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By Joe Lemire

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whitworth

As part of our latest Member Virtual Roundtable, those on the call engaged in rich discussions around the application of mental skills in practice.

Providing some additional content and provocation for the start of the roundtable, we listened to some of the thoughts and experiences of Dr Duncan Simpson who is currently serving as the Director of Personal Development at IMG Academy – Duncan is also on the Executive Board for the Association of Applied Sports Psychology in a Research & Practice position. The premise of the first section of the roundtable was to engage in some stimulus around the ’what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ as it pertains to mental skills training.

The ‘why’ of mental skills

Simpson kicked us off by sharing this definition of mental skills training: ‘The systematic and consistent practice of psychological skills aimed at enhancing performance and personal well-being’ (Vealey 2007). There are two key components to this definition – the systematic and consistent practice and the other focusing on what is the purpose of that practice? When we think about mental skills, if you just do it without an intended outcome or purpose, it will lack any impact or substance.

Now we’ve explored a definition of mental skills and some core considerations, why is this topic of much interest and relevance to the high performance sport industry?

Recent meta analyses corroborate decades of research regarding mental skills training having a positive effect on sports performance and vital psychological factors (Brown & Fletcher, 2017; Lochbaum et al., 2022).

However, some coaches and athletic directors have not adopted mental skills training due to perceived barriers, such as lack of time, cost, and concerns over relinquishing control (Wrisberg et al., 2010; Zakrajsek et al., 2013).

To summarise this first segment of the roundtable – we know that mental skills is important because there is a significant body of research outlining the positive impacts, but we also know it’s not being implemented across all levels of sport consistently.

What? ‘Questions are the shepherds of your mind’

We have to begin thinking about the implementation of mental skills. We may want to ask ourselves some questions because these will help direct where we want to go without on programming. Below are some considerations Duncan shared when thinking about the programming of our mental skills training:

What does the athlete or team want? What are we hearing from them around what they want? Do they want to become more resilient, confident or focus – what are the areas they want? This is a really important step, in particular having the connection with the athlete to collate that feedback. Where we have seen mental skills not work is when we put the programming to the athlete and try to make them receptive to it.

What does the athlete or team need? An audit or a needs analysis, working with coaches and support staff to understand what they actually need. When we start to collate the information around what they want and need, we are much better informed around what the programming and training needs to look like.

When you think about the sport in the context in which you work, what’s the greatest return on investment? If we want to improve the resilience of the team, is that going to have the biggest impact upon performance and wellbeing? Are we strictly focused on performance or is it a combination of both? We need to evaluate what is actually going on in order to make a difference.

It’s also worth thinking about an opposing question such as ‘what’s the lowest hanging fruit?’ What’s the easiest thing, not just the greatest thing? What are the things that are no brainers?

Addition and subtraction. When we think about organisations and teams, a lot of times coaches have this idea of needing to do more; and mental skills training is another one of those things we have to do, work and focus on – it’s an addition. We can actually reframe this. Mental skills and psychological work can actually be about subtraction. Here’s an example to bring this to life – if we are to focus on team building and culture working through the lens of subtraction, an element of this might be that when we make a mistake, we don’t criticise each other. We’re not doing anything extra, we’re just stopping criticism.

Finally, and when thinking about the ‘what’ behind mental skills’, what can you provide? What are your areas of competence?

What do we mean by ‘mental skills’?

Skills, in this case mental, is an ability and capacity acquired through deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort. Below are a number of key mental skills we often seen aligned to the practice.

1. Attentional control
2. Body language
3. Breathing
4. Competition planning & evaluation
5. Goal-setting
6. Imagery
7. Routines
8. Self-talk

Mental attributes

Attributes are qualities or characteristics of a person or team. Below are some of the things you may hear from coaches or support staff around how we want our athletes to be. The below examples are the outcome, this is what we are leading towards and we’re going to practise some mental skills in the aim to reach these outcomes:

• Accountable
• Adaptable
• Coachable
• Cohesive
• Communicative
• Committed
• Competitive
• Composed
• Confidence
• Connected
• Consistent
• Controlled
• Creative
• Disciplined
• Empowered
• Focused
• Happy
• Hard-working
• Inspired
• Leaders
• Mentally tough
• Motivated
• Optimistic
• Resilient
• Self-aware
• Trusting/trustworthy

Behaviours

A behaviour is the way a person acts or reacts in response to a particular situation or stimulus. They are observable actions that express psychological attributes. What does it look like when somebody is confident, when somebody is resilient?
Collaboration and agreement between performer, coach and support staff is an important aspect here. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether your definition of an attribute is slightly different to another member of staff or the athlete, the collaboration and agreement is the most important.

It’s also important to be sport-specific. What does that behaviour look like in your context? We are also in a position now where we can be objectively recording and capturing data based on these behaviours.

Skill learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour as a result of practice (Magill, 2016). If we are just psycho-educating our athletes and they don’t actually change their behaviours, they probably haven’t learned it. Seeing a change in behaviour is key.

