CHAPTER 20
These days elite athletes are spending nearly as much time training their mind as training their body. Why? Because it often makes the difference between being a talented athlete and being a great one. But training the mind is not just relevant for the elite athlete. Any social golfer who has stepped up to the first tee overlooking a water hazard between them and the green realises that they have a major test for their attention—is their focus on the ball or on the water? Mostly the water has a magnetic attraction for the mind and the ball follows suit.
Let’s look at mindfulness and its usefulness in sport. We’ll start by considering a few examples. Each of these situations illustrates an important issue related to sport and how mindfulness and unmindfulness affect enjoyment and performance of it.
Jo was 21 years old and a very good golfer—so good, in fact, that she had won a number of amateur tournaments and recently turned professional. So good, in fact, that she wanted to play on the US golf tour but she needed to gain her player’s ticket by performing well enough in a four-round event for aspiring young golfers to be able to enter these lucrative tournaments.
After three rounds and 15 holes Jo was in a good position to qualify for her ticket and she just needed to come home over the last 3 holes in par to make it. Jo sliced the next drive into the trees. She then 3-putted from 20 feet. Finally she found the water hazard on the last hole. Jo missed the cut-off by four shots. Jo got very angry with herself, especially as the same thing happened again, particularly when she found herself in close contention late in a tournament. Jo never got her player’s ticket for the pro tour and gave up her dream of being a professional golfer by the age of 25, feeling that she had never really reached her potential.
Jo experienced what nearly everyone experiences at various times, and not just in relation to sport: performance anxiety. But just what lurks behind performance anxiety? In the spirit of mindfulness we shouldn’t simply hate the fact that it comes up, we should be interested to see what’s going on. Jo fought with herself, which made the situation worse, until she gave up—but where was her focus when she found herself in a tight situation? If she had consciously examined the situation then she might have noticed that it wasn’t on the process (which takes place in the here and now), it was on the outcome (which is a hypothetical future event). The more important the outcome, the greater the likelihood for distraction and nerves.
To prepare for a golf shot, a lot of information is required: the attention needs to be on the breeze, distances, contours and nap of the green. Then, having assessed the context for the shot we need to execute it—our attention needs to be on the feel of the club, the ball, the muscles, the smoothness and flow of the movement. All of this is present-moment stuff. If the attention is on our ideas and aspirations about the outcome—at the moment of assessment or execution—then we not only introduce the potential for anxiety, but also significantly reduce our potential to play the shot well. The more we want the outcome, the greater the potential for this interference. ‘What if I get it? What if I miss?’
Strangely, we often interfere with the attainment of the very thing we want. We can do all the imagery and motivational thinking we like in the lead-up to the event, but in the moment of execution there is only one thing that matters and that’s our focus on the task—here and now—our mindfulness. Paradoxically, although we may have a goal, it’s letting go of the goal that allows us not only to feel relaxed again, but also to optimise our chance of reaching the goal. It’s one of those Zen things.
Peter was a top-level shooter and was leading the biggest tournament of his life. He was three shots in the lead and had a score of 192 hits out of a possible 195 and was about to take the last five shots. The second-placed shooter was on 189 with five shots to go and had just scored five out of five with his last five shots to finish on 194. Considering that he hadn’t missed three out of five for years, Peter felt supremely confident. He stepped up and missed three out his last five shots, thus finishing on 194. Peter lost the tournament on a count-back.
When Peter was approached by an incredulous reporter after the event he was asked what went wrong. Peter shook his head in disbelief. All day he had been so focused, so cool and calm. He had been in ‘the zone’. In the lead-up to the last five shots, and being so far in front, Peter’s attention turned to the most pleasant of dreams: standing on the podium, receiving the medal, being a hero, coming home to a hero’s welcome, being ‘the champion’ for the rest of his life. The lesson here? Pleasant daydreams are just as much of a distraction as unpleasant ones. If he had been just one shot in front with five to go we can expect that he would not have let his mind wander anywhere other than on what it had to do.
Greg was 44 years old and had taken up running in the mornings again because he had become unfit, was putting on weight and felt like he was ageing faster than his years. The intention was just to get back to running a few kilometres a few times a week but, enjoying the challenge, over time he had been slowly increasing his distances and now his longest runs were up to 10 kilometres. When younger, Greg had intended to run a marathon but never did. It was an unfulfilled ambition, but while listening to a radio interview with someone about to run their first marathon in a couple of weeks Greg noticed the thought pop into his mind: ‘I wonder if it’s not too late to run a marathon?’ There wasn’t time to train for it this year, but what about next year?
