{"id":946,"date":"2020-02-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/reports\/why-hendrick-motorsports-has-made-mental-skills-a-priority\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:12:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:12:23","slug":"hendrick-motorsports-mental-skills","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/hendrick-motorsports-mental-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Hendrick Motorsports Has Made Mental Skills a Priority"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n Feb 07, 2020 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

Why Hendrick Motorsports Has Made Mental Skills a Priority<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Human Performance<\/a> <\/div>\n
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The team\u2019s Director of Human Performance Andy Papathanassiou discusses a fast-evolving field.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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A Leaders Performance Institute article brought to you in association with<\/p>\n

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The balance between the cognitive and emotional sides of performance are high on the agenda of Andy Papathanassiou and his imagination was further sparked by the 2018 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Chicago\u2019s Soldier Field.<\/h4>\n
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By John Portch<\/h6>\n

\u201cI could not attend the summit that summer but I saw the video of Denise Shull\u2019s session<\/a> on the online Leaders hub,\u201d explains Hendrick Motorsports\u2019 Director of Human Performance.<\/p>\n

Shull is a Performance Coach who serves as the Principal of the\u00a0ReThink\u00a0Group, a New York-based human capital consultancy that leverages the latest neuroscience and psychological research into creating new levels of human performance.<\/p>\n

That afternoon in the Windy City she spoke of the value in negative emotions in a high performance context and it led to Hendrick and ReThink working together.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hook for me was when I saw Denise on video,\u201d continues Papathanassiou. \u201cThe coaches and I will watch a Leaders video once a week during the season, for professional development, and I heard her describe why the negative emotions are where the value really lies.<\/p>\n

\u201cSimply put, people are good when they are happy, but it\u2019s dealing with, processing and utilizing negative emotions that can enhance performance. It\u2019s not done by looking at the brighter side or getting mentally strong enough to push the bad thoughts away \u2013 it\u2019s about confronting, communicating and living with the bad in order to give your brain time to say \u2018message received, I\u2019m mad today\u2019; recognize you\u2019re mad, say you\u2019re mad; and once your brain realizes you\u2019ve got the message, it clears the pathway and you can get your work done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who have worked closely with Papathanassiou during his 29-year career in Nascar recognize his insatiable desire for improvement and innovation. \u201cI can\u2019t create a winning environment today the same way I did with Jeff Gordon\u2019s team in 1997,\u201d he says of Hendrick\u2019s four-time Nascar Cup Series champion. \u201cEven though we were a devastating force, if you tried that approach today it would be an utter disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having gone into Nascar in the early 1990s as, by his own admission, \u201ca complete outsider\u201d, the former Stanford offensive guard kept his elite sporting career going in bringing his athletic experience to the pit road, where he joined Hendrick as a pit crew coordinator in 1992.<\/p>\n

In the intervening 27 years, Hendrick Motorsports has won 12 Nascar Cup Series, including four for Gordon and a record-tying seven for Jimmie Johnson, who will retire later this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe question that most often gets asked around our place is what do you need to be successful?\u201d says Papathanassiou. \u201cHow can we support you? Even though I was brand new to racing, the question was asked of me: \u2018what do we need to make pit crews successful?\u2019 and I said \u2018we need athletes\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw racing as an athletic event, not a mechanical event, so I approached it from an athletic mentality, which really involves practice and repetition, coaching and overcoming adversity; all of these kinds of athletically-minded skills and I approached pit stops in an athletic way. That was the paradigm shift you can say that occurred in Nascar back in that time in the early 90s.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went about creating an athletic mindset of what I\u2019ve come to call \u2018over the wall\u2019 thinking. We went out and found people that had the cognitive building blocks of successful athletes; they had performed under pressure situations, they had performed in front of crowds, they were used to the practice and repetition, detail-oriented, used to the grind of an athletic season.\u201d<\/p>\n

Papathanassiou is speaking ahead of his role in hosting Members\u2019 Monday at the Hendrick Motorsport facility at the 2020 Leaders Sport Performance Summit and we delved into the role of mental skills within the Nascar setting.<\/p>\n