Consider this flow: one of the outcomes is that we want an athlete to take more calculated risks. When we can define what that means based on the sporting context, what do we need to allow that to happen? We need the athletes to be more confident (the attribute), what are the skills that can support that confidence (self-talk)?

Skill = Self-Talk → Attribute = Confidence → Behaviour: Take More Calculated Risks

In practice reflection

Think about reflection. Below are some questions we can ask ourselves as performance support staff and coaches.

Ultimately, when you are looking at your team, organisation and athletes:

• How do you want your athletes or team to think, feel, and/or act differently?
• What types of knowledge, skills, and experiences will they require to get there?
• What exists psychologically in competition that is lacking in practice?
• Practice must intentionally include work on psychological development.

Group reflections & insights

At the end of the call, attendees were asked to share a key reflection from the roundtable that they’d like to take forward:

• ‘How do you know?’ How can we be objective in the measurement of the impact of mental skills and psychological development with the interventions we put in?
• Every person in the organisation is a performer and therefore all have the responsibility to practice performance psychology skills in their own daily practice and professional roles.
• Creating buy-in with athletes around mental skills training by breaking it down into small, actionable steps. Skill→Attribute→Behaviour. To get the outcome they’re looking for and the return on investment that matters to the stakeholders.
• Long-term development and clear understanding of roles in this space is important for success.
• Fire proofing vs fire fighting. What does your environment need and what are you giving it?
• Regardless of sport, the common challenge of balancing the practitioner’s goal of creating long-term change and the coach’s short-term focus on competing in the next game.
• Attributes can be a great way to identify a desired end state for your organisation’s efforts. ‘In X months we would like our players to be…?’ However you finish that particular sentence is an attribute.
• Skills vs attributes (doing vs being). Uniform desire to move towards an integrated model. A shared mental model around when our team is at its best mentally, what challenges we will face, how to train them and how to handle them in performance.
• Getting the organisation as a whole to buy-in and be one voice regarding mental performance.
• The need to get the leadership team buy into mental skills training and value what it can do for players, coaches and all staff.
• How to show value throughout the organisation, especially those above us.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whitworth

Our latest Performance Support Series explores the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ that influence performance under pressure. Across the three sessions within the series which Rachel Vickery has led, we have looked to develop our understanding behind the physiological responses to pressure from the athlete, coach and staff perspectives.

Part one, which looked at better understanding athletes’ physiological responses under pressure, is available here.

Part two explored how you can train your athletes’ physiological responses to pressure and can be found here.

We moved into the third and final session where the focus shifted to thinking around:

• Front-loading to put ‘buffer’ in the system.
• Maintaining through season and through career pressure.
• Breathing for performance and its role in pressure moments.
• Allostatic load.
• De-escalation of arousal state.

Relationship between breathing & performance

Before exploring some specific elements around how effective breathing can help to control arousal state and support performance, do we actually understand how pressure can influence breathing and vice versa?

In high pressure environments, inevitably we will see changes in breathing mechanics. If we want to be intentional and strategic in setting teams, organisations and ourselves up to be able to execute really well under pressure, efficient breathing is a powerful tool to support the control of operating state and to optimise physical, mental and emotional performance under pressure.

We need to avoid situations where things fall apart and then try to fix the problem – we will talk about the importance of front loading below, but to witness positive developments in this space, it takes time to become effective and second nature. We are seeking to keep our arousal state below the threshold for performance where you can perform well and in your sweet spot, as opposed to ‘crossing the red line’ where performance starts to fall apart. Approaches to breathing and other physiological support mechanisms can help to calm the nervous system for a more sustained approach to performance.

A really critical piece that’s often missing for teams and for individuals, is that we don’t get the chance to work with the arousal state in an environment that is not actually the performance arena whenever – whenever it is practised, there tends to be other things to be thinking about.

Importance of ‘front load buffer’

Throughout this series, we have reinforced the notion that performance under pressure is less to do with what you do in the moment of pressure. The concept of ‘front loading’ is something Rachel has woven throughout the sessions – it’s something she believes is a key determinant in controlling the pressure that will inevitably occur around competition time.

When we consider ‘front loading’, we are talking about the techniques and tools that can be used before a game or away from competition. Around ‘go time’ there is always going to be an increase in arousal state, driven by uncertainty, the unknown, high consequence, responsibility of outcome, being outside of the comfort zone and, even from a physiological perspective, the respiratory response to exertion.

A technique that can have a real positive impact is the ‘Theory of Fours’ breathing technique. This is a technique lasting four minutes, and includes breathing in for four seconds and out for six seconds across the four-minute period. There is strong evidence behind the science around its ability to bring the heartrate down. In high performance environments, it can be a useful practice to be used in the locker room both before and even after a game to reduce arousal. It’s also important to understand that the biomechanics of performance can be supported through effective breathing – there are more performance factors to be impacted than just heartrate control.

