Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who are looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 82, we're going to look at how do I turn my performance around when I'm in a slump? Now, look, most athletes are consumed with what's not working; becoming fixated on a problem, even when things are working in their performance. They do this dance around focusing on the problems and the things that should be better. And what that does is it increases doubts in our minds. And so it's fear driven. Part of that is because athletes are driven to try to be the best versions of themselves. They want to be the number one. Hey, that's why they're athletes, right? That's why they're competitive athletes. They're looking to do perfection. We all know perfection is not a realistic thing. Even athletes know that it's not a realistic thing. But part of the consuming focus of every athlete is to aim towards that perfection. So this is why we operate as athletes in this place of fear.
We're worried about the 'what if'.
- What if I can't perform?
- What if things go wrong?
- What if I don't get selected?
- What if I fall off?
- What if I hurt myself?
So these aspects of our brain, if you listened to the podcast Brain in the Game episode 81, when we looked at the fear-based dramas of when an athlete chokes, you'll understand what's going on inside an athlete's brain. So we believe humans are the only animal with an imagination. And the awesome thing about being the only animal with an imagination is we're at the top of the food chain. Not because we're the biggest, or the fastest, or the strongest, but because we can use our imagination to create. And when we use our imagination to create a positive outcome, we see what we've created as a species, which, despite all the dramas that are going on around the world, is pretty amazing. The flipside of that coin is if we can create such great, awesome things and create such great potentials, we can also create fear. That fear of 'what if'. And our imagination can either work for the good or it can work for evil.
If it works for the good, we create. We create routines and opportunity and performances and great environments that we all live in. If we create fear, then we create this world of being highly anxious and going out there trying to minimise risk or minimise something rather than optimise something. So being consumed, as athletes are, with being the best at what they do, they are prone to overfocus on those 'what ifs'; what could go wrong. And what this can do is not allow an athlete to understand what they are doing that is working. So in the essence of all of what we're trying to create here with this better mental performance for our athletes, recognising that just purely by nature, competitive people, not only athletes, but competitive people, are often highly fixated on things that aren't completely optimised or in their words, perfect. This is why we have habitual behaviours before we go and do something. Why you get athletes who will wear the same socks, or they'll wear the same undies, or they'll eat the same foods. What they're trying to do is create control over certain things that, realistically, they don't have control over. So habitual behaviours feed the emotion.
They don't actually feed the outcome. By you keeping the same socks on doesn't actually change the outcome of that game. Sorry to be the one to tell you this. If you've worn the same undies in every competition now for the last 10 years, all you've got is very holey undies. You do not have something that's controlling your performance. So with that in mind, we have to better understand what keeps our performance on track. Before we even unpack how we get back on track, we need to understand how we get on track in the first place. And that comes down to better understanding what our performance DNA is: how we do what we do; what's our optimal version of us; how we prepare; how we perform; how we debrief; how we communicate; how we deal with situations; how we deal with keeping ourselves on track; how we deal with correction. So all my athletes that I work with, I take them through a performance DNA template. That template is designed specifically to teach the athlete to recognise how they do what they do the best way possible. And when they understand this blueprint of their optimal how, we can recognise when things go off track. We can recognise when things start to get wobbly wheels long before they derail us.
There's some preparation process in place there that minimises the potential of going off track in the first place. But let's understand the tipping point of performance, first of all, that's taken us into that negative place. Let's make the assumption that you're listening to this because you're not performing where you want, you're in a slump, and you didn't have a process around you beforehand to minimise that. Step number one of this five step process that I'm going to take you through is:
Number one: recognise what the tipping point was that took you into this place of not performing. Now that could be a poor performance, it could be injury, it could be non selection, it could even be a change in your environment, change of coach, change of club, change of family circumstances, change of geographical circumstances. There's a whole variety of things that will make you feel vulnerable. And it's that feeling vulnerable that will make you overthink and be very consumed with what could go wrong. Because ultimately, that's what we're looking at here. Our brain is using the imagination to go, 'This could go wrong. What are the threats around us?'
Again, in the last episode of Brain in the Game, we looked at why our brain looks for those threats, what it does to eliminate, or at least be proactively trying to create scenarios to manage, those. And when we're in a place that's not working, we're in a performance slump where you're going out there week after week to compete, and you're just not nailing it, what your brain is looking for is causation. What's causing this? And if it can't see a very clear causation, then that imagination will create one. You're not good enough, you haven't done enough, you haven't prepared enough, you haven't eaten the right things, you didn't sleep the right way, you've got the wrong people around you. Whatever those excuses, and they often are excuses are, your brain will then become fixated on those to correct them. Almost sacrificial lambs to the slaughter in your mental capacity.
