A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

“I think burnout is a runaway cousin of wellbeing,” said Dr Meg Popovic.

Last week, she hosted the second session of her three-part Performance Support Series for Leaders Performance Institute members entitled ‘Wellbeing – What’s Having the Most Impact?’ The focus for session two – by popular demand – was burnout: what it is and how one can prevent and manage it in sport.

The session began with a straw poll where Popovic asked attendees: what are the main sources of stress in your workplace? The results, which were collated in real time, were illustrative. The most common answer was work-life balance; second was workload; third was people and the workplace culture; and fourth was a lack of job security.

The results allude to a range of problems, and yet these stresses – which can lead to burnout – have been rarely discussed in elite sporting contexts.

“There is very little to nothing written about staff burnout in high performance sport, Olympic and professional sport,” added Popovic, who is the Senior Professional Sports Manager for North America at EPIC Global Solutions, the world’s leading independent gambling harm minimisation consultancy and a valued Partner of the Leaders Performance Institute.

“In sport, I think burnout is sometimes quite hidden or it just looks different in every person and you don’t know what to do to help.”

Over the course of an hour, she led a discussion on understanding burnout and its early warning signs before turning to stress management and the importance of supportive environments.

The five phases of burnout

Burnout is, as Popovic said, “a state where the employee feels exhausted emotionally and physically”. It is “often the outcome of feeling stress or frustration for a prolonged time” and “burnout can cause significant physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual damage to people”.

While sport is distinct from traditional workplaces, with unique time-sensitivity and performance pressures, Popovic distilled the stages of employee burnout into five phases that resonated with those members in attendance. They were:

1. The honeymoon phase: characterised by enthusiasm, high productivity, feeling invincible, and an individual being hyper-focused on tasks.
2. The onset of stress: there are early signs of fatigue and reduced performance.
3. Chronic stress: the individual is struggling to cope, suffers from persistent anxiety and detachment.
4. Burnout: an individual experiences emotional and physical exhaustion, reduced efficacy and disengagement.
5. Habitual burnout: left untreated, burnout can lead to chronic health issues and emotional numbness.

The early warning signs of burnout

Popovic explained that phases two and three of employee burnout – the onset of stress and chronic stress – are preceded by a series of early warnings signs that we can all become attuned to recognising. They are:

Higher sensitivity – an individual feels or seems more sensitive than usual.

Reduced job performance – there may be signs that they are not able to perform tasks effectively.

Extreme thinking – an individual may become reliant on food, drugs, alcohol or gambling to cope.

Popovic conducted a second straw poll and, troublingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, attendees indicated that anywhere between 15% and 80% of the colleagues with whom they interact are currently experiencing burnout, in their view.

Preventing burnout strategy #1: navigating the stress cycle

Popovic presented two perspectives on preventing burnout. Firstly, that of Drs Emily and Amelia Nagoski as posited in their 2019 book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. They argue that we should recognise stress as a natural response to challenging situations. There are inevitable stressors and people will experience both physiological and emotional responses.

In Burnout, they suggest that individuals must go through the full cycle of experiencing and articulating stress in their bodies to effectively manage it. By acknowledging and addressing stress, one can navigate through the cycle and emerge on the other side with improved resilience and wellbeing.

As Popovic explained, the Nagoskis recommend:

1. Physical activity: regular exercise helps release stress from the body. Engage in activities like walking, jogging, or yoga.
2. Laughter: create moments of genuine laughter. As Popovic said, belly laughs can be therapeutic.
3. Crying: allow yourself to express emotions through crying. It’s a healthy release.
4. Physical affection: seek and give physical affection. Hugs, handshakes, or even petting a dog can help. The Nagoskis encourage people to build themselves a “bubble of love”.
5. Deep breathing: practise deep, intentional breaths to calm the nervous system. The Nagoskis see the practice of mindfulness as an important component of building emotional resilience. They also advocate for journalling.

In making their case, the Nagoskis highlight the distinction between ‘stressors’ – external situations or circumstances that trigger stress – and ‘stress’ itself, which they refer to as the internalisation of stress within your body. This process encompasses how your body responds to stressors and is a manifestation of the physiological and emotional impact of stress on an individual’s wellbeing.

All in all, the Nagoskis’ perspective is underpinned by a sense of compassion. They encourage people to understand the societal pressures and obstacles that contribute to burnout.

Preventing burnout strategy #2: the demand-control-support model

The second view posited by Popovic was organisational psychologist Dr Adam Grant’s ‘demand-control-support’ model. Grant said:

‘Demand’ involves making structural changes, which includes lightening a person’s load or redistributing tasks. He also feels that an organisation should address overtime and expectations of a person’s availability.