Front loading and giving yourself ‘buffer’ techniques can also help to manage arousal state in other instances, for example managing difficult conversations or other interactions away from the field. In the moment, if you are breathing calmly, your shoulders will relax, tone of voice lowers and the body doesn’t give a signal of stress. If you are able to do this, the other person you are interacting with doesn’t perceive the interaction as a threat and the communication is going to stay calmer and a lot more open. If you are carrying a lot of stress, you can carry it into a conversation with someone else.

Distinguishing breathwork & default breathing

Breathing isn’t just a key part of controlling arousal state, but it plays a significant role in optimising the physical and biomechanical aspects of performance, alongside mental and emotional performance under pressure. When it comes to breathing, there are two types to consider: breathwork and default or automatic breathing.

Breathwork in Rachel’s words is the ‘vitamins’, helping to give you a boost to more effective breathing. Default or automatic breathing is the ‘nutrition’, day-to-day breathing which is going to have the most impact in terms of optimisation – ‘if you have good nutrition, the vitamins can give you an additional edge’. There are huge performance gains through optimising breathing, which is different from breathwork.

If you have an athlete or are an inefficient breather yourself, you can miss out on the three factors below:

1. Power, Performance & Recovery: higher heartrate. Experiences of early fatigue. Technique tightens up. Loss of accuracy. More prone to injury. Reduction in speed and power. Slower recovery.
2. Breathing Issues: Shortness of breath. Difficulty getting enough air into chest. Cough or sore throat after exercise. Erratic breathing.
3. Operating State: Loss of focus. Loss of emotional control. Peripheral vision impacted. Rushed or panicked execution of skills. Poor decision-making. Reactive rather than proactive. Anxiety. Heightened threat response. Poor communication.

The final point in this section is the potential parasympathetic backlash that can occur for people operating in high pressure environments consistently. This is more commonly known as burnout. This is a downside of high performers who are typically very emotionally, mentally, physically, and virtually resilient. They can keep pushing a long way down the road before their physiology finally goes. Effective breathing, starting with default and topped up through breathwork, has been shown to help control the possible parasympathetic backlash that can occur.

Getting the basics right: what are the non-negotiables?

We have discussed the effectiveness of breathing techniques in helping to control responses to stress and pressure. There are a number of other factors that are important to get right to optimise human performance – they are the basics and non-negotiables which need to be focused on consistently. If we have these foundations well squared away, we can operate in a calmer nervous system state.

• Breathe: not from a meditation perspective, but from default breathing patterns – when you’re not thinking about breathing. Many people are aware of breathing from an arousal state perspective, which is more conscious control. This is more aligned to subconscious control.
• Eating clean.
• Body care.
• Daily gratitude.
• Get rid of toxins: can also be ‘toxic people’; what we watch and listen to.
• Mindful presence: something you can be present with for a period of time.
• Get life squared away: saps energy under the surface with your physiology.
• ‘Where’s my squiggly line’: self-assessing where you are.
• Have a code and stay true to it: deeper sense of your identity.

How can we de-escalate arousal states intentionally?

Rachel encouraged the group on the call to think about the importance of consistent de-escalating, especially in sports where there are repeat events, which is most. If we don’t strategically de-escalate between each game or aspect of the game, the arousal state will continue to creep up. This is where we can begin to see more mistakes occur. We can also do this for post-game to bring the arousal state down.

What are some of the things you can consider or implement to support this process:

• Non-sleep deep rest.
• Guided relaxation.
• Hard physical exercise: some teams have trialled this to burn off some adrenaline post-game.
• Get into nature.
• Have a third thing outside of family and the job. Something that gives a different dimension and outlet.
• Curate ruthlessly. Be ruthless with the people you spend time with, what you watch or listen to.
• Off-load to someone, ideally who isn’t invested in the results.
• Be mindful about what drives you.

De-escalate, don’t distract / escape.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whitworth

Our latest Performance Support Series explores the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ that influence performance under pressure. Across the three sessions within the series, we will look to develop our understanding behind the physiological responses to pressure from the athlete, coach and staff perspective.

Part one, which looked at better understanding athletes’ physiological responses under pressure, is available here.

We moved into the second session where the focus shifted to content and thinking around:

• Front-loading and intentionally setting up high pressure scenarios.
• Practical strategies for training and competition.
• Reframing the threat to opportunity.
• Quality of self-talk.
• Importance of communication.

Working with the nervous system

As we explored in session one, there is a need to spend time working on our physiological response to pressure. Do your people and athletes really know what it feels like when you experience that adrenaline surge and what changes in the body? How are we working with the nervous system so we can become comfortable being uncomfortable? Giving more tolerance for people to be uncomfortable feeds into this, however it doesn’t actually give them the skill or the tool in their toolkit to understand how to work with the physiology when it gets out of control – we want to develop strategies and deployable skills to take control of the arousal state.

