In the final part of our interview, Dr David Fletcher discusses the importance of building helpful thought patterns and developing the correct habits.
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Their mindset is a good starting point, says Dr David Fletcher. “If you can train the psychological aspect and manipulate the environment, the way to check that you’re getting it right is that you’ve got athletes walking into training and competition situations with a challenge mindset,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.
“In other words, they perceive the demands as an opportunity to perform, an opportunity for growth, an opportunity for learning, as opposed to a threat to their ambitions where they end up in a panic-stricken state,” he continues. “That’s your acid test of whether your resilience training is working.”
Fletcher, who is the Professor of Human Performance & Health and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Sport, Health and Well-Being, at Loughborough University, has little time for toxic positivity – the pressure to display positive emotions to the suppression of all else – “we’re not robots or machines,” he says. “What we’re looking for is the majority of the time they’re stepping into arenas where they’re up for the challenge and they see it as an opportunity.”
There is an element of metacognition in the way that the best athletes harness challenging circumstances to their advantage. “I don’t want to go into too much jargon, but resilient athletes enter a higher level of functioning,” says Fletcher. “Hopefully your initial emotions are ones of excitement, you’re up for it, but if you are a little bit more anxious and uncertain, there’s another stage of cognitive processing where you evaluate that emotion and the best athletes can give themselves a safety net. You’re not sure on the initial context and you’ve got a bit of anxiety running through you, but you’re still able to interpret this negative emotion in a positive way. This is a skill that we’ve seen in some of the world’s best athletes. They’re able to say ‘well, actually I’ve been anxious before, the anxiety is going to help me drive through pain’ or ‘the anxiety is actually going to help me focus more on what I need to focus on’. Whereas a lesser athlete, when they have some of those negative emotions come in, they will then spiral into an unhelpful thought pattern.”
Fletcher has been talking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a series that looks at how psychological resilience can be developed, the influence of the environment, as well as any other considerations for coaches in sport.
In the fourth and final part of our interview, Fletcher discusses the reframing of unhelpful thought patterns with a view to developing athlete resilience in an environment that successfully balances challenge and support.
What types of thinking patterns prevent the development of resilience?
David Fletcher: There’s a host of different things athletes can tell themselves. For example, ‘if I mess this up this is going to be the end of my career’ or trying to second guess what the crowd is thinking. ‘What are people in the crowd thinking of me? or ‘what will my parents think?’ or ‘what are my teammates thinking?’ There’s all sorts of traps and distractions from optimal thinking patterns that will get in the way of being resilient in the moment
What steps can athletes take to prevent these unhelpful thought patterns hindering their performance?
DF: People need to stay in the present. That’s the first thing. So don’t think about the previous point if it’s a tennis match; or if you think ‘what if I win this competition? How much money will I earn?’ You need to stay relatively positive, focusing on what you need to do versus what you need to avoid doing. What are some of the key tactics I need to focus on staying relatively positive? As soon as you get distracted from those things then some of these more unhelpful thinking patterns can creep in. We do a lot of work around developing habits of behaviour in order to reengage at different times. Again, take a tennis player, for example, the idea of resetting between each point. The obvious one is when you hit the ball into the net and you’re dwelling upon that, but even if you hit great shots you have still got to reset for the next point. It helps to go through a physical behavioural pattern where you might turn your back on the opponent, you may look down at your racket and straighten some of the strings, using that as a cue to restraighten some of the thoughts in your mind and refocus on the next point as opposed to dwelling on the previous point, which would be something that could compromise your resilience.
How can athletes build the correct habits?
DF: A lot of it is around putting together everything that we’ve discussed. So starting with basic fundamental psychological skills training about learning how to better set goals, not just focusing on outcome goals but also incorporating into the process performance goals and, most importantly, getting the balance right between those factors and practising imagery techniques and developing those. Then bringing these into training contexts and situations where we optimise that challenge and support over time. You’re merging the two together to try and harness that psychological development and then you’re trying to bring that all together under a challenge mindset over time.
Does that go beyond competitive situations?
