how we perform and our confidence levels, how do we tame that monster? How do we put it back in its cage so we’re back in control?
So if you think back to how we managed our confidence issues by having more frequent hits of successes, by creating an environment that fed our emotions and fed our confidence, we do a similar thing because it has a similar impact on our imagination on fear. So if we had that fear based on an event, the first option where we looked at something’s happened and our imagination is built on that experience, that accident, that bad competition, the poor result, we go back through utilisation and visualisation and emotional stimulation to before that event. So we start to recall and remember and then increase the emotional significance to the events prior to the incident; prior to the competition; prior to the accident. And then we recognise those and reward those and that becomes our new neurological point of reference. Our reference point isn’t the accident anymore, it’s before the accident. That’s the far more stimulating and rewarding process that our brain is looking for and utilises as that neurological point of reference.
If it’s something that we haven’t done before, so we’re talking about when we went to the Olympics or the World Championships and we had that fear about performing, again we create the environment where we can reward ourselves. So, again, through the use of visualisation and emotional stimulation we visualise us being successful at those competitions; we visualise both associated and disassociated performances at those venues; building in the crowd, building in the rewards; the recognition in understanding whether an athlete is internally or externally referenced, we build that in too. So again, these all become far bigger and far more useful and replicable reference points and the emotion that was associated to the fear dissipates. The emotions surrounding the good outcome are far greater and far more in control.
We can also use the mental debrief exercise we spoke about in a previous episode. This enables us to look at what worked, what didn’t work and what we need to do differently. It’s that transition between what worked and what we can do differently that dissipates the emotional tag, the emotional weight around what didn’t work or the accident or the bad competition. So it’s a utilisation of visualisation, emotional stimulation – so we increase the vibration, we increase the weight that comes with that, the positive emotional weight – and the use of the process to bypass and almost reduce the impact of the negative. Utilising all these three different sets of skills we start to stimulate our brain’s reference point system so that we have better references. Those neurological points of defence, our blueprints for positive outcomes become far more a selection that we want rather than an emotion-driven negative.
So the next time as an athlete you feel your confidence levels are really, really low or you have fear around completing a skill, going to a competition; all these can be managed really effectively by understanding that the fears and the confidence issues are created internally. They’re created in your brain as a system to protect you so what we need to do is just recalibrate that. We need to manage that far more efficiently and effectively so we still have that skillset, we still have that reference point to look after us and protect us, but we take back control; we take back the outcome by managing the emotions and our imagination far more effectively.
And this brings us to the end of yet another episode of Brain in the Game. I hope this has given you a new aspect and a new way of looking at the fears that you’ve had in the past and the confidence issues you’ve experienced and a way that you can manage them, a way that you can utilise the skillset that you have and you’re learning here to take back control of your performances. I know just how debilitating a lack of confidence can be or how debilitating a fear around a skill or an accident or a performance can be. They’re real, they’re three-dimensional, they’re almost tangible where you can touch them, and this exercise and this process gives you back control.
And as always, as a reference I will put the show notes on our website and you can go directly to our website which is www.braininthegame.com.au and there will be downloads and links and an opportunity for you to send us feedback and ask us direct questions which we will handle in other episodes. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this as much as I’ve enjoyed delivering this information to you. I hope it’s given you a new aspect and a new perspective on managing these kinds of aspects of your performance and, until the 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