‘Control’ includes empowering people to set their own goals, equipping them with the skills needed to handle difficult situations, and giving them the freedom to work flexibly.

‘Support’ operates at a more systemic level. Leaders should foster an environment where requesting and receiving help is easy and it is, in fact, normal to seek assistance and discuss challenges.

Additionally, Grant emphasises the importance of celebrating small wins and tracking daily progress to help address burnout. He also advocates for redesigning job roles as part of an effort to foster supportive cultures.

Further reading:

Four Ways to Better Balance Winning and Wellbeing

If you are interested in joining the third session of this Performance Support Series with Dr Meg Popovic on Tuesday 30 April, sign up here.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

“Every single person has their breaking point,” says Dr David Fletcher, the Professor of Human Performance & Health and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Sport, Health and Well-Being, at Loughborough University.

“It’s the same for all of us in our day-to-day lives with stressors and strains that we experience,” he continues. “It might be that a major life event occurs and as a consequence that’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back and we struggle as a consequence. It may be day-to-day stressors in the environment that build up over time.

“Psychologists call this ‘allostatic load’ and it’s where it can lead to burnout or, in a sporting context, overtraining.”

There is more to it than just teaching psychological skills or qualities. “That’s the starting point.”

Fletcher is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a series that looks at better understanding psychological resilience, how it can be developed, as well as any other considerations for coaches in sport.

In the third part of our interview, Fletcher discusses how the environment in which someone operates influences their resilience, which has implications for coaching practice.

Why is it important to balance challenge and support in developing resilience?

DF: Challenge is all about providing developmental feedback. It’s feedback telling you how you are going to develop over the next 12 months and the challenge is for you to be able to step up your game in this respect. And, of course, there could be physical goals, certain technical goals, nutritional goals, lifestyle goals, psychological skills training goals. There’s a whole raft of different things that go into challenging people; and in sport and high performance we tend to be quite good at that. The area that sometimes gets neglected is the idea of supporting people in order to meet those challenges and those demands. ‘So if you’re going to progress by this much in the next week or the next month towards this goal, what do we need to put in place to support you in order to do this?’

What can coaches be doing better?

DF: This is all about encouraging people; providing them with confidence and motivation. I mentioned developmental feedback, but the feedback we need here is motivational feedback. Instead of looking forwards, we’re saying ‘12 months ago, you were here now you here look at how you’ve progressed and here are the reasons why you’ve progressed over the last twelve months you did this better. You did this better. You perform well in this situation, in this context’. So it’s about bolstering people, bolstering their self-esteem, their confidence and motivation. It’s also about providing them with support around what they’ve done better and how they’re doing things better on different fronts.

Is there a role for other staff too?

DF: Absolutely. This is where you need to try and draw in your sports science and medicine team so that the sport support they get is bespoke to them as individuals particularly at elite levels of competition. So what are the fine-grained areas that you can work on that are bespoke and specific to you? It’s an area that can get neglected, particularly at the higher levels. The optimal development of resilience is very much contingent upon balancing challenge and support, the fluctuations between the two, and trying to get that balance right; and some of the research that we’ve done suggests the best coaches intuitively and instinctively have a really good feel not only on how to balance the two for an individual but how to balance challenge and support for all of the individuals in the team. So you can imagine, if you’ve got a squad of 20-30 players they’re coming in and out of training, they’ve got all sorts of things going on in their lives. It’s not just the stressors and demands associated with the sport. It’s things outside of the sport. So no psychologists in the world could monitor all of those stresses and demands on all of those different athletes and then modify and tweak an intervention. The best coaches have got that real instinctive sense of when to back off somebody, dial down the challenge, dial up the support and put the arm around them. Or maybe an individual is getting a bit complacent and they need to dial up the challenge in different ways.

Are there any specific types of training for resilience that involve manipulating the environment?

DF: It’s really extending this idea around challenge and support and looking at specific contexts. What are the specific types of stresses and strains that people need to perform under? The principles are the same whatever the sport. We’re still looking at how can we place individuals under or challenge them to perform under more pressure. The key to that is what can we do to support them to do that? So you’re asking more of the athletes but you’re also saying ‘in order to meet this demand here’s my advice, here’s some of the things that you can do to step up and meet that demand’; and that’s crucial for coaches to do. You don’t just throw them into a pressurised situation that that, first of all, is too pressurised and too extreme. We’ve seen some cases of that in the past over the last couple of decades where people have wildly misjudged that and what people are capable of. I might add to that as well situations when the pressure is completely irrelevant or unrealistic, such as in a boot camp. The stresses and the pressures can be completely irrelevant to what your athletes will face in competition. The environment has got to be progressively challenging and it’s got to be realistic to meet these demands, but also, as I emphasised before, you’ve got to support players and athletes in order to achieve this. So what are you underpinning this with in terms of psychological skills training around imagery, around preparation around planning, around nutritional development? All the things that can help them meet these demands within the context that they’re working.