Steadily and methodically building the distances, by the age of 46 Greg found himself fit enough to run the city’s annual marathon. Everyone had told him how tough it was, and how those last 5 kilometres really hurt, so it wasn’t surprising that when Greg made the final turn for home, still 5 kilometres out from the finish, the thought entered his mind: ‘It’s really going to get tough now!’ It was as if someone put a 20kilogram pack on his back—all of a sudden it was a whole lot tougher than it was a minute ago. ‘Wait a minute! Just check in with the body. I’m tired but going okay. Just take one step at a time and we’ll get there when we get there!’
This is the literal ‘one step at a time’ situation. Greg was just about to start telling himself a story—one that he probably didn’t realise he had rehearsed—about how tough it was going to be. It was like there was a play button pushed at the 5-kilometre mark and off it went. He was about to filter his experience of what was happening in the present moment through this story. We do it all the time—tell ourselves how tough something is, how much something is going to hurt, how we can’t do something. All this does is make a task more difficult than it needs to be, or increase our perception of the pain, or make us give up even before we’ve begun.
In Greg’s case there was tiredness, sure, but it wasn’t really painful. If he thought about how long another 5 kilometres was then it seemed like forever, but how much of a burden was just one step? It wasn’t such a big deal, nor was the next one, nor the next ... This is mindfulness—just being in the moment and not focusing on the outcome; just attending to the journey and not being preoccupied about the destination. Checking in with the body by paying attention to what the senses are telling us—not necessarily what our noisy mind is telling us—is an act of mindfulness. If Greg did pay attention to his body and it was about to have a major meltdown or a heart attack, then the reasonable and mindful thing to do in that moment would be to say, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting, my body seems to be telling me it may be time to stop running and get some assistance from one of those helpful-looking people standing on the side of the road who enjoy telling marathon runners, “Not far to go, you’re nearly there!”’
When we’re performing at our peak, whether it’s in sport or in any other activity, we tend to describe mindful states of a very high order. Athletes have a term for this: ‘The Zone’. Others call it ‘The Flow State’. This is a state that’s widely recognised and described, and looks to be the same in whatever sport or activity in which it arises.[1] Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is the most widely cited author writing about flow states.[2] (If you can’t pronounce his name, call him ‘the flow guy’.) The kinds of things that athletes describe when in the zone or flow is summed up by Billie Jean King, one of the greatest female tennis players of all time:
Many athletes later come to describe such experiences as spiritual, such is their transcendent nature.
So let’s discuss some of the characteristics of the zone or flow state. We’ll try not to get too Zen, but you just can’t avoid a bit of Zenness when discussing such things. If you can recollect peak experiences in your own life, these tips will make a lot more sense.
The zone or flow state sounds pretty good, and we think most of us would live there if we could. For many of us, our desire to be in the zone is about performing well. For others it’s about fulfilment and enjoyment—a much better motivation. For others, like rock climbers, it’s about life and death—that’s one way to bring ourselves into the joys of being present!
Is being in the zone a matter of luck? Not really; it requires practice. Can we snap our fingers and transport ourselves into it whenever we like? Not really, because thinking about being in the zone isn’t the same as being in it; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. So what do we do? Well, according to Dr Jim Taylor from the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology, this is how he sees the role of mindfulness in sport.
The way to cultivate the zone is to learn to pay attention, to be present. It means ‘keeping the eye on the ball’, which doesn’t make much sense if you’re not playing a ball sport, but you know what we mean. If swimming—feel the water, the body’s movements, the flow of the stroke. It’s about connecting with the senses and letting the mind’s innate intelligence work unimpeded. A famous Australian Rules footballer equalled a record for goals kicked in a season in 1971 that had stood for 39 years. When asked for the key to his success, he didn’t mention a special secret diet or training drill or innate physical talent, he said that he gave his complete attention to the football—all the time, even when it was out of play.
The zone is a natural state, not an artificial one. We don’t force ourselves into it, we just practise not thinking our way out of it. When we notice our attention is off task, we bring it back on task again. When we’re practising worrying about the outcome before or during the game, we focus again back on process. The future is unknown and will not be known until it’s the present—and then it will come to pass. When we’re practising beating ourselves up about a past error, we can instead be present and reflect on what the experience can teach us—and then leave it alone.
One other little trick is to not try to hold on to being in the zone. Holding on is the exact opposite to what mindfulness is about. We can only rest in the state. Thinking about being in the zone when we notice we’ve been in it is also a good way to catapult our way out of it—like Adam and Eve getting evicted from the Garden of Eden. ‘Look at me, I’m in the zone!’ is a sign that the ego is about to pop up its head and it’s as much a distraction as any other thought. In the zone the mind is quiet but very perceptive and not self-conscious, so we need to gently get our attention back on track.