DF: This is an important point to emphasise when we’re talking about the development of resilience. It’s not just about that moment in competition. It’s about handling everything else that goes with elite level sport. There’s a broader consideration around training camps and lifestyle. For example, you’ve got a holding camp then you go into the Olympic environment. So how do you train for all of those types of things? I’ve attended meetings about the distractions present at the Olympics. Coaches discussed how we can train our athletes not to be distracted by some of those things and we’re also doing what’s called ‘what-if’ scenario planning. So what are some of the challenges and stressors that our athletes have encountered previously within the Olympic Village? One example is an athlete getting on a bus that took him to the wrong venue. Social media has also become an issue for a lot of top level athletes. So again, it adds some novel dimension to this idea of resilience.
As we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts?
DF: There’s a lot being written and said about resilience, with plenty of research available, but it’s another thing to develop on the ground. It is fundamentally reliant on relationships. The first thing you should do is hire a skilled psychologist and ensure they have the support of coaches, performance directors and the broader leadership and management within your organisation. Otherwise there is only so much they can achieve in teaching psychological skills and strategies. Perhaps the environment is wrong, say there’s too much challenge and not enough support, where the psychologist cannot input effectively. Or the other way around. There’s too much support and not enough challenge and the environment’s too comfortable. Then you’re never going to create and coach truly resilient athletes when it comes to the moment of competition. You need buy-in. It’s going to be a collective effort of working together to help craft that environment to help the athletes perform together. Some of the other considerations are around trying to monitor the environment and really understand the players and the support staff on an individual level because you do want to be able to assess and monitor whether you’re having an impact and, if you’re not, what you need to do accordingly. If you’re not monitoring things effectively then that can be a challenge too.
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
Though it may not be as trainable as some people claim, Dr David Fletcher identifies some of the personal qualities that define psychologically resilient athletes.
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“The short answer is both,” says Dr David Fletcher, the Professor of Human Performance & Health and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Sport, Health and Well-Being, at Loughborough University.
“Your personality characteristics have a large genetic component,” he continues. “The physiologist Per-Olof Åstrand once said ‘If you want to be an Olympic champion, choose your parents wisely’ and he was talking from a physiological point of view, but there are certain personality characteristics that do give you a real head start.
“But the good news is that there is a trainability bandwidth, which means psychological skills can be trained. However, they are trainable but not as trainable or developable as some people might claim.”
Fletcher is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a series that looks at how psychological resilience can be developed, the influence of the environment, as well as any other considerations for coaches in sport.
In the second part of our interview, he discusses the necessary personal qualities, trainable psychological skills, and the caveats for all teams looking to develop their athletes’ psychological resilience.
What are some of the personal qualities or psychological factors that are important for developing psychological resilience?
David Fletcher: There’s almost a whole shopping list here. I mean there’s probably about 50 years’ worth of research which has looked at some of these personal qualities or psychological factors that are important. I can list a few that we know, such was self-confidence, which underpins resilience. We know optimal levels of motivation self-determination are important. We also know certain personality characteristics are advantageous, such as the Type A behaviour pattern [commonly people who are highly competitive, ambitious, work-driven, time-conscious and aggressive]. There are other important social-related qualities, such as people who are able to ask for help and engage in social support. They tend to handle stress better and be more resilient. There’s a raft of factors that go into making a psychologically resilient individual and there’s parallels with the physical aspects of training for sport.
You have previously said that it is important to understand the differences between personality characteristics, psychological skills and desirable outcomes. Can you please explain that point?
DF: Personality characteristics are enduring and distinctive. In other words, they stay fairly stable over time and they’re distinctive in that they are what make us individuals and separate us from other individuals. They are quite stubborn and don’t change very easily. That’s not say that they can’t change. They will do during periods of extreme adversity, or indeed extreme success, they can alter personality, but by and large they stay fairly constant. On the other hand, psychological skills are much more malleable and amenable to training, such as goal setting-imagery, self-talk or relaxation strategies. There are other skills such as the ability to plan or proactivity that don’t receive quite as much airtime in the sports psychology literature but I would say they are equally important in developing resilience. Now, it’s important to distinguish between those because, as a psychologist going in and working with an athlete, that has implications for how, as well as how often, you assess those qualities because you probably need to monitor those amenable to change more regularly than personality characteristics. You also mentioned desirable outcomes so it’s probably best if I give an example here. If we take certain personality characteristics, like levels of self-esteem and traits for confidence, they stay fairly consistent and essentially they refer to your general tendency to believe in yourself and your capabilities. That’s the personality-type characteristics that are relevant here, but you can also do a lot to enhance your self-confidence using skills like goal-setting, imagery and self-talk. Consistently, the literature shows and that those tools can help to develop self-confidence. So what we’re trying to do is merge those skills with their physical qualities. When a performer is placed in difficult, stressful positions, we ask the question ‘to what extent do you believe in yourself in this specific situation?’ That will be a factor of both your personality and how well you’ve learned these skills.