Once we've understood step number one, what the real causation is, step number two is: you have to understand what we could have done differently. So if it was a poor performance, what could you have done differently to eliminate that?
Now, we need to strip all emotion out of this process. It's no point in you saying, What could you have done differently? Oh, I could have been better. I could have been a better human. I could have been a better athlete. I could have trained harder because you know what? I'm not a very good person when it comes to training. So we want to strip the emotion out of that and look at the pragmatic process here and go, What could I have done differently to eliminate that? And if it's a poor performance, it's the same thing when we're looking at injuries. If you incur an injury, now, if the injury is pre the competition or the event, now that could be because you've overtrained and you've created a fatigue based injury, or you've created a fatigue based thought process where you make mistakes and cause an injury, an accident. If it was something like non selection, were you not prepared in the way that your skill set or your routines or your performance was geared for you to be selected? Now, there's many times an athlete won't get selected and they'll come back and they'll go, I'm just not good enough. The selectors don't like me. I can't do this. And I say, Whoa, one minute, your routine construction didn't put you in a selection position. Or, you're not in a selection position because this is your first competition in that environment. What they're looking for is to see how you perform under pressure. What they've done is then made you selectable for the next opportunity. So these may be causations that the athlete emotionally isn't seeing. So we need to strip that emotion and look at that from a pragmatic perspective. If it's environmental, then we've got to look at, okay, what was that environmental challenge that's caused you to maybe not train the way you need to train. Or, that's created doubts and taken everything from our subconscious, if you remember the last podcast, back into our conscious where we're overthinking. And because we're overthinking, we're not following the blueprint. So we didn't perform in a place of trust. We performed in a place of trying to force the outcome. Once we can do what we need to do, what could we have done differently? This is all about learning. It's not about blame. It's not about making excuses. It's about learning and saying, Right, now that I've learnt that, if there was something I could have done, should have done, would have done, that becomes part of my preparation in the future. Of course, I'd like to turn back time, jump in my time machine, go back and do it differently, but I can't. Therefore, the best mechanism for me to be able to move forward is to learn from this.
Step number three is: what were you doing when it was working? Now, let's make the assumption, it should be the right assumption that you could perform this before you went to the competition or the trial. And at some point, what you were doing was working. What we're looking for is, again, that emotionless pragmatic process of: how. How did I perform that skill? How did I perform that routine? What did I do to create that outcome? What are the actions I took to get that performance? Because what we are looking to do is get back on track with that performance blueprint, remember those line of dominoes, that gives us the outcome that we want. If that line of dominoes was working, but then we go trying to correct a slump by fixing the problem, rather than reverting back to what was working, then we can become fixated on the problem.
The analogy I use with this is, if we're on a train on a track and that train on the track is traveling really well and everything's going great, then all of a sudden those wheels became a little bit wobbly and there's a little bit of rattle in the train, but you paid no attention to it. And then all of a sudden that train crashes and then where that train has crashed, we try to put those parts back together to get back on track really, really fast. All we're doing is putting broken pieces back together. And if we put broken pieces back together, all we're putting back together are the parts that were already wobbly. So what we need to do is backtrack, and we need to go back to a point where there were no problems, there were no wobbly wheels, and things were traveling really, really well. When we go back to that point, we then have an optimal blueprint that we want to reengage. So that could be the way that you prepared. It could be the way that you trained. It could be the way that you focused. You could have been doing a high degree of very detailed disassociated visualisation. You could have been journaling, collecting good data. You could have been doing your bounce process. So you were creating those positive affirmations inside your head. You could have been recognising and rewarding. So you were creating momentum. All of these things that you could have been doing that you might have let slide, which created the wobbly wheels, which eventually created the crash. We don't want to be fixated on the crash, despite the fact that that's where the emotion is, that's where the pain point is. We want to be able to backpedal all the way back to, when was it optimised? Once we've got that optimal blueprint and we've identified that, we've got to look at that and say, does that fit within my DNA? Is that why things were on track? Why things were working so well? We've then got this really clear, this is what I should be doing. This is what I should have been doing. At what point did I let something elapse, or did I overfocus and change my process? Did I start to overtrain because the competition was coming closer? Did I start to do too much because I'm thinking, I am not doing enough. I've not actually followed my funnel process. I'm not ticking things off to know, I'm trying to rely on emotions to feel.
