4.
The Tip of the Iceberg
You’re on the squash court. Sweat is pouring down your face, you’re breathing heavily and the lights in the sports hall feel brighter than usual, as though they’re piercing your eyes and simmering in your brain, where a dull headache is starting to form. You’re down in the match and your opponent, a colleague from work you usually get on perfectly well with, is assuming the characteristics of a sworn enemy as she prepares to serve. Time seems to be slowing down … until the ball is struck and it seems to jolt forward as you mishit yet another shot and lose the point once again.
You’ve got some self-talk on the go: Concentrate on the ball and win the next rally. But the harder you try, the worse it gets: you scuttle round the court hopelessly, chasing shadows, desperate just to keep the rally going and hoping you can force an error. You lose point after point, trying ever harder in the process.
Now, with the game starting to feel beyond you and your body feeling unusually racked by the exertion, your mind is being hijacked. You’re drowning in a deluge of destructive, interfering thoughts so that you can no longer do anything intuitively. You know you must hit the ball more cleanly, get in a better position to make the shot, get your leaden footwork right, but not only are you having to contend with these myriad technical aspects, your frustration, anger, doubt and humiliation are also threatening to bubble over. You can’t stop thinking about the last rally, about what will happen if you lose this game – you’re even starting to wonder if you can ever face working with your opponent again, you’re so furious with her.
The pressure is really on. As you ready yourself to receive serve again, lost in your red mist, you wonder to yourself: How can I dismiss this swarm of negative thoughts and emotions so that I can play as well as I know I am capable?
Or, perhaps more likely: How the hell do I win the next damn point?
That One Simple Thought
In October 2014, in a large sports hall at St George’s Park, the Football Association’s training headquarters in Stoke, I, along with the England and Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) principal fast-bowling coach Kevin Shine, was making a presentation to a group of elite cricket coaches. The idea was to illustrate a more ‘implicit’ coaching style.
I illustrated this by helping Chris Taylor – an ECB fielding coach and keen amateur golfer – learn the low-punch shot in golf, something he had been trying to master for some time, even having lessons from PGA coaches. We had a cricket wicket laid across the floor with hanging nets at one end. About ten yards from the net we had set up a golf mat, like any you’d see at a golf driving range, and behind the mat was a TrackMan radar system, a must-have training tool for any professional golfer.
The vast array of technical data from the radar – such as club-head speed, dynamic loft and the like – was projected on to a large screen behind Chris, where all the delegates could see it; in front of Chris was an iPad, which showed only two pieces of data from the TrackMan: the projected height and the distance of the shot. Chris was only allowed to look at the information in front of him and we had agreed that, if he took a peek at the data behind him, he would have to pay for the session!
Chris started hitting some shots with a nine iron into the net and I asked him to note the ball height each time. The height started off at around ninety feet, before I started giving Chris some advice: that he should press his hands slightly further forward when he made contact with the ball to produce a lower flight. However, both the audience and Chris could see that in his subsequent shots he was still hitting too high.
I have seen this in many talented people I’ve coached: he thought he had got his hands forward as asked, but in the split second of the swing he went back to his original position. Verbal instruction often has this non-result.
I then set up a pair of cricket stumps as a ‘gate’ about five yards in front of the ball and asked him to start hitting his shots through it. The first went high, but the next one went through the gate and so did the following shots. Chris had adapted his swing because of the target. I then moved the gate another yard back and Chris reacted by leaning further forward into the shot, which decreased the dynamic loft and lowered the ball flight. After moving it forward again, Chris was hitting shots that were only getting up to around fifty feet high, with some even lower.
By introducing an external intervention, rather than just a verbal instruction, Chris was able to reframe his thinking into a single, explicit thought: get the ball through the gate. Rather than thinking through minor technical changes to the swing and grip, he was able to let his subconscious process take over as he delivered on that one specific task. Having the target right in front of him allowed him to see this clearly and left him with his mental key to execute his low-punch shot. Golf can be a simple game when we allow it to be.