Is there much variation amongst athletes in different sports? Are certain traits more prevalent in athletes than the general population?
DF: The scientific literature hasn’t fully unravelled that but elite level athletes do have certain characteristics and traits are more prevalent than in the general population. These include high levels of self-confidence, optimism, openness, proactivity. Part of the reason is these help them perform in demanding situations. They have that sort of head start. The analogy is right there with physical characteristics. In men’s basketball, for instance, we tend to see people who are over six foot performing at the higher levels. One thing I find interesting, and it’s a trap I’ve seen some researchers and practitioners fall into, is to not confuse the characteristics for high performance with characteristics that are likeable, socially desirable, ethical or to assume that they help support mental health. One example is narcissism. So narcissists are individuals that crave adulation, they tend to perform well in arenas where they get that adulation. So in an Olympic final, you’ve got a huge crowd who are who are going to celebrate your successes; so narcissists particularly like high pressure situations because of the potential that that brings them for this adulation. That’s a personality characteristic that again would give you a head start in an Olympic arena but narcissism isn’t a particularly pleasant or desirable characteristic. These are very important considerations whether you’re working as a psychologist or just generally working in high performance contexts. Selfishness, perfectionism and obsessiveness tend to be advantageous for developing resilience and for high performance but they’re not advantageous for mental health, sustaining relationships or marriages. That’s why we sometimes see individuals who are very high performance who struggle in other contexts. When we start to unpick some of these personal qualities and what they’re all about it certainly gets quite interesting and present an ethical challenge for psychologists and coaches when working with these individuals. How do we help them not only as a performer but more holistically as a person?
Read our interview in full:
Part III – How the Training Environment Can Influence an Athlete’s Resilience
A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners
The Head of Global Resilience at Google, appeared at June’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership to provide an insight into her leadership of the tech giant’s Mental Performance & Resilience Program.
“Sport gives us, as you know, many opportunities to win, to lose, to overcome, to battle, to be in the trenches,” Whitt continues, “but we have choices on how we respond with our attitudes and our behaviours. These skills are built and practised little by little, day by day, over weeks, months and years. So it’s not a quick fix. There are little tidbits and little things that we can put into play.”
Here, the Leaders Performance Institute details how Google “sets the stage”, as Whitt puts it, for the resilience of its employees.
Resilience needs a common language that resonates with your people
Google understood that its research needed to be thorough, but it also needed a simple and easy definition of ‘resilience’ that hit the mark with its employees, its ‘Googlers’. “So we have looked at all of that research and we’ve come together on a definition that resonates with Googlers; it resonates with our culture, it resonates with our population,” says Whitt. “Our common language is critical to our success.” Having pored over decades of research, Google settled on: ‘resilience is your ability to respond and recover from stress’.
A person’s resilience will be determined by their balance of ‘protective factors’ and ‘stressors’
Whitt explains that the relationship between ‘protective factors’ and ‘stressors’ will determine your resilience at any given time. They need constant attention because they remain in a state of flux; and one thing is clear: “We need to have our protective factors that overcome our stressors.”
‘Protective factors’ can be our personalities, personal skills or even our communities, while ‘stressors’ include, as one would expect, adversity, life events, or simple uncertainty. Whitt says: “We are fine at the point that our protective factors overcome our stressors. When our stressors are larger than our ability to protect ourselves or respond, that is when a boom or disruption happens. It could be as easy as the ping of a text or something to distract you while you’re working on a project or having a presentation or meeting with an athlete; or it could be something as large as a health event for a family member. It could be a million different things here, but we have them from small to large.”
Teams and individuals must be intentional in their approach
How you manage your protective factors and stressors will depend on your behaviours and your environment. Whitt says: “Our behaviour is a function both of the individual, the Googler, and the environment. So when we talk about ‘resilience’, we have to be critically intentional that it can’t just be about the player. It can’t just be about the athlete or the coach. It has to be compounded by the entire environment. What are the pieces of the organisation? What are the policies? What are the tools or resources? What does the support look like from top to bottom and inside and out?”