We need to then look at number four, which is what do I need to do to reinstate that old process? If it fits within our blueprint, if it's what I needed to do to be optimised and perform, how do I reinsert that? Is it simply I just need to reengage and do what I was doing? And that sometimes is the biggest realisation moment that we need. We need to look at it and go, Look, you know what? I know what works for me, but I started cutting corners. And the key thing with cutting corners is it's a very human trait. It's not necessarily because you're lazy, sometimes it is, but it's not necessarily because you're lazy. What it tends to be is your brain is looking for efficiencies, and it thinks, I'm doing all of this work, I'm doing all of these processes, where can I get a little bit more efficient? Where can I cut some of the fat off? Where can I trim some of the processes I'm doing back to become way more efficient and effective in how I do what I do?
And as I say, that's a very human trait to do that, because what it's looking for is, Well, there's a whole lot going on here. How much of this is actually necessary? And normally we do not realise we've cut back too far until we crash. And then all of a sudden we panic.
So the recognition and reward process becomes critical, which is step number five. We need to recognise and reward what's working. Those working processes need to have a higher degree of value. When we have higher degree of value and we're focusing on them, our brain will prioritise them. If we do not prioritise them, then we do not select them. It's just, again, it's a human efficiency mechanism inside our brain. Our brain isn't designed for high performance. Our brain is designed for, You know what? Just do what I need to do to get the job done, thinking about being a hunter and a gatherer, or being a nurturer, or whatever our capacity as a human was supposed to be. Then our brain is looking for, What's the minimum thing I need to do, the minimum amount of effort I need to put in to get the most out of it?
Which sounds really great, but the reality to that process is we're constantly looking as humans to trim. But what we got to do is recognise there's certain things that we trim that aren't necessarily smart things to be trimming. There's certain things we just need to do because they work. If they work, it's a non-negotiable in our process. So in our funnel process, we've got what's called job victory, which is JOB-V, which is Journal, Objectives, Bounce, and Visualisation. We've got non-negotiables, which is our hydration, our nutrition, our recovery, our sleep. So the first selection are looking after us mentally. The second selection is looking after us physically. They're non-negotiables. We wouldn't say, You know what? I'm not going to eat or drink anymore because it's more efficient if I don't. I get more training time. You know at some point your body is going to shut down and go, I need to eat, I need to drink. It's the same with sleep. People, myself included, spent many, many years trying to hack the sleep cycle where you try to get more done by sleeping less, and what's that sweet spot that you can manage?
I'm here to tell you, that comes back and bites you hard. So there's certain non-negotiables, whether we're looking after ourselves mentally and emotionally, or we're looking after ourselves physically, they're just non-negotiable. And when you look at your performance preparation and performance, there's going to be aspects in what you need to do. And I use that word very, very specifically. What are the things I need to do to make sure that I can perform and stay on track? They become things that you can't compromise. So getting yourself back on track and recognising and rewarding what works for you, building that momentum of feeding the successes will allow you to roll over any speed hump because you've built momentum. That allows you to future proof what you're doing. We want to have a bit of a mental strategy. I speak to my athletes in better English than that, I hope. I speak to my athletes often about controlling what you can control and letting go of what you cannot. Now, I know even saying that out loud to them and to you, that rubs up against what the mindset of an elite athlete is. The mindset of an elite athlete is, Well, I don't want to let anything go. I want to make it optimal. I want to control it. I want to make my weaknesses my strengths. But if your weaknesses is focusing on things that you cannot control the outcome of, then all you're doing is spending your focal currency, your financial thought processes, on things that you can't get a return on. So if you're in a competition and it starts to rain and you go, Oh, I want to over focus on the fact that it's raining. Let's put it in the context of if you're a racing car driver and all week you've been practising on the slicks in the dry and all of a sudden it comes qualifying and it rains, trust me, unless you know something I don't know, you cannot control the rain. What you can do is you can adapt and go, I need to get in my wet weather tyres on and go on my wet lines rather than my dry lines and have a strategy to manage that. But overthinking the fact that it's raining doesn't change the fact that it's raining. Changing your approach to work within that is something that you can control.
So that allows you to optimise in an unusual situation. So a big part of the process in understanding performance is understanding our performance DNA. Then it also is, if I know what my performance DNA is, what about those performance strategies that optimises that performance? We build that visualisation blueprint, that optimal performance strategy that we've got. Then the third part of that is you go, Right, what if? What if it rains? What if the tyres aren't great? What if somebody cuts me off? So then you start to create those strategies using your imagination for positive outcomes that are relevant for you, rather than creating something that the reality is, will probably never, ever eventuate. Athletes and humans in general tend to over focus on a whole variety of things that could go wrong, that the reality tells us will probably never, ever eventuate. And we do that because we don't have structure around building those 'what ifs', those 'how do I manage something if something happens'? So then our emotion gets involved and we get that fear. When we get that fear, we fall off track. Now, you'll notice that we started this conversation, we started this podcast around how do I deal with a performance slump?