Read our interview in full:

Part I – Is an Athlete Resilient or Merely Coping? Why it Is Important to Understand the Role of Psychological Resilience in Sustained Success

Part II – Psychological Resilience: Everyone Has a Trainability Bandwidth

Part IV – Why the Way you Think Impacts your Resilience

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

Why is psychological resilience so important to sustained success?

“When we’re talking about any high performance environment, and particularly when we’re talking about sustaining success over time, psychological resilience becomes increasingly important the higher you go,” says Dr David Fletcher, the Professor of Human Performance & Health and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Sport, Health and Well-Being, at Loughborough University.

“The demands placed on individuals performing at the highest levels, whether in a sport, business, military context or any other domain, intensify and they come from an increasing number of sources. They also become more intense and more frequent,” he continues.

“With that, individuals need to be able to cope with, adapt to, and just generally deal with stressors in a variety of different ways, which necessitates resilience. That’s why resilience is particularly important for sustained success.”

Fletcher is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a series that looks at how psychological resilience can be developed, how it can be influenced by an environment, as well as any other considerations for coaches in sport.

In the first part of our interview, he sets out what psychological resilience means to both scientists and applied practitioners how this has implications in sporting environments.

What is psychological resilience?

David Fletcher: This is a contested area amongst academics. One definition is the ability to withstand and adapt to different types of stressors. ‘Resilience’ comes from the Latin verb ‘resilire’, which literally translates means ‘to leap back’. That’s where the phrase ‘bouncebackability’ comes from too. ‘Resilience’ is where there’s some form of disruption to somebody’s functioning or their performance and they’re able to regain their original levels of functioning and performance quite rapidly. Over time, the word and its usage have evolved. If we use sporting parlance, if the commentators on a football match describe a defence as being ‘very resilient today’ they’re not talking about a team that’s conceding goals. They’re talking about a defence that’s withstanding pressure and some modern scholars use it in that way too. That’s a subtly different meaning to the original term.

What are some of the implications for an academic and an applied practitioner such as you?

DF: When I’m working, whether as an academic or an applied practitioner, I do make a distinction between what I call ‘rebound resilience’ and more ‘robust resilience’. I think that’s important regardless of what context you’re in because of the implications for research scientists. How do you define ‘resilience’? How do you then measure resilience and what are the key parameters you need to look at? Then, as an applied practitioner, a psychologist working with athletes, there will be a subtle difference in some of the skills you might try to teach an athlete or a team to either withstand stressors or if there’s some kind of disruption and they need to be able to rebound quicker.

Does this ever lead to some confusion?

DF: It is important to be able to distinguish between ‘resilience’ and some related terms, perhaps the most notable of which is ‘coping’. To be clear, ‘coping’ is where there’s been disruption to somebody’s functioning but they’re unable to rebound as quickly and it takes them more time to deal with and work through some of the issues that arise under stress and pressure. That’s where I see the distinction between something like resilience and coping; and again that’s quite important for practitioners because the type of techniques that you’d need to teach athletes to cope more effectively. With more prolonged stress it is, again, subtly different to some of the techniques that are important for resilience.

How do you approach the development of psychological resilience?

DF: There is no magic bullet that is going to develop resilience – we need to look at it more holistically. To look at it from a bird’s eye view, we need to focus on three main areas. The first area relates to personal qualities or the psychological makeup of an athlete or, if we’re talking about a team, it’s a little more around the psychosocial makeup of that team. In other words, the relationships that bind the team members together. Either way, that’s the first thing that you would focus on.

The second area that we look at tends to get neglected, in my opinion, is the environment in which an individual or a team is operating, their surrounding conditions, the facilities, the management, the teammates, all those types of things. We’re talking about trying to optimise or manipulate that environment in such a way that it facilitates the development of resilience rather than either not stimulating that development of resilience at all or, the flip side of that, crushing individuals and putting them under too much pressure and, again, not leading to the development of resilience.

The third area is the combined effect of personal qualities and the environment. What you’re looking to develop is a challenge mindset. Individuals who step intro stressful situations and see it more as a challenge than a threat or, if we’re talking about a team, rather than it being a mindset we’re talking a bit more about a challenge culture in the dressing room. There’s like a collective confidence and efficacy in stressful situations. If you just focus on one of those areas and neglect the others, in my view, you’re not going to develop resilience optimally.

Read our interview in full:

Part II – Psychological Resilience: Everyone Has a Trainability Bandwidth

Part III – How the Training Environment Can Influence an Athlete’s Resilience

Part IV – Why the Way you Think Impacts your Resilience

Not a member and want more content like this? Speak to our team.