Where do mental skills fit in at Hendrick Motorsports?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AP:<\/strong> In the modern day you have all of this specialization and differentiation. You don\u2019t train with the same person for weights that you do with sprinting; or that you do for agility or hand-eye coordination; it\u2019s all very sub-specialized and I see mental skills going the same way. When it was initially introduced back in time, to have the sports psychologist that you were consulting with or that would stop by or do exercises with the team, it was all lumped together and now you have so many different specialties of mental skills and cognitive training, neuroplasticity, all of these different things that require their experts and mining the capabilities of all those different areas. Mental skills means so many more different things than it meant before.<\/p>\n

What is the starting point?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AP:<\/strong> It really starts with motivation; and I feel, for today\u2019s athlete, what helps is to create the right environment. The oppressive and more dictatorial environment that existed and provided success years back, those are not the successful environments today. You need a supportive environment and athletes need to be understood, there needs to be a degree of empathy. All the while, that makes it all sound like summer camp, but it\u2019s important to keep winning front and center, this is just the language of winning that I believe, the mental and cognitive language of winning in 2020. You have to create this environment and ask your athletes to utilize the different tools that the team can provide. You can\u2019t tell them to do it, you can\u2019t tell them to come together as one team, you can\u2019t force them because as odd as it might sound, winning just isn\u2019t enough today. You have to create the environment that makes the athlete feel comfortable and safe with trying their best, a safe place to fail, all of these clich\u00e9s, but you have to create and maintain that environment and then the athlete ultimately has to make the decision to participate in that process.<\/p>\n

Where does a Nascar team gain its confidence?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AP:<\/strong> We gain a lot of confidence from repetition and repeatability. We\u2019re very process-driven; you can compare a Nascar pit crew to a rugby team or an American football team. Those analogies apply but equally applicable is an analogy like golf or bowling, where it\u2019s repetitive and the same; the more you can get close to the same the more success you\u2019re going to have against that other pit crew that you\u2019re physically competing against. Individuals have core activities to perform with their teammates but it\u2019s performing within their individual parameters and the closer they can get to that ideal technique, then the repeatability of that technique, the better we\u2019re going to be as a pit crew.<\/p>\n

By Nascar rules, we have five crew members that are able to go \u2018over the wall\u2019, which is the Nascar vernacular, when you perform a pit stop. If four out of five do it just right and have a good pit stop at 13 seconds but the fifth crew member makes a small mistake, they add two seconds to their technique and they finish in 15 seconds \u2013 the stopwatch only records the slowest crew member and you can\u2019t disavow the time or rely on the majority; you can\u2019t even average everyone\u2019s time together. It only shows the mistake. Through consistency and repeatability, we gain confidence that the pit stop will be good.<\/p>\n

Where is the balance between resilience and wellbeing at Hendrick?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AP:<\/strong> The balance comes from keeping it in perspective. This is where some of those softer skills, those softer words come into play. Practice can give you resilience but forming strong ties to your teammates, seeing them in social settings, we do a quarterly department event, and people bring their wives and kids. The majority are early 30s down into their 20s; there\u2019s babies everywhere. Forming those bonds and creating those relationships, even though it\u2019s work-inspired, that can hold a team together; you know what a person\u2019s about, you see them at practice, you see them at the race, now you see them as part of their family and that makes the team as strong as it can be. If you say \u2018work is work\u2019, socialize on your own time, then you\u2019re inadvertently weakening your team.<\/p>\n

What are your hopes and expectations for mental skills within Nascar in the near future?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AP:<\/strong> The biggest area for mental skills in the future, is adaptability; we have to be able to control what you can control and address the feelings; are you afraid, are you concerned, OK let\u2019s talk about that, let\u2019s not just push it aside and just do our practice and go home; let\u2019s talk about how we\u2019re going to have to adapt and the changes that are going to be pushed upon us and how we\u2019re going to adapt based on those changes. Adaptability is our key focus right now.\u00a0 There are many changes ahead for Nascar.<\/p>\n

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What is it going to take to win in 2020?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is the focus of our latest Performance Special Report. Download The High Performance Manual: Winning in 2020<\/em>, which features sports organisations as diverse as Red Bull<\/strong>, the Brisbane Lions<\/strong> and the Royal Military Academy<\/strong> discussing the pertinent topics across Leadership & Culture, Coaching & Development, Human Performance and Data & Innovation.<\/p>\n