As part of the session, we explored the theme of ‘identity statements’. This is another layer that gives athletes a very powerful identity statement to say that they have earned the right to be able to say, ‘I’m someone who does difficult things’ – it’s actually a really powerful statement when we’re trying to counter unimpactful self-talk that some athletes will try to convince themselves of.

Creative strategies

A really simple but effective strategy for those operating in daily training environments is the use of ice baths or plunge pools. It’s a resourceful strategy – when you get in, the huge adrenaline rush will be present. Breathing tightens, shoulders tense and the heart will begin pounding. We typically see athletes in particular use them for physical recovery, but it’s a great way of dovetailing this with training the physiological response.

How to make this really effective? Don’t do any specific breathing techniques or practices in advance. The reality of the performance arena is that you will need to control your arousal state in that specific moment – there isn’t time to prepare in advance of it. Through consistent training, eventually an athlete or person will get to the point of calm – when it gets to this stage, look to get creative once again through introducing cognitive tasks and intensifying the challenge. Rachel shared that within elite military environment settings, the challenge is ramped up considerably including complex maths questions or communication and translation of a foreign language.

Finally, you might also like to introduce something such as a fine motor skill aligned to an element of performance in your sport; an example being to relax your hand whilst training the response to integrate some performance orientation.

Threat focus

Where’s the threat? Where’s the danger? When considering pressure, the magic is not to buy into the panic. We are striving for situations when the body and mind are trying to do something, you are able to take control because you have learnt how to control it when it kicks in. The only time a stress response kicks in is when we’ve actually got another response that we need to handle and execute on, this concept is known as ‘threat focus’. In most performance environments, we don’t have enough time to notice, think about the what and the go to strategy.

Creating awareness for athletes or others around threat focus is important, it’s powerful to ask athletes in particular ‘what did you notice about yourself? What was your go to?’ You will hear responses such as a feeling of tension through the shoulders, the heart pounding or ‘my mind went into a victim mindset’. Provide space for those self-awareness moments and exposure.

Coaches and performance staff should also look to be involved in this process. You will often here coaching staff wanting their athletes to improve at handling and staying calm under pressure. An interesting insight shared within the roundtable was how many coaches do this work as well? Many coaches and performance staff don’t think they need to do it.

Mental rehearsal

The notion of mental rehearsal isn’t new to high performance environments. However, relating to the topic for this Performance Support Series, this is not mental rehearsal from the perspective of generic visualisation. This rehearsal is visualising yourself in the performance arena right now and working on ways to get into a calm state so that the brain waves are in a more optimal state. The practice is visualising yourself doing the difficult thing and experiencing how your strategies impact the difficult thing. This is where consistency of training neurophysiologically is important to ensure there isn’t a movement towards the ‘fear track’ and instead stay in the ‘calm track’.

Weaving strategies in skills training

We have already discussed the importance of building the muscle of the nervous system in training environments. What are some practical things we can do:

• Breath control (not breath work) with physical exertion. From the get go, learning to control breathing so that it stays slower and more under control because our thought processes tend to follow our breathing pattern.
• Use recovery positions and rest periods well. Where are the moments you can look to drop heart rate and breathing to aid recovery in a short amount of time during game time?
• Ice baths for arousal state control as well as physical recovery.
• Practice precision techniques ‘gassed’. This helps to build awareness of how things break down under pressure with either fine motor or cognitive. This is also useful for staff when giving athletes instructions. How well have they actually understood?
• Use uncertainty in drills, mix things up and have athletes problem-solve.
• Use the physical exertion to train arousal state control: fine motor, cognitive and situation awareness. Deck of cards conditioning drill.
• Consider impact on team culture. When it’s really tough in certain scenarios, who goes to the victim mindset? Who starts to blame others?
• Train the response. Don’t necessarily ask how do we reproduce that exact scenario in training as it will be almost impossible to mimic. Instead work on the response.
• Weaving in precision technique under pressure. Creating situations and scenarios where simple technique work is put under duress.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• It is your choice as staff, coaches, mentors and leaders to support the entire person.

• Being able to self-report is pivotal – make sure that players feel safe and that it’s OK to not be OK.

• What brings an athlete joy? Encourage athletes to look outside of their discipline whenever possible.

There is an appetite for self-reporting

When Tish Guerin served as the Carolina Panthers’ Director of Player Wellness between 2018 and 2020 she was one of the first in the NFL. Yet far from finding herself at a loose end, she was able to hit the ground running. “One of the things I found interesting was the immediate self-reporting,” she told an audience at the 2020 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte. “That was how I really started to measure the psychological wellbeing of our players.” Guerin was also proactive in her approach. “I had to make sure I was at the forefront, that they knew they could come to me and get that confidential interaction with me.” It worked. “Players came to me pretty much within my first week and they weren’t necessarily talking about the weather or their favourite restaurants – they were talking about real life issues that they were dealing with and wanted to combat those.”