What do I need to do to turn my performance slump around? What we've done realistically is spent the vast majority of this podcast trying to work out how you perform at your optimal irrespective of this particular slump that you're in. Because what we want to do is recalibrate back on track, rather than trying to fix something that's already occurred. It's just a much better investment in our focus, in our process, and in our time if we work out pre-emptively, what's the best version of me? Because the best version of you in every scenario benefits everyone. If you go in there and try and patch holes when you find a hole, what you end up with is not the best version of you, but a patched version of you. So the earlier you learn your DNA, your performance DNA, the earlier you learn how you best prepare and perform and collect data, the more likely you are to control any wobbly wheels when they turn up. You need to pay attention if you're on track and things are working. The second you see the wobble, recalibrate, bring it back on track to what works. You are less likely to crash. But you can't do that unless you've got the data to know when things start to wobble. Do not wait for things to go wrong. Do not wait to fall off the rails and go into a slump. Pre-emptively understand you.
Quick message here to the coaches. Having this conversation, utilising the DNA template with yourself and your athletes will allow you to see something from an external perspective that the athlete may not see from the internal perspective. If the athlete is consumed in preparation and performance, often those little wobbly wheels, they do not see until they become very wobbly. From the outside, a coach, the small shifts and changes in how they're approaching their focus, their conversation with you, the language they're using, the consistency, are they becoming a little bit habitual behaviours over certain things? Are they becoming fixated with doing something before they perform a habitual behaviour of tapping their feet or wiping their hands or looking in a certain direction? All of these are early warning systems for us to say that athlete is feeling vulnerable. The process that they usually follow isn't being optimised. So as a coach, we can see that often before the athlete sees that. And if we can see it early enough, we can raise it with them in a way that fits within their DNA.
So it is a real collaboration process for the athlete and the coach to recognise. Now, I'm a huge advocate for parents to be involved in the athlete's career. And I'm a huge advocate for parents to have a very specific role in that career. This is not it. Because as a parent, you'll always look through an emotional set of eyes. As a parent, it's very, very difficult. Now, I've got three children or not children anymore. Two of them are very grown up. And as a parent, you look at your children and you always look at them in a way that's highly emotive and in a way you want to protect them. So essentially as a parent, what you're doing is you're... Same thing as their prefrontal cortex. You're looking for risk. You're looking for something that's going to derail them that may never be there. So what you doing jumping in early with emotional set of eyes is creating doubt. So essentially, you can create those wobbles before they're even there. So like I said, I'm a huge advocate for parents having a very specific part to play in this. However, this is not the part to play. This is very much a collaboration between the athlete and their coach.
Let's go over those five things.
Understand the tipping point, the poor performance, or the injury, or the non selection that caused this in the first place.
Step number two is understand what you could have done differently. Make it a learning opportunity. It has to be very pragmatic, emotionless, however there needs to be a value you get from it so that you can move forward.
Number three, what were you doing when it was working? Your how, your DNA. What was the best thing for you? How do you then reestablish that process?
Number four is, what do I need to do to reinstigate the process? What actions do I need to take? What do I need to think about in a slightly different way? Was I cutting too many corners? Was I trying to trim off too much of the fat? Did I cut off a critical component? Remember, we talked about JOB-V, Journal, Objective, Bounce, and Visualisation. And we talked about the non-negotiables, which was the hydration, the nutrition, the sleep, the recovery. All of those things are looking after us mentally and emotionally and physically. If we've started to cut out some of those, then the likelihood is we've cut something off that was keeping us on track.
Number five was recognition and reward. We want to make sure that our brain sees value in what we're doing, otherwise it will start to trim it off. If we don't recognise and reward it, our brain will see it as luggage and baggage that needs to be got rid of.
So each one of those five components are critical. And the thing that underpins all of this, the foundation to everything is the athlete to better understand their DNA, to make sure that they know exactly how they do what they do the best way they can, to understand how they keep that on track, to understand what they need to do when it's not working, what's their recalibration process, and then to also understand what's their unique language patterns that work for them. So those four stages of the DNA are critical, and it's a place for the coach and the athlete to work collaboratively on that.
I hope you've got a lot from this episode because I think every single athlete will be hit by a performance slump at some point. We can control what we can control. And if we are fixated on what we can control rather than fixated on what we can't control, then we are spending our focal currency in a place that's best spent to give us an outcome that we want.
So I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Brain in the Game. Until the next one, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle. I'll see you inside the next Brain in the Game.