You can experience something very similar without learning golf. If a friend asks you to throw a ball to them when they’re standing a few yards away, the chances are you’d just throw it without even thinking about it. If they then moved back to a distance of, say, ten yards, you’d likely do the same – with the adjustment of the applied power, backswing and change in release point happening subconsciously. If you were then asked to throw the ball up higher you would adapt again; you wouldn’t stop to consciously think about changing the swing and release point – this is all implicit. The key to the changes, the explicit thought, is simply the distance to the target and the height, much as the wicket was the stimulus for Chris to adapt his golf shot.
The reason we can do this, and that Chris was able to adjust his swing subconsciously, is because we’ve got so much practice in the bank. Growing up, we’ve played simple games of ‘catch’ and then moved on to the likes of rounders, and there are countless occasions when we’ll have been asked to ‘throw’ something towards someone – be it an apple from the fruit bowl or an eraser in the classroom – so that all our practice has produced a skill that is well within our comfort zone, and whose mechanics have become procedural, subconscious thoughts. These are our well-practised motor skills that we can rely on without having to think about them.
US PGA golfer Ben Crenshaw spoke with real affection about his coach Harvey Penick, in the latter’s Little Red Video, saying how Harvey wanted players to take ‘dead aim’, which meant picking out the smallest possible target, whether it was a spot on the green for a chip shot or a precise point on the fairway for a drive off the tee. Ben posed the question: ‘Why is it that, when we hit a great shot in golf, we often try to work out the thoughts that were going through our head at the time so we can repeat it?’
The reality is that, for most of us, there is no explicit thought involved in such actions. We simply pick out the target and let the swing or throw or kick happen. And why is it that when our head is full of interference and thoughts about technique we don’t play well? Because we forget to take dead aim. In fact, it is the single, engaging process of taking dead aim – really seeing that very small target in extreme detail – that helps to displace the potential interference and allows your subconscious to deal with the finer details of technique. The weight of your thoughts leans towards the implicit side, with just one explicit idea.
This is called implicit–explicit balance, and a good way to understand it is to think of an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg – the part visible above the water – represents conscious, explicit thought. The vast proportion of an iceberg is actually underwater: the subconscious, implicit mind. It is here that all the time spent learning how to swing, throw or whatever is lodged – all the work on technique and practice. This is called repair, and will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. For now, let’s just say repair is working specifically on each part of the technique to create a strong and stable foundation that will withstand whatever pressure it is subjected to. Utilizing a single explicit thought – get the ball through the gate – then lets us tap into that solid, implicit iceberg – the swing mechanics, the sequencing – that lies in the subconscious.
The Trolley Dash
You drive to the small local supermarket and pull up outside on double yellow lines. You can see a traffic warden a couple of hundred yards down the road. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to run in and buy a pint of milk, a bunch of grapes and a packet of cornflakes. Your time starts … now!
You would no doubt be able to complete this task pretty easily, assuming there wasn’t a huge queue to navigate, and drive off before the warden was on to you. Congratulations, you have performed effectively under pressure.
What if we change the scenario? You’re on the yellow lines with the traffic warden 200 yards away, but this time you have to pick up a bag of brown sugar, four chicken breasts, a box of washing powder, a litre of orange juice, unsalted butter, a packet of raisin bagels, a bag of spinach, a dozen eggs, a packet of cherry tomatoes and two tins of tuna in oil, as well as the items earlier. Still feeling confident?
It’s likely that you’d either forget something or get a ticket or both. The less you have to remember, the easier it is to perform under pressure.