Work out their normal

Right from the moment then-Head Coach Ron Rivera invited Guerin to address his players in the locker room, Guerin was visible around the practice facility come hail, rain or shine and joined the players at mealtimes. They knew they could check in at any stage and it enabled her to establish “behavioural baselines”, as she puts it, for each player, which is no mean feat on a roster of 53 athletes. “I know what their normal is,” she said. “I know what it looks like when a player has a good mindset and is emotionally balanced because I know what their levels are and I see them every day. That’s the benefit of being able to interact with them day in and day out.

“It’s about being able to recognise if, during a play, they struggled and I know it’s not something they struggled with typically. That’s where I’m able to go in and say, ‘hey, I noticed you hesitated before you made that block and in this play that’s not normally something you would do. Why is that?’ That’s addressing that potential performance anxiety and working through it.”

They may best respond to someone else

“One of the things that’s been important for me is acknowledging that players may not respond to me,” she said. “That meant I couldn’t come in and have an ego about that. When Coach Rivera brought me in, he let me get up in front of the team and give my spiel and I let them know right off: ‘if you prefer a male, that’s perfectly fine. I’m happy to refer you to wherever you’ll get the best treatment from’. You have to be aware of who you are serving, who those athletes are, who they might best respond to.”

Life beyond sport

Guerin explained the importance of providing players with coping skills, which are, “just those things you do to help you keep calm; that give you balance. You want to encourage activities that give the person a sense of peace, balance and a way to relax.” She also delved into tackling the ever-present threat of performance anxiety. “You want to change the thought process so that instead of a player thinking ‘I’m not going to make this block because this guy has two inches on me and about 30lbs’ you think ‘I’m going to keep my feet planted on the ground, I’m going to dig in all the way through and I’m going to hold them off with everything I have in me.’”

“Changing how you look at things can be instrumental in helping to decrease performance anxiety,” she continued. “We encourage our athletes to look outside of their discipline to something else that gives them joy. I don’t care if it’s a cooking class; we’ve had a player who’s learning to be a pilot; one guy was interested in being a glass blower. ‘I don’t know why but, hey, do your thing.’

“It helps the creative process and it helps them to buy-in more to being on the football field because now they have some balance.”

“I often talk about the difference between fixing broken and creating awesome,” Rachel Vickery tells the Leaders Performance Podcast.

The performance coach, who guides and supports high performers to excel, lead and thrive in high pressure and high stakes environments, is discussing the importance of preparing athletes for the high pressure scenarios they face in competition.

“You don’t need a ‘get out of jail card’ in the first place if you haven’t ended up in jail in the first place,” she continues.

“Performance under pressure is less about what happens in the moment of pressure, it’s more about ‘what have you done?’ everywhere else that’s led you into that moment.”

In the course of our chat, Rachel, a former gymnast who works across the worlds of sport, military and medicine, to name a few, explores:

• The importance of helping athletes to build buffer and front-loading strategies to deal with human stress responses [6:00];
• The need for awareness and understanding of those stress responses so that athletes don’t feel they are ‘going crazy’ [13:00];
• The role of impostor syndrome in feeding arousal states during competition [23:00];
• Why it is necessary to aim for excellence rather than perfection [28:00].

Check out Rachel’s website here.

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whithworth and Sarah Evans

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Framing the topic

The practice of psychology or mental skills is always a field of interest across the Leaders Performance Institute – there is always a curiosity to learn about how others are integrating and influencing the practice across different environments. Therefore, within this topic-led roundtable discussion we wanted to delve into our members’ current thinking around what is making the most impact and what some of the associated barriers are to embedding effective psychological practice.

Due to the popularity of the topic, we split the group into two to cover more of the detail.

Group 1:

• Do you have a clear definition of what mental performance is and isn’t? Is everyone aligned on that definition?
• With this generation of athlete we are seeing a real desire to have their sport be a part of who they are, thus wanting more from their club or organisation around not only inner development but professional development as well.
• There is more of a focus on developing the holistic individual – a lot of what is being done on the front end with younger talent is basic life skills and fundamental qualities. Historically, mental skills and performance was centred around performing at the sharp end without developing the foundational qualities first.
• In the space of mental performance and sports psychology, a couple of teams on the call cited that they are doing a lot of work around education and awareness of what it is and what it isn’t – having a distinction between the mental performance and mental health space.
• Approach your mental performance work with an athlete-like athletic development – it is a muscle that can be developed so you are ready when it matters most.
• In the sport of baseball, you are afforded a short pause between pitches. In terms of some of the work, one environment on the call has honed in on is the challenge over thread mentality and being focused on the right thing at the right time.
• One of the questions a team from the NBA has been thinking about is the balance between individualised learning and holistic team culture learning that sits alongside it. There have also been further considerations on how best to package and meet the athletes where they are at in the different points of their athletic and their human journey.
• In agreement on the point above, a baseball environment uses group contexts for priming and generating conversation and interest in a topic, but then sitting down with the players on an individual basis to personalise it. One of the most important components of unlocking this has been the integration with coaches, getting their buy-in and speaking the same language; working with them to set up training environments that can reinforce the concept of external vs. internal.
• We are seeing the most impact with people who are most bought into the process. Naturally, we will see those that do buy into it and those that don’t. Once we have got athletes into the process, it falls into two camps: do you want to engage in opportunities to drive performance? Or, do you want to just have conversations that make you feel better about playing poorly? It can sound harsh, but often that is the reality we see in different environments.
• Put things in very concrete terms for athletes, using language from their sport for things that they can actually transfer over and apply in their practices – a great place to practise things is in practice. So being able to give them things to actually tangibly work on and experiment. From here, when they come back to have that follow up conversation, you get the opportunity to find that process. What worked? What didn’t? What did you like? It’s important to show how these ideas related to their experiences as a performer.
• NCRW: Naturally Curious Resourceful & Whole. This framework is to support your understanding of where the athlete is. Another good analogy to consider is soil – is it ready for the seeds of mental performance to be planted? It might take those relaxed conversations and meeting the athlete where they are at before planting the seeds.
• Education within your group is important. You will have players that have been at the top level for a number of years that don’t want this specific support, but others in the environment will. It’s important to make it clear to those who are sceptical to not be a detractor to those that are proactively asking for the support.
• Consider the World Café concept: athletes are often wired to do what they are told to do, but best practices like the World Café give off a vibration of something different – create opportunities to get people into small groups and ask powerful questions, from there getting feedback from the leadership group.