Training is as much about the mind as it is about the body. It will not only wire the nerves and muscles to do tasks they couldn’t previously do, but we can train attention—with training drills—especially when we ‘don’t have time to think’. If pain follows hot on the heels of being unfocused, we can learn focus very quickly. We need to practise fluency, rhythm and flow; this will help us focus our attention and shorten the attentional blinks.
Racing-car drivers have trained their reflexes by shooting tennis balls from a machine straight at their face. Thinking about lunch, or impending pain for that matter, is a great way to get one on the snoz.
In 2007 a BBC news story reported on a recently published study. ‘Trusting your instincts may help you to make better decisions than thinking hard, a study suggests,’ said the journalist.[5] When participants were tested, the researchers found that 95 per cent of instinctive decisions were accurate when participants were given less than half a second to perform a computer-based pattern-recognition task. We might expect giving them extra time would reduce that error rate of 5 per cent. Well, the participants were only 70 per cent accurate if given more than twice as long.[6] That meant that the error rate went up from 5 per cent to 30 per cent with more time—that is, it was six times higher.
Why? Well, if we’re paying attention we see and we recognise—it all happens pretty quickly. If we respond to what we recognise in the moment, then no further correspondence need be entered into. But having extra time to delay the response and double-guess doesn’t lead to a better decision; it leads to self-doubt and a loss of flow. Sportspeople will say that when they are in the flow they just see, recognise and respond without thinking about it; the window of opportunity opens for a split second and they go straight through it. When we’re not in the flow, then the window of opportunity opens and then we ask ourselves, ‘Is that the window of opportunity? I’m not sure. If it is, should I go through it? How could I be sure? Maybe there are better windows somewhere else?’ By this time the window of opportunity has not only closed but the crowd has already left the park.
Of course, some complex issues may not be as appropriate for snap decisions, and in these cases the mindful thing to do is to wait or gather more information. Being able to tell the difference between when we should act and when we should wait is one of the hallmarks of wisdom and serenity.
Sport is, of course, as much about the team as it is about the individual. Teams can be more or less mindful, more or less in the zone, more or less focused and working as one, more or less in the present rather than the past or future. Furthermore, many of the attributes of Emotional Intelligence we will discuss in the next chapter are attributes of good teams and leaders.
A team that learns and understands the principles of mindfulness is likely to do far better than one that doesn’t. To illustrate, one of the authors much enjoyed hearing John Bertrand speak at a conference not so long ago. Bertrand was the skipper of Australia II, the first foreign boat to win the America’s Cup from the Americans after 126 years of attempts—in 1983. Apart from having a great boat and support team, he said there were two things that helped them to perform under that kind of pressure. One was a sense of humour. The other was to train in his team a capacity to stay in the present moment. He knew that when the pressure was on, if the crew grew anxious about mistakes or misfortune, or concerned about the outcome, then they would lose focus on their tasks. Executing their tasks reliably, as one, and with precision and efficiency, was all they needed to do. He didn’t call this mindfulness, but a rose by any other name...
For children, learning mindfulness as a part of how they learn to play sport will be a great advantage and should be the goal of any coach. Not only will mindfulness help them to enjoy their game more and play it better, it will also help them to display better sportsmanship. Unfortunately many adults, especially ones who are projecting their anxieties on to their children, train their children to be unmindful. If children learn to focus better because their enjoyment of the activity is the aim, then better performance will also follow in its wake. That’s a win–win situation.
One of the authors still remembers playing in a Little League football grand final a hundred or so years ago, and being screamed at by footy fans including the parents of his team-mates for dropping the ball at a critical moment. This was an enduring lesson in the potential destructiveness of unmindfulness—on the part of parents and himself. Eventually there was an illuminating realisation that he dropped the ball because he was so lost in thinking about the outcome of the thrillingly/chillingly close game that he had forgotten his coach’s earnest and simple instructions: ‘Keep your eye on the ball!’ What better lesson in mindfulness? Unfortunately, when we create anxiety about the outcome in the mind of the child we make them far less able to focus.
Very important also is fostering a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset in relation to sport as well as to academic work. Read more about this in Chapter 18.
Sorry, but we just can’t help ourselves: let’s finish with another quote from that sage author, Rudyard Kipling, from his poem If, which he wrote for his son approaching his sixteenth birthday. The first two lines of the quote are placed prominently in the Wimbledon changing rooms for the players to read just before they enter the playing arena. These precepts would be valuable for any child’s development in sport, and in life for that matter:
Not so helpful
• Be so anxious about the outcome that we can’t focus on the game.
• Put winning before anything else including our values.
Helpful
• Keep our ‘eye on the ball’.
• Play hard but enjoy the game rather than get anxious about the outcome.
• Value sportsmanship.