If you’re unlucky enough ever to have assembled a piece of flat-pack furniture, you’ll be familiar with the booklet detailing the components and the step-by-step instructions. What almost no one ever does is read the instructions from start to finish, attempt to absorb all that information in one go and then go off and try to put the thing together. Instead we use the instructions as cues and concentrate on each step, looking only at the instruction relevant to the task at hand. As each step is completed we move on to the next, using the information in bite-sized, manageable chunks. Of course, there’s probably a screw or crucial piece missing, in which case, well, you have my blessing to handle that particular pressure situation as badly as you like.
So, back to your trolley dash: if you were instead given three items to find to start with and then regular updates on your shopping list announced over the supermarket tannoy as you entered the relevant aisle – ‘Your next three items are …’ – you’d be able to absorb and act upon these items in a much more efficient way. There wouldn’t be any hesitation or paralysis as you frantically tried to remember if it was tuna in oil or in brine, and it’s the same in any pressure situation: keep the amount of details to remember to the absolute essential minimum, because it won’t get any easier to remember them when things get stressful. That’s why when preparing for a test it’s essential to concentrate on what you will be tested on, rather than attempting to memorize everything involved in the subject.
If you were a small business owner applying for a bank loan, you might not be expected to remember every single transaction in the history of your business without referring to a paper document, but you would be expected to know the important ones: recent turnover, profit and the like. We all know about the effect pressure can have on tasks we can usually perform easily, like some unfortunate budding entrepreneur struggling to remember their last year’s turnover or profit in the face of derision from the Dragons on Dragons’ Den. It may be that they genuinely haven’t paid much attention to the figures, but it’s more likely that they’ve over-prepared, and that these important figures have become lost among a plethora of data they have tried to memorize but will almost certainly not be asked for. Along with the multitude of other things they have to remember as part of their presentation, they’ve simply given their minds too much to do. Outside the ‘den’, they can no doubt readily recall these essential figures with ease, but when the pressure is on as they’re delivering their pitch, it’s a different story.
Too Much Information
We live in the information age. All manner of facts, figures and statistics are at our fingertips should we wish to access them. Want to know whether to take an umbrella with you to work today? That weather app on your phone will tell you the percentage chance of rain, not to mention the predicted temperature, wind speed and humidity. Want to know the best way to get back to your hotel in a hurry? Your map app will give you a variety of routes along with a range of transport options: walk, train, bicycle, taxi or bus.
Sport, in particular, is now home to an ever-increasing wealth of statistical information, traditionally rich food for the plentiful ‘statto’ types. Many games are overwhelmed with it. The language of football discussion has changed markedly in recent years, with pub talk now likely to include pass-completion rates, possession and the distance covered by individual players. It is as if the central tenet of the game – to score more goals than the opposition – has somehow changed. The likes of Arsène Wenger of Arsenal and Pep Guardiola, whose obsession with possession first at Barcelona and then Bayern Munich has played its role in making such stats en vogue, epitomize the image of football managers today, utilizing the wealth of data at their disposal to give their teams an edge.
So, with all this information at hand, wouldn’t it be best to tool up with as much as possible? Isn’t it a case that the more information you have, the better you’ll perform? The answer depends on the individual.
Not that long ago I was working with three touring golf pros, all very different people and a range of ages. There was a marked variation in their ability to take on information and react to it productively. Player A needed very little information to play well – what some people are fond of calling a ‘natural’, rather than a product of his environment – but his ability to absorb usable information was limited and too much information had a dramatic negative impact on his ability to perform under pressure. Player B was able to take on more information, but he too had to be careful not to suffer from ‘paralysis of analysis’, particularly in regard to his swing. Player C had a deeper knowledge of his technique and was able to use more information, but this didn’t necessarily mean player C performed any better than the other two.
There is no unequivocally ‘best’ way to use statistics. Some people need more detail to perform, some need to keep it simple and others prefer something in between. With extremely talented elite players, usually the less explicit the learning (the fewer facts and interventions), the more effective the learning tends to be. In other words, I’m championing having less but more relevant information.
