The will to win is important, but the will to prepare to win is vital.
—JOE PATERNO
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
—WAYNE GRETZKY
Sylvie Bernier had a history of caving in during pressure situations. But now she stood on the top step of the platform, beaming. As the French-Canadian springboard diver turned her eyes to her country’s flag and sang the national anthem, the only thing that kept her from rising off the medal stand and floating away like a party balloon was the anchoring weight of the gold medal around her neck.
The experience was everything Sylvie had hoped it would be. From the moment she arrived at the pool, her day went exactly as she had imagined and rehearsed over and over in her mind.
“I knew I was going to dive the sixth of August, at four o’clock in the afternoon in the finals,” Bernier recalled in the video Mind Over Muscle. “I knew where the scoreboard was going to be—on my left. I knew where the coaches were going to be sitting. Everything was in my head. I knew where the crowd was going to be. I could see my dives exactly how I wanted them to be. When I went to the podium I had seen it before.
“It was like a déjà vu.”
The twenty-year-old champion from Quebec won because she came to the biggest event of her life fortified with what every athlete needs.
Confidence.
What do you think is the most important part of the mental game? It’s a question I’ve asked hundreds of managers, coaches, and professional athletes during plane flights and bus rides to stadiums over the past twenty years. The answer is always the same. It’s confidence. When you’re confident you can relax, trust your stuff, and perform at your best. Confidence is the bottom line.
Where does confidence come from? Great athletes say that confidence is knowing they are prepared physically and mentally. Experience tells them what to do and confidence allows them to do it. Confidence is the emotional knowing that you are prepared, mind, body, and spirit, for anything.
Alan Brunacini is the Vince Lombardi of fire chiefs. The head of the Phoenix Fire Department made an interesting comment about confidence. He told me that confidence is knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do. Louis Pasteur never fought a four-alarm blaze under a desert sun or coached a team in the Super Bowl, but the words of the nineteenth-century scientist apply to firefighters, football players, Olympic divers, and every other performer. “Chance,” Pasteur said, “favors the prepared mind.” Or as golfer Tom Kite said, “Give luck a chance to happen.”
Throughout this book we stress that mental preparation is as important as physical preparation, if not more so. Television broadcaster Ahmad Rashad, a former All-Pro NFL receiver, said, “Some players with a lot of athletic ability just go out and play. Then after four or five years you don’t hear about them anymore. The smart guys figure it out, and they play ten, twelve years. They do it mentally more than they do it physically.”
Confidence is the result of preparation, and preparation begins with forming a mental game plan. The great athletes visualize not only best-case scenarios but also worst-case scenarios. They don’t imagine failing, but they do mentally plan how they will respond in unpleasant and difficult situations. In sports, the ball takes funny, or not so funny, bounces. Oftentimes games or contests don’t go as we had hoped. The prepared athlete has not only a Plan A but also a Plan B and a Plan C.
Reggie Jackson called winning the science of preparation. “And preparation can be defined in three words,” Jackson said. “Leave nothing undone. No detail is too small.”
When our astronauts trained for the first flight to the moon, they rehearsed for everything going wrong as well as for everything going right. If something out of the ordinary happened, they knew how to respond. They over-prepared so they wouldn’t under-perform.
During his playing days, former NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton prepared for the upcoming game by seeing himself, in his mind’s eye, performing in difficult situations. “I’m trying to visualize every game situation, every defense they’re going to throw at me,” Tarkenton said. “I tell myself, ‘What will I do on their five-yard line and it’s third-and-goal to go, and our short passing game hasn’t been going too well and their line looks like a wall and we’re six points behind?’”
The marquee athlete uses the mind to program the body. Listen to Nolan Ryan, the Hall of Fame pitcher, describe his routine: “The night before a game I lie down, close my eyes, relax my body, and prepare myself for the game. I go through the entire lineup of the other team, one batter at a time. I visualize exactly how I am going to pitch to each hitter and I see and feel myself throwing exactly the pitches that I want to throw. Before I ever begin to warm up at the ballpark, I’ve faced all of the opposition’s hitters four times and I’ve gotten my body ready for exactly what it is I want to do.”
When you’re relaxed, you’re in a more receptive state for positive affirmations and visualizations. Steve Carlton, the former strikeout artist with the Phillies, had his own pregame routine. Like Ryan, Carlton would stretch out on a training table and close his eyes. “A lot of people think he’s sleeping,” said Tim McCarver, who was Carlton’s catcher. “But what he’s thinking about are lanes in the strike zone. He thinks about the outer lane and the inner lane. He doesn’t even think about anything over the middle. And by not thinking about it he gets himself working that way.”
ESPN announcer Harold Reynolds used imagery when he played second base for the Mariners. “As I’m running my sprints, I’ll listen to the lineup and visualize where I want to play this guy. The night before, I’ll make mental and physical notes about how they pitched and played me. I’ll write down the guy’s move, whether he might want to go right after me or nibble with me. I’ve got to be ready for that.”
Olympic champion Bart Conner mentally rehearsed his performance. In the book What Makes Winners Win, Conner said he saw himself as a gymnast doing his routine, feeling the rhythm and the timing. “Then I try to visualize as if I were the person who was standing back and watching me perform,” Conner said, “and that’s a little different picture. I was always at my best when I saw that picture. It’s like once you had visualized it, you see the scene, you see the gym, you see the judges, you see the arena, you see where the equipment is, you see where the chalk tray is, you see everything. So when you actually go to perform, it’s like ‘Oh, I’ve been here before.’ Then you have such confidence because it’s like you’ve already been through this.”
Just as you wouldn’t go into a baseball game without taking batting practice, don’t go into your competition without taking mental practice. Visualize yourself performing. See the action. Feel yourself moving. Hear the sounds. Smell the smells. Make your images as vivid and clear as you can.
Confidence comes from the emotional knowing that you are prepared mentally as well as physically. Over-prepare so you don’t under-perform.