If you want to get better at something, you have to practise. This simple fact isn’t up for debate. We now know that repetition on its own isn’t enough to become an expert, but this doesn’t make repetition any less important. It is still an essential ingredient for success – and there is a science to doing it well.
In the section on mental attitude, we explored how practice often starts as a highly engaging activity. Like a child at play, it’s fun. We are not necessarily doing it with the end in mind; rather, we are simply enjoying the process of learning for enjoyment’s sake. Continue this indefinitely and, at some point, what started as something that was fun turns into more of a discipline.
I remember learning to play the piano at school when I was ten. Along with all the school’s other musicians I was sent down to the ‘practice rooms’ during break time every day. This was an underground labyrinth of tiny rooms with no windows and no air. We were effectively incarcerated in these rooms for 45 minutes at a time to practise. The corridors were patrolled by a member of staff who would make sure we didn’t escape. I always felt sorry for them for having to listen to the cacophony of horrific noises coming from the dozens of rooms that lined the corridor – I’m sure it would have been considered torture in many cultures.
Looking back on it now, I can see that we were never taught how to practise. We were told what to practise, but never how to practise. I now realise how limiting this was. Eventually, like most of the other kids, I gave up my musical instrument, something which most teachers and parents would consider normal at some point. But if only I knew then what I know now I think I would have applied myself very differently. And had more fun in the process.
I enjoy asking people of all skills and abilities: ‘Why do you practise?’ Very often people talk about ‘clocking up the hours’ and ‘building muscle memory’, ideas which are easily misinterpreted.
To help guide your thinking around these interpretive trip hazards, it’s important to remember the role the brain plays in all of this. Muscle memory, for example, does not exist in the muscle. The memory for skilled movement exists in the brain. It is the brain that executes your actions – your muscles are simply the instruments it uses. This is important to remember because the brain is open to other sorts of influences that determine how clear the signal is that it’s sending to the muscles. Your mood and your quality of focus are just two examples of influencers that affect your ability to access the right pathways. This is called mood–state congruence and makes it essential to learn a skill in the mental state in which you intend to apply that skill.
Before any activity that you are trying to progress or get better at, always take time to breathe, relax your muscles and clear your mind. You might listen to music to help establish the right mood. This simple pre-activity exercise will train your state of mind to be congruent with the activity you are about to practise.
This simple idea that the patterns of your physical skill and behaviour are led by the patterns of your brain opens us up to an astonishing technique that I regard as one of the most powerful mental tools available to us: visualisation.
So important is visualisation that it crops up a number of times in this book for different reasons. Visualisation is based on the premise that the mind works by using images and associations to remember the past and imagine the future. By bringing these images to mind, and the feelings associated with them, we can actually practise and refine them into our desired outcome. Whether it’s performing on stage, having a tricky conversation or sliding down a mountain on ice, by imagining yourself doing it brilliantly you recruit exactly the same neural pathways in the brain that equate to actually doing that activity. With repetition, these pathways get stronger just as they would do through physical practice. The difference between physical practice and mental practice, however, is that you can do it perfectly in your mind. Therefore, you can actually enhance your ability to do something without actually having to do it.
This has huge implications in a sport such as skeleton that offers only a couple of minutes of physical training every day, but it’s also essential in so many other scenarios. Have you ever wondered how a pole vaulter trains to propel themselves high into the air on the end of a bendy stick, or how a gymnast in the Cirque de Soleil plucks up the courage and confidence to perform a back flip on a high wire? Even if they have a safety net while they practise, there is still a first time for doing it without the net, and if they don’t have clarity in their head (reliant on well-defined neural pathways), they will not want to attempt it.
The idea that visualised practice may actually be more effective for us than actual physical practice was tested in an NBA basketball team where the players were split into three random groups. Each group was challenged to improve their ability to score a free throw from the penalty spot over a two-week period. Group 1 were allowed to physically practise as they normally would. Group 2 could only visualise the skill over the same period, with no physical practice allowed. Group 3 were not allowed any practice. Group 2 (the visualisation group) showed the largest positive gains, followed by Group 1 (the physical group) and finally Group 3 (the no practice group). This suggests that – at least for skilled performers – there may actually be more merit to training in your head than doing it physically. There is clearly a balance to be had here, but either way it highlights a skill that I don’t believe we are anywhere near utilising as well as we could.
This is just one example of some of the compelling research from the past 20 years, and now with real-time brain imagery you can back up the effects of visualisation with the observable impact it has on strengthening neural connectivity in the brain. This should make perfect sense intuitively – the better you are able to imagine doing a specific skill internally, the better your control and accuracy of that skill will be externally. Despite this, I believe that visualisation remains one of the most intuitive yet under-practised tools we have freely available to us. I’m sure that, if people understood its true power, they would do it as much as they go to the gym or brush their teeth.