Group 2:

• One of our members from North America highlighted the importance in creating relationships in the coaching and application of mental skills, between both the players and coaches; and this takes time to build. Having mental performance coaches as full-time practitioners is key for this, giving them the time and resources so that they can embed this work into everyday performance.
• It is worth noting that the importance of psychologists has become much more accepted within high performance environments. Covid helped to open many people’s eyes to the importance of mental health and mental performance coaching.
• However, it is important to remember that there is a difference between mental health and mental performance and to understand where those lines are and how to best support the athletes with what they need.
• Another key way of seeing the greatest impact within teams is having this practice integrated into the day to day of performance and not having it as an additional session at the end of the day.
• One US baseball team explained the use of short and sweet ‘drive-bys’ where the mental performance coaching is drip-fed into every day, in short bursts rather than 30-minute sessions as add-ons. They also explained how they work with and through the coaches, so the messages aren’t solely from the psychologist, but are delivered by the coaches too.
• Having the psychologist integrated into the session designs and strategy for the week is another great example of where a football team in the UK has seen success. They take a skill to focus on for the week, for example ‘confidence’ and plan how they can design the sessions to help best bring out this skill.
• Coaching the coaches – how can the psychologist help strengthen the coaching team? If they are truly integrated into the coaching staff then they can provide very specific feedback and offer a different perspective.
• Process-focused rather than outcome-focused. It is important to remove the outcome focus both with staff and players.
• Creating identity cards, is another practice one team found had a positive impact. The coaches develop these with the players individually and they put them up on the walls. This helps close the gap in self-awareness so that the players and staff are more on the same page.
• One way to help team cohesion and confidence was through creating a Google form where every player and staff member writes a couple of positive things about each player. It is anonymous, and each player receives the comments from the group.
• One barrier to implementing some of the mental performance work is when the coaches see the ‘casual collisions’ as overstepping. You have to build trust with the coaches which again, takes time.
• This leads onto the notion that the ‘coach is king’ model, which is a major barrier to some of this work. This notion of giving power away to someone else from a mental performance side can be difficult, and to overcome this it is again about building trust, and understanding what small wins you can take. Being able to allow them to see that the work is relevant, and why it is a tool rather than a threat.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By Sarah Evans

• Happiness precedes great performance.

• Many people who are successful, experience depression.

• We are able to operate differently when we are given positive emotions.

Success and happiness very rarely go together at all.

“Often people who are incredibly successful, and have worked extremely hard at their chosen profession or sport, are not happy,” stated Dan Lerner, Co-Professor of The Science of Happiness Course at New York University at the 2017 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Chicago. So Lerner sought to find people who were both successful and happy to understand how you can balance the two. He posed the audience a question: “Some of the most successful people in sport and business have proven you don’t need to be happy to be excellent, but there are some who are able to balance success and happiness and so shouldn’t we aim for this?” He gave examples of people who have proven that you can be both successful and happy, such as Richard Branson and Maya Angelou. Lerner quoted Richard Branson: ‘Most people would assume my business success and the wealth that comes with it have brought me happiness, but they haven’t. In fact it’s the reverse, I am successful, wealthy, and connected because I am happy.’

Do you have an advantage as a positive coach?

