Don’t wait for certainty, just take action

How often have you said “One day I am going to...” and then followed this with a statement such as “...get in shape”, “...write a book”, “...learn a new language”, “...run a marathon”, “...take up an instrument”, “...change my career” only to end up not doing anything about it because you are not certain that it is going to work. You then decide to put it off until a time in the vague future when you do have certainty. The problem with this approach is that there is no such thing as 100% certainty so more often than not people never get round to pursuing their dreams. Instead we sabotage our dreams by making excuses (“I don’t have time”, “I can’t afford it”, “I’m not good enough”, “I’m not ready”) and then carry on with our lives as they are.

One problem with dreams is that people tend to focus on their conclusion rather than the process of achieving the dream. This usually has the effect of making it seem far too big and unachievable. For instance, if your dream is to climb Everest and you haven’t actually done any exercise for two years it may be quite intimidating to think about getting to the summit. The best way to make a dream achievable is to turn it into a goal by breaking it down into small pieces and then focus on the smallest piece first.  So instead of focusing on getting to the summit of Everest, set a goal to scale a local climbing wall first and then move onto a slightly greater challenge. Focusing on the smaller parts of the goal gives you greater motivation, belief and energy to achieve your dream. Even the smallest step takes you towards your dream and creates a feeling that you are working towards something worthwhile. 

So what are you waiting for? Now is the time to take action.

Andy Barton

Performance Consultant

The Sporting Mind

Watch what you say

Have you ever considered what impact the words you use have on the way you represent the world in your mind? Our language colours our perception throughout the day and impacts on our self-belief, our behaviour, our confidence and our emotions. When we think about the future, for instance, we play an internal movie representing how we expect that future to be (or less visual people play a radio show). Our words play an important role in our internal representations as they are effectively the script of the movie. The words that we use mostly in day to day life will therefore determine the kinds of movie we play. If we constantly use negative words such as  ‘worry’, ‘fear’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘stress’, we end up creating disaster movies in our minds. .

An experiment was carried out at New York University where subjects were primed with words associated with old age by getting them to rearrange cards with individual words on them to form a sentence. Each of the sentences included words such as ‘worried’, ‘forgetful’, ‘bingo’, ‘lonely’, ‘grey’ and ‘Florida’ (if you’ve been to Florida you will know why), all words which could be associated with the elderly. Waiting outside the room where the priming took place were researchers who secretly timed each of the subjects as they made their way to the room at the beginning of the experiment and as they left the building at the end. Interestingly, the ‘old age’ words seemed to have a profound effect on the subjects as they were significantly slower leaving the room as they had been when they arrived.

If you want to be happy, excited, fulfilled, relaxed or motivated, make sure your script is the right one!

Andy Barton

Performance consultant

The Sporting Mind

Think yourself fit

Even after many years working in the field of mental performance I am still in awe of the extraordinary power of the mind. Certainly the one thing that seems to unite elite sports performers, no matter what their chosen sport is, is that they all possess unusually vivid imaginations. It is what allows them to see, hear and feel things that us mere mortals are not able to that sets them apart in a competitive situation.

One way of exploiting a powerful imagination is to use mental rehearsal techniques essentially to train the mind and body to perform skills successfully. When we imagine performing a skill, we actually fire up an almost identical pattern of neural response to when we are actually performing the skill itself. When Rory Mcllroy is lining up a golf shot, he mentally rehearses it by using all of his senses to imagine the look, sound and feeling of the shot in his mind before actually playing the shot. As he imagines it, he fires up the required neurons and muscles that are involved in the shot, effectively programming it in to his mental computer.  The more vividly he imagines the shot, the better the programming is.

One study carried out in Cleveland, Ohio compared people who went to the gym with people who imagined being at the gym and having a virtual workout.  The participants who actually went to the gym over a 3 month period increased their muscle mass by an average of 30%. Interestingly, the participants who only did the virtual workout and lifted no weights at all, still managed to increase their muscle mass by an average 13.5%.

So if you want that six pack before you go away for your summer holidays, all you have to do is use a little imagination!

Andy Barton

Performance consultant

The Sporting Mind

Chilled or pumped? It’s a personal thing

I don’t know whether you have been absorbed with the World Cup as much as I have but I just love it when it gets to the knock out phase where it becomes a real test of mental and physical strength and determination. At this point of the competition, coaches have very little need to get their players ‘pumped up’ as, in most cases, the players are going to be highly stressed already. This is where a coach really needs to have a good understanding of his players individually because we all perform at our best at different arousal levels so some players like to be really pumped up but others will perform much better when they are at lower arousal levels. If a coach takes a one size fits all approach and does a stirring pep talk for the whole team which gets their hearts beating fast, their hands tingling and their heads spinning, it may be of benefit to maybe 3 or 4 players but for the rest it could end up having the opposite effect to that intended.