Even player C types, who are able to absorb and use a lot of information, will still have a limit on the amount they can use efficiently. This particular player was given the opportunity to have a sophisticated video analysis done in the lead-up to a big tournament. Given his desire for knowledge and self-improvement, he jumped at the chance, but when the analysis was done, despite the operator identifying one or two areas that could potentially help his swing, the player – who had a very clear idea of what his swing should ideally be – spotted another few areas that he could also change. So, in the week of a big Tour event, there was so much going on mentally that on the first two rounds he played well below his capability and missed the cut. It was a classic case of paralysis by over-analysis.
If we go back to the example of Chris learning the low-punch shot earlier, he was given only two pieces of information, whereas the rest of the room had the whole arsenal to refer to. When it came to improving his shot, it was the case that he needed just one piece of feedback – the height – to know he’d succeeded.
Golf is a perfect example of a sport where, thanks to technology, a wealth of information can be gleaned from an act as apparently simple as a club striking the ball. There are a number of incredibly sophisticated analysis systems available which can produce a huge amount of data, but this information is of no use unless it is managed correctly. I use the already-mentioned TrackMan radar, which produces a vast array of technical data, all of which has its time and place – but that time and place most certainly is not in a player’s conscious thoughts when they are striking the ball.
The key is to provide the information relevant to the task in hand. The TrackMan can be adjusted so that it supplies only certain pieces of information, specific to the particular practice being undertaken, so that the player can concentrate on committing to that part of the process without being distracted. In this respect, it is similar to putting that net three yards in front of a rugby kicker or putting stabilizers on a child’s bicycle – with the outcome removed, it can’t interfere with their thoughts.
Me, My Selves and I
The implicit–explicit balance so vital to performing under pressure can be compared with Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, in which he describes the two parts of our thinking – our two ‘selves’. He describes them thus:
I found self 1 – the verbalising, thought-producing self – is a lousy boss when it comes to control of the body’s muscle system. When self 2 – the body itself – is allowed to control, the quality of performance, the level of enjoyment and the rate of learning are all improved.
If we return to your travails on the squash court at the start of the chapter, with your destructive thoughts and self-criticisms running wild, you asked: How can I dismiss this swarm of negative thoughts and emotions so that I can play as well as I know I am capable?
The key is to find something simple yet engaging to keep self 1 busy, losing it in an engaging process, so that self 2 is free to take over. For the squash court, I would suggest Gallwey’s ‘Bounce, hit’, which involves you saying ‘bounce’ to yourself at the precise time the ball hits the ground and then saying ‘hit’ – again, to yourself, not to your opponent – at the moment you hit the ball with your racket. Through these simple conscious and exact thoughts, your attention should move to watching the ball and getting your timing right. You allow your subconscious mind to take over the technique involved in striking the ball.
Do Not Open the Folder
Technique in any task you attempt is important, but it shouldn’t be in your conscious thoughts when performing under pressure. Thoughts about your technique are necessary when you learn and practise but not when you are executing a skill for real. The middle of your squash match is not the time or place to start thinking about the position of your elbow or how you’re holding the racket.
One way of looking at it is to compare your mind to a computer. Let’s think of the desktop as being your consciousness and on it are folders for your subconscious with documents labelled ‘Grip’, ‘Stance’, ‘Posture’ etc. (all elements of the technique that support your process) within. For a game like squash, the folder would be labelled ‘Feel’ – what you know a perfect strike feels like – followed by one instructional process key. In the case of your squash match, let’s use Gallwey’s ‘Bounce, hit’.
This is how everything should be when you’re performing under pressure: the folder sits in plain sight on your desktop, labelled correctly with your conscious thoughts – ‘Feel’ or ‘Bounce, hit’ – and contains all the documents necessary for you to perform. Your preparation work is done and you’ll be judged on the whole contents of the folder.