“We have lived in this world where success comes before happiness,” said Lerner, “but we have started to see exemplars creep into our culture that show us that’s not necessarily the case. There are tremendous advantages when we put happiness before success.” Lerner went on to describe many studies that proved if people were positively stimulated before an event they produced better performance. One study which Lerner explained, was undertaken on doctors, where they were split into three groups; one not primed at all, one group positively primed and the final group negatively primed. They were then given 50 symptoms to diagnose. “Those that were primed positively, diagnosed with 20% more accuracy than those that were primed negatively. Something happens to us when we are primed with positive emotions which enables us to operate differently” he added. Another study which directly relates to athletes, was an eye tracking study. When athletes were negatively primed before taking the eye tracking test, they were found to have a much more narrowed vision and focus, compared to the athletes who were given positive emotions before the test, who showed their vision remained far broader and they were able to take in information from their peripheral vision. “Do you want your quarter back to hone in on one person or them seeing the entire field?” Lerner asked. “Positive emotion is not only allowing us to operate differently, it’s allowing us to see the world differently and operate at a higher level.”

How do we cultivate positive emotions?

“When we have more positive interactions than negative interactions is when we take advantage of that positive emotion,” said Lerner. “Every time you criticise someone, you have to have at least two or three positive interactions to get the best from that person”. However there is a limit to this. Lerner also went on to highlight that if you give too much positive emotion, it becomes unreal, and it feels fake. “If there is no criticism they aren’t hearing ways to get better.” What can you do to cultivate these positive emotions? Lerner explains that it is essential to provide interventions for your athletes or staff that take no more than five minutes per day. Below are four examples Lerner provides to help increase positive emotions.

1. Gratitude journal – at the end of each day write down three new things you’re grateful for, and why you’re grateful for them.
2. Praising others – say ‘thank you’ to or praise someone every day for what they do for you or for others.
3. Meditation – we are able to focus much more clearly and have higher levels of positive emotion with regular meditation. This only needs to be two or three minutes a day, and you can build it up to 12 minutes.
4. Become a mentor – ask people questions about their lives. How are you working with your athletes and staff as human beings?

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• Confidence is multifaceted – it can be derived from numerous places

• Athletes must accept they will endure moments of self-doubt

• Constraints-based coaching can assist with skill execution in tricky environments

Develop a confidence bank

Confidence is multifaceted and people can be confident about different things, which is why, according to psychologist Dr Kate Hays, it is important for athletes to develop what she calls a “a robust confidence bank” ahead of any setbacks or moments of self-doubt. “What we try to do is ensure they’re pulling their confidence in from lots of different places,” Hays told an online audience at Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership in June 2021 when she was still serving as Head of Psychology at the English Institute of Sport. “We know that athletes gain a huge amount of confidence from performance accomplishments whether that’s in training or in competitive settings. We know that they derive a huge amount of confidence from coaching, social support and holistic preparation, whether that’s physical or mental. The more proactive people can be in terms of self-reflection and developing confidence from a multiple of sources, the more likely it is to be robust when they have those peaks and troughs.”

Normalise a bad day at the office

Hays, who is currently the Head of Women’s Psychology at the Football Association, tried to dispel the myth that you are either confident or you are not. “That’s just not true,” she said, explaining that no one is immune to self-doubt or negative thinking. We can all have a bad day at the office, as Dr Wendy Borlabi, the Director of Performance & Mental Health at the Chicago Bulls, has said. Hays added: “I think it’s a myth that we see the professional athletes and these Olympic athletes line up and they look so well-rehearsed – and they are – but it’s not true to think that some of them are not standing on that start line wishing they were not anywhere else in the world.” Athletes need to accept the inevitable and not fall prey to the myth. “It’s so important then that you’re able to go back to your evidence base and the preparation and your process to be able to cope with that in the moment and to enable you to still perform when the pressure is on. Confidence is not about positive thinking, confidence is about a set of evidence-based beliefs developed from really good preparation.”

The value in constraints-based coaching

What is happening when athletes are unable to execute under pressure? “If the skill is not transferring, there is a difference in the pattern, behaviour, the emotions or the cognitive thought processes that are taking place,” said Hays. She believes the path to the solution lies in constraints-based coaching. “It’s creating as many different environments and as many different circumstances and helping people understand their processes. But it doesn’t matter what you’re faced with, if you’ve got a consistent process that works for you, you can transfer it into any environment and you start to build confidence in your skill execution. I’m a massive believer in constraints-based coaching and how you develop psychological principles through technical and tactical coaching. Just having sessions day to day about learning; ‘so you’re going to make some mistakes and that’s OK.’”

Performance ‘doublethink’

Leaders Performance Advisor Dr David Fletcher, Senior Lecturer in Performance Psychology and Management at Loughborough University, reflects on the importance of confidence in high performance sport.

“Confidence is an essential part of the make-up of the very best performers; of course, the key question is how can belief be developed so that it remains robust under pressure? As Dr Hays says, one of the best ways of doing this is to help performers draw their confidence from various foundations, with their previous accomplishments being at the core of this. The notion of a ‘confidence bank’ is one that many top performers use because, just like our personal income and finances, we can generate confidence from multiple sources, we can invest and expand our belief portfolio over time, and we can make withdrawals when we need them most. But, similar to financial management, performers require support from coaches, family, experts and others, on how to best manage their own experiences and environment in such a way to strengthen their confidence. Certainly, focusing on personal mastery experiences, particularly success in difficult tasks that have occurred recently, is critically important for performing at our best.