When I used to play rugby (many years ago!), before the match started in the changing room, the whole team would form a circle, link arms and gradually crank up the excitement as we shouted louder and louder counting from one to ten whilst stamping faster and faster onto the concrete floor. Those who managed to avoid turning their ankles then ran out onto the field whipped up like a bunch of crazed warriors ready for action. Except for me, it seemed. Such frenzied displays did nothing for me and so I would spend the next few minutes actually calming myself down before the match started as I realised even back then that I played much better when I was more relaxed.

One of my clients experienced this state of over-arousal when he made it to his first Cup Final. Normally a very confident player, after a heartfelt speech from his coach somewhere on the lines of Shakespeare’s Henry V, he then made his way down the tunnel at Wembley and as he saw the crowd and heard the roar, the whole occasion got to him. He was just too pumped up to perform and he spent the largest part of the match in a state of paralysis.

It is essential to recognise that everyone is different and so it is important to work with people on an individual basis if we want to get the best out of them. By helping individuals tap into what is that makes them tick, we can go a long way to get sports performers into the right frame of mind to perform to their best.

At this stage of the competition, the team who wins the World Cup may just be the one with the coach who understands his players the best.

Andy Barton
Performance Consultant
The Sporting Mind

Don’t worry, be happy

I have noted a worrying trend in recent years, particularly in my younger clients, that, in the pursuit of excellence, they seem more and more to be losing their enjoyment of their sport. They get to a point where they feel it is time to take their sport seriously and something changes in their approach. Instead of taking a carefree, curious and open-minded approach to learning new skills, they start focusing on results and status. As a consequence of this, they develop a belief that they should only be happy as a reward for achieving a particular goal or as a consequence of good results rather than enjoying playing for the sake of playing. They feel they should be hard on themselves, they will beat themselves up when things go wrong and scrutinise their performances for errors. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work very well.

The thing is, we are much more resourceful when we are happy than when we are focusing on our faults and chastising ourselves. I often ask my clients what it was like performing in their sport before they took it seriously, and pretty well everyone I have asked this question has spoken positively, almost with a glow of nostalgia. There was no fear of failure, they played instinctively, they focused on the process of learning rather than the consequences of their actions and they had complete trust and belief in themselves – essentially all the things you want from a sports performer.  And yet they would still put off happiness until they achieved something rather than use it as a means to help them achieve.

Being positive even has a profound effect on our ability to use our senses. The Russian psychologist Krikor Kekcheyev found that, when thinking pleasant thoughts, test subjects could see, taste, smell and hear better and, more significantly for sports performers, could detect finer distinctions in their sense of touch. 

Personally, I see this as a win-win situation. If you go out purely with the intention of enjoying performing, you will actually perform better than if you are hard on yourself and take it too seriously.

So why wait to be happy?  Go and have fun!

Andy Barton

Performance Consultant

The Sporting Mind  

Feeling overwhelmed? Isaac Newton can help

I was working with a business client recently who was feeling overwhelmed with the sheer workload ahead of him. He suffered from ‘never-ending list syndrome’ (okay, I’ve just made that syndrome up) where he would have a huge list of things to do but for every thing that he completed and crossed off the top of the list, it seemed that he was adding an extra two things to the bottom. As days and weeks went by, he found he was achieving less and less and any motivation that he had was now turning to procrastination. His focus now seemed to be wavering between various social networking sites, spider solitaire and Sky Sports but very little was being done for his business.

The problem is that we can only consciously process about 7 pieces of information at a time so when we try to think of a number of things greater than that (such as on a long list) we can become stressed, anxious and out of control. We also very often distort the amount of work we have to do so the task just seems so much greater than it really is. One way people deal with this is to give up altogether and do nothing which ultimately makes matters worse as the list will continue to grow.

To help my client, I gave him two very simple but effective tips. First of all, I suggested that when he first got into work that he should decant from his list a maximum of 5 items that are priorities for that day and put them on a new, separate list. I stressed that it was essential that it was possible to achieve all of these things in the day otherwise he was to remove items from the list until it was achievable. The never-ending list was then to be put out of sight and he was just to work on one item at a time until all items on the new list were completed. This meant that he no longer would have a large number of items to worry about. Having only a small number of achievable tasks to aim for can have a significant impact on our motivation and also gives us a feeling of achievement and closure at the end of the day when the list is completed (which the never-ending list never does).

My second tip was that, contrary to some widely held views which suggest it is best to get the biggest thing out of the way first, he should in fact do the easiest/smallest thing first. Why? Well, this is where we look to Isaac Newton and his First Law of Motion (otherwise known as the Law of Inertia), which states “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion”. If we aim to start on something that only takes 10 minutes, we have already created motion so the likelihood is that we will continue onto the next thing using the momentum from the easy task.

So if you are feeling overwhelmed all you really need to do is create a small, achievable list and just get moving!  

Andy Barton

Performance Consultant

The Sporting Mind 

Sportlobster TV: What does a relegation battle do to the mind?

I had the pleasure of doing an interview with Sportlobster, the new social networking site for sport. I was sharing the couch with former Premiership footballers Jimmy Bullard, Leon McKenzie and Paul McVeigh. We were discussing the mental effects of a relegation battle. The programme can be accessed by clicking here.

Andy Barton
Performance Consultant
The Sporting Mind