However, under match conditions the folder should be thought of as being like Pandora’s box: it must not be opened. To do so would be akin to starting to edit a report after you’d handed it over as complete, or trying to change your sales pitch halfway through a presentation. On the squash court, with things going wrong and your mind running riot, you’ve opened documents like ‘Grip’ and ‘Stance’ and started to fiddle about with them and then your negative, self-critical thoughts come flooding on to the screen in the form of unwanted pop-ups. All of this inhibits your performance – slowing down your processor – and distracts you from the task at hand. If too many documents are opened at once, the system might even crash completely. You’ll have ‘choked’.
System Jam
The terms ‘choking’, ‘freezing’, ‘quitting’, ‘icing’, ‘bottling’ and ‘the yips’ are all expressions that have entered everyday use. They all describe pretty much the same thing: an inability to perform at the crucial moment or moments of a contest owing to anxiety.
The most famous examples of choking in the sporting world tend to involve an elite-level professional with victory in sight on the grandest stage of all suddenly losing his or her ability to execute skills that they had previously been using to great effect.
Think of Greg Norman, the Great White Shark, blowing a six-shot lead on the final round of the Augusta Masters in 1996, handing victory to Nick Faldo. Think of Jimmy ‘the Whirlwind’ White, the six-times snooker world championship finalist but no-time world champion, whose 1994 defeat hinged on missing a makeable pot on the black in the deciding frame to hand victory to Stephen Hendry. Think of Jana Novotna, who in the space of ten minutes went from the verge of 1993 Wimbledon champion to being the losing finalist against Steffi Graf. Think perhaps not of England football players taking penalties – we will come to them – but of Italy’s Roberto Baggio, one of the greatest ever to have played the game and a regular scorer for club and country, blazing his decisive penalty over the crossbar in the shootout of the 1994 World Cup Final, having dragged his team there almost single-handedly.
These performers, no matter how unfairly, are sometimes cited as lacking the necessary ‘mental toughness’ to take the top prizes in sport. But it isn’t just those painted as being mentally fragile who can choke. Can you think of a more psychologically focused athlete than John McEnroe? Even he was not immune to choking, as his 1984 French Open final against Ivan Lendl demonstrates: McEnroe, who was unbeaten all year, let slip a two-set lead after one of his famous temper tantrums, on this occasion with a noisy cameraman, and Lendl came back to take the crown.
I dislike the term ‘choking’. It has negative, almost cowardly implications. Many excellent, heroic performers have been unfairly labelled as weak under pressure, often by those who could not even begin to comprehend the kind of stresses involved in performing at the pinnacle of a sport. As golfer Tom Watson says: ‘A lot of guys who have never choked have never been in the position to do so.’ And, in fact, it isn’t mental fragility that causes choking at all; it’s more like a lack of mental discipline, or a failure to organize one’s thoughts when the pressure is on.
Choking occurs when the anxiety of the situation causes a player to become conscious of and unpick things that had hitherto been automatic – a well-practised motor skill like a golf swing, cue action or kicking technique. Subconscious thoughts start intruding, crowding the conscious mind, and I prefer to think of choking not as a sudden inability at a pivotal moment, but more as an overload of information that causes the sensory system to jam, just like the computer mentioned earlier. This is why I would like very much to replace the word ‘choking’ in our vocabulary with ‘system jam’.
Once you start fiddling with stuff that had previously been automatic in the procedural memory in an attempt to regain your lost form, you find yourself in a real mess, as you are dealing not only with all the things that are always present in your conscious mind at pressure moments but also with the stuff that you would usually do without thinking – the subconscious actions you’ve done implicitly a thousand times before – and you suddenly find yourself unable to execute the skill automatically.
Of course, system jams aren’t confined to elite-level sportsmen. A public speaker well practised in addressing colleagues in the office could end up mumbling at the floor at an international conference with an audience of thousands. A child who excels in school PE lessons could freeze when sports day comes around, performing for the first time in front of a crowd, with parents and peers looking on.