“Just because the best performers can develop their confidence to high levels, this does not make them immune from intense anxieties. In other words, performers can simultaneously have strong belief in their ability (i.e., high levels of self-confidence) whilst being uncertain, or even doubting, if they will achieve some of their goal(s) (i.e., high levels of competitive anxiety). This is the performance equivalent of what the novelist, George Orwell, termed ‘doublethink’: the acceptance of contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time. It is not uncommon, for example, for performers to believe that they are capable of a great performance but be uncertain of whether it will be enough to win – hence being self-confident and anxious at the same time. The good news though is that some doubts can serve to keep high levels of confidence in check and prevent arrogance and/or complacency. It is, in part, for these reasons that performers should use some constraints-based coaching and pressure training to help them learn how to draw on and maintain their self-belief when they are under pressure and some doubts will likely creep in.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Bryson DeChambeau has been setting new driving distance records in each of the past two seasons, setting a new standard with a nearly 324-yard average in 2021.

In the tee box prior to the drive, he often paces around to get the blood pumping faster and then focuses very carefully on the pace and force of his respiration. “Breathing helps quite a bit,” he has said.

Helping golfers like DeChambeau and Jordan Spieth for the past several years has been NeuroPeak Pro, a sports science company focusing on helping its users perform better, particularly under pressure, through precision breathing, heart rate variability monitoring and neurofeedback.

Its latest tool monitors heart rate and HRV through an ECG belt worn around the sternum with added IMU sensors (accelerometer and gyroscope) to track movements of the diaphragm due to breathing. This newly released device, the NTEL belt, replaces what previously required a full briefcase of medical-grade equipment.

NeuroPeak Pro’s NTEL belt is more of a trainer than a wearable.

“The NTEL belt is a trainer, and it’s not a tracker,” says NeuroPeak Pro’s Director of Golf Performance Andy Matthews.

NeuroPeak Pro Vice President of Performance Programs Nick Bolhuis shared a recent story of a PGA Tour golfer who had grown discouraged when his Whoop registered a lower-than-expected recovery score. But using the NTEL belt allowed him to be proactive, with the NeuroPeak app providing scores on a scale of 0 to 100. Before the golfer’s final round at the Players Championship, he did two breathing sessions a couple hours apart, registering scores of 93 and 95, before completing the tournament with a strong showing.

“We gamified breathing,” Bolhuis says.

Matthews describes the NTEL belt as the missing link between those two, helping athletes transcend an immutable recovery assessment. “I did everything I was supposed to do yesterday,” Matthews says, “and I woke up with a 71% recovery score. But I need to perform at 100% of myself today. How do I bridge that gap between those two?”

After starring at the University of Michigan, Matthews played several years of pro golf, mostly in Canada. He won the 2010 Corona Mazatlan Mexican PGA Championship while using NeuroPeak’s tools, and that experience helped him appreciate the value of learning effective breathing technique.

“The precision breathing practice is just like one would practice their golf swing or their putting stroke,’’ Matthews says. “You set aside that time to really dial in and start to really hone in on your muscle control, your respiration rate and allow all those heart rate metrics that are connected to your physical breath start to follow in and unlock that zone-like performance state.’’

The NeuroPeak app has tutorial videos to help athletes learn to control their breathing, and premium packages include personal instruction. Breathing can be used for focus or for recovery. DeChambeau has previously discussed how, after a poorly executed shot, he can use the methodology to re-center himself. “When my heart rate got up, I was able it to control it and get it back down, based on breathing,” said DeChambeau.

The NeuroPeak Pro app.

Asked in late 2018 how important this training had been to his success, DeChambeau told a writer for the PGA Tour website, ““There’s a reason why I’ve won four times this year. That’s my statement on that.”

Golf has been the beachhead for NeuroPeak, but the company counts pro athletes in all sports as users. Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins, San Francisco Giants pitcher Matthew Boyd and New York Islanders center Brock Nelson are among the other notable users.

The demands of each sport are unique, of course, and NeuroPeak caters to each. There’s foundational breathing everyone must master, after which “we’ll be very specific and prescriptive, based upon your sport in the needs,” Bolhuis says.

Bolhius was recently working with tennis players, who will invoke their precision breathing between sets. They need only two or three deep breaths, typically taken in 10-second cycles—four-second inhale, one-second transition, four-second exhale and another one-second transition—to reset themselves. In that half-minute, they won’t return all the way to their resting heart rate, of course, but they can conserve themselves.

“It’s the difference of being at 150 and getting that down to like 120 or 110, as opposed to staying at 150 the whole time and just redlining it,” Bolhius says. “Because then you get impacts on your cortisol output and all these different things physiologically. So, it’s how quickly can I take my foot off that accelerator and get that braking mechanism in place and conserve energy?”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.