By John Portch

Max Whitlock, a three-time Olympic champion, spoke candidly about his mental health upon his return from the delayed 2020 Tokyo Games.

“I fell into a place, into this rut where I just lost all motivation for everything,” he told BBC Breakfast in September 2022, just weeks after retaining his Olympic title on the men’s pommel horse. “I felt sluggish every single day. I was in this place where I just didn’t want to do anything.

“I even got a blood test because I was just feeling awful every single day. The blood test came back and I was absolutely fine. I think that is what proved to me that it was all in my head.”

Whitlock, who said he felt like a “complete waste of space”, explained that his wife, Leah, was worried and he was unable to process how he felt. “A lot of people say it, talk to people, get it out it helps,” he continued. “But I think I’ve never been that person. I’ve always been the person to just keep it in and plough on through. I’ve done [that for my] whole career of almost putting a mask up.

“I think as I started to talk to Leah or started talk to my parents more and the people around me, I started to actually realise how I was feeling.”

One of the people in whom Max confided was his Head Coach, Scott Hann, who viewed himself as a sounding board rather than as a dispenser of advice.

“Making sure that you’re able to have those conversations with the athlete is important, that you’re able to have those open conversations, that you’re not there to fix, you’re there to guide,” he told the Leaders Performance Podcast last month.

“As a coach, if you’ve been that rock, that support, that guidance throughout the whole journey, you can’t all of a sudden jump into being a practitioner. So it’s important to try and encourage the athlete to reach out and make those connections with people who are going to be able to help them. Qualified good people who are able to help.

“Also just helping by giving them confidence in what they’ve achieved and where the next part of the journey can go. I think just being there is worth its weight in gold because, quite often, when the athlete is at the pinnacle of their career and they’ve achieved something, there could be a break from training. So the athlete and coach are separated. So it’s just making sure you’re there all the time and you’re giving that communication and guidance.”

When the Tokyo Games finished, Whitlock decided to take a 12-month break in which he contemplated retirement. Hann was never going to force Whitlock’s hand and, having given it some thought, Whitlock decided to return to the gym to prepare for the Paris Olympics.

Said Hann: “I know when Max spoke to me about getting back in the gym and making this next drive towards Paris, it wasn’t just a ‘yes’ from me ‘let’s do it’, it was ‘have you considered all of the obstacles, all of the challenges that are going to come your way and are you prepared for all that?’ We spoke in detail about different things that we may experience on this. So there was a big communication around ‘are you planning or working on what you’re going to do next so that you don’t fall into that situation again in the future?’ And I think they were all positive conversations and now Max is in a really strong place with a great mindset and his training is going so well.”

The Leaders Performance Institute’s Henry Breckenridge then steered the conversation towards Hann’s own mental wellbeing.

“Well, it’s interesting because, after the Rio Olympics, I’d never experienced anything like I did before,” said Hann, who recounted his experiences in 2016.

“Everything was just a whirlwind of emotions leading up to it. If you can imagine going from country to country, hotel to hotel, you’re waited on hand and foot, you’re in your own room, you’ve got your own space, you’ve got the highs of competitions, you’ve got the lows of competitions, you’ve got the pressure. You’ve got all of those things and then you get the most incredible results that you could even dream of.”

He spoke of the “euphoria” of Whitlock’s victory, which was swiftly replaced by relief. “It’s literally ‘thank god that is over and that result was what it was’ and then you get home and, all of a sudden, you’re hoovering the floor in your living room and it hit me. It was just ‘what was it all for? What’s happened?’ No one’s holding you on a pedestal, no one’s coming around and helping you with anything now. It’s done and you’re on your own. It was really hard.”

By the time the Tokyo Games came around in 2021, Hann felt better equipped to manage that post-Olympic bathos. “Knowing that that is a possibility was what helped me. And, of course, that’s not the answer you want. You don’t want someone to have to experience that low to be able to identify it in the future. But, for me, I did experience that low so I was prepared for it. So going into Tokyo, I gave myself the tools that I needed to make sure that I was ready to go on that journey, come out the other side, decompress slowly, and then go back into normal life. But I think there needs to be guidance for coaches to be able to reach out and have that support because it is such a pressurised whirlwind of emotion all the way through.

“So I think having people to talk to, having support, having mental health support, and identifying issues and being able to talk about them are all absolutely key for both the coach and the athlete and anybody else that’s involved in that journey.”

Listen below to the full conversation with Scott Hann:

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

Recommended reading

Psychology and Purpose: Creating a Thriving Team Environment

How Do you Get that Little Bit Extra Out of a Person’s Performance?

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?