Lt Luke O’Sullivan (call sign Big Muma) is an F18 fighter pilot serving with Squadron Fighter Attack 113 based in Lemoore, California. Through hard work and skilled mental aptitude, Luke has done remarkably well to get to where he is, training with the very best Top Gun instructors from the US Navy Fighter Weapons School. Needless to say, for a young fighter pilot like Luke there is a lot to learn very quickly, so the protocols of accelerated learning are as important to him as they are to our skeleton athletes.
In a jet plane capable of speeds up to Mach 1.6 (close to 2000 km/h) and g-forces spiking at 6G (similar to those experienced by skeleton athletes), it is important to first get complex skills and manoeuvres right in his head before doing them for real. Flight simulators help with this, allowing Luke to increase his hours of practice and make ‘safe’ mistakes, but it’s visualisation that enables him to confidently translate this into the cockpit of his $100-million fighter jet. In the cockpit, pilots must apply the technical and tactical skills they have learned in the classroom. For air-to-air combat these skills are particularly demanding. Psychologically, fighter pilots must have almost superhuman capabilities of spatial and situational awareness, managing and processing complex information from various sources and making critical decisions. But, before they can do any of this, they must learn how to stay conscious. The effects of prolonged g-forces are so great that every manoeuvre becomes a fight to stop the blood draining from their brain. This induces ‘grey-outs’, which Luke describes as being like someone slowly drawing the curtains on your field of vision.
You can see why Luke might want to practise his flight protocols and manoeuvres in his head before taking to the skies. He and his fellow pilots normally do this sitting on a chair at the end of the pre-flight briefing – a process they simply call ‘chair flying’. By this time all distractions have been removed, mobile phones especially. Luke uses the bubble technique (described earlier) to push any unhelpful thoughts or concerns outside of his bubble, leaving him space and permission to focus on key elements of the flight. ‘I visualise what I am expecting to see and experience at each stage of the flight, as if I was there in the cockpit, going through the “conduct” of the mission.’ Luke describes how he is seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears and feeling what he feels. He never has long before he is required to walk to the plane, but by repeating the process every day he has become exceptionally well practised.
Luke also uses visualisation not just to prime his skills but to actually get better at them. The idea here is that when you visualise something, you can isolate one skill at a time and do it perfectly – without all the distraction of everything else that may make the core skill more difficult to refine in reality. Luke can practise one manoeuvre or one component of the flight at a time in his head without the sensory overload that comes from the talking in his ear, the hundreds of dials and lights in the cockpit, or the need to withstand the g-forces. Together these could all be overwhelming; in isolation they can be carefully honed. This allows him to layer one skill at a time without compromising the quality of each layer. It is visualisation that makes the process possible where in the real situation it might not be.
Taking the same principle, a study at Stanford University found that, when visualisation was introduced to gymnasts’ training routines, it allowed them to successfully master complex, multi-layered routines which up to that point they hadn’t been successful at.
The likes of gymnasts, fighter pilots, free solo climbers and surgeons all have one thing in common: none of them will accept a trial-and-error approach to getting better – they can’t. With all the simulations and safety nets in the world, they simply don’t want to practise getting it wrong more than they have to. They may be brave and highly skilled people, but every mistake has the potential to undermine their confidence. Visualisation becomes their friend in learning.
Identify something simple you would like to improve or do well at. It could be a new skill you are learning or an existing skill you want to perfect. Visualisation to enhance a skill is best done in intense 10-minute bursts, including time to get into the right state of mind to do it properly.
Start by taking 10 deep and relaxing breaths. You should only ever visualise in a state of mind that best suits the skill you are practising. If you are tense in the body or busy in the mind, you will not be teaching your brain the right cues.
Visualisation is as much about what you feel as what you see. Practise using all your senses. Notice what you see, feel, hear and smell around you, immersing yourself in the environment in which you will be. You should NOT be watching yourself from the outside as if you were on TV, instead you are looking out through your own eyes and feeling what you feel. Identify specific cues that help you to stay focused on the process. For example, if you are delivering a speech, it may be a combination of posture, breathing and delivering key messages in a confident manner. Stay focused on them.
Whatever you visualise, keep it accurate and positive – it’s better to imagine a few simple skills done perfectly with a break in between than a whole performance done averagely. Keep it steady. We tend to rush in our mind, especially if the activity we are visualising makes us feel slightly nervous. This can be the source of many errors, so, if this is the case, take a deep breath and slow everything down as you breathe out. If you need to, you can even ‘press pause’ on what’s going on around you while you regain composure – that’s the beauty of visualisation.
If you struggle to visualise at first, don’t worry. Try these tips:
Visualisation isn’t just about enhancing physical skills; it can also prepare you emotionally and intellectually for challenging events, raising the bar on your ability to manage difficult and complex situations, as well as helping you to maintain composure and confidence under pressure. These specific variations we will cover further on, but for now let’s look at how you can develop some complementary mental skills.