At its root, then, a system jam results from fear of failure. And nowhere does this fear manifest itself more than when an underdog reaches a potentially winning position. Having executed their familiar motor skills throughout the match or tournament, they’re suddenly in a place they’ve never been before and haven’t been able to prepare for. And once the expectation that they might, or even should win comes about, fear of failure can rear its ugly head and make them start to worry about that which should be automatic – Greg Norman’s swing, Jimmy White’s cueing action, Roberto Baggio’s penalty technique.
In the next chapter, we’ll talk more fully about the documents in the folder on the desktop, the ‘repair’ that belongs in your subconscious when performing a skill. But as for our conscious thoughts that label the folder, how do we come to know what ‘feel’ is right? And how can we best use this thought to help us perform under pressure?
Top Pocket
It was a cold winter’s evening in Edinburgh and the converted church hall was alive with the sound of judo players crashing on to mats under the force of an opponent’s throw. After each throw, the player responsible would turn towards head coach Billy Cusack – who was in charge of the judo coaching team for the 2008 Olympics – and shout out two seemingly random numbers.
‘Minus one and plus a half,’ shouted one.
‘Two and minus one,’ came another.
Euan Burton – gold medallist at the 2014 Commonwealth Games – threw a player effortlessly over his shoulder and, after a moment’s thought, called out: ‘Zero, zero – double top pocket!’
Billy Cusack nodded, then turned to 2006 European Champion Sarah Clark, whose opponent had just been dispatched to the mat. ‘Zero, zero … I think,’ Sarah said.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Billy. ‘How did it feel?’
‘I didn’t feel anything,’ said Sarah. ‘It was as if she were weightless.’
‘Then you’re right.’ Billy smiled. ‘Zero, zero – great throw.’
The casual observer might wonder why on earth players were shouting out seemingly random numbers, and they might wonder even more once they realized what the numbers were: the judo players were working on the feel of each throw – and, perhaps more oddly, they were scoring their own throws.
The Top Pocket system is, much like the C–J concept, one of the tools I have developed for my coaching kit, and again it can be applied across a host of disciplines: I use it when coaching rugby kicking, football, cricket and golf, as well as judo. In fact, for any sport that involves any striking or contact. And, also like C to J, while its roots and base applications are in the sporting world, the philosophy behind it can be – and indeed already is – applied to all of our lives.
In the Top Pocket system, a player labels each kick, bowl, shot or throw with a numerical value. The score is based entirely on how the action feels to you. In football it’s not as black and white as a good strike being great and a mishit, disaster; there are various grades for the mishit. This numerical value describes the energy waste, so that zero is a perfect strike or throw, with no energy lost, and a plus or minus figure describes the amount of energy wrapped or leaked. The bigger the number, the greater the energy wasted. The system is a tool for self-improvement: it is impossible to compare one player to another when it measures something so subjective that only the person experiencing it knows how it feels.
Imagine I asked you to kick a ball and then tell me how it felt off your foot. ‘OK,’ you might say, ‘but not great.’ Then I’d ask you to kick it again and you might say that you felt this shot was better. So, then I’d ask you to tell me what the difference was with the first one: did you pull it a little (perhaps wrapping your foot around the ball and sending it left, if you’re right-footed) or did you slice it (catch the ball too far on the left side and send it right)? If it’s the former then we can say you’ve had an energy wrap and it’s a plus value. With the latter, when the ball escapes right – a slice – it’s an energy leak, which will be given a minus value. A zero would be your feeling of an effortless straight and true shot. What’s important is your comparison, so that you start to become much more aware of what it is you’ve done through feel. On some occasions and for some skills – such as a footballer hitting a curling cross – a slight energy wrap is deliberate to add spin, so a plus score can be desirable.
In judo the players worked from their own kinaesthetic map, based on their balance and energy application. The easier the throw, the lower the number the player calls out. Billy Cusack was enthusiastic about the system, saying: ‘Although we have only been doing it a while, the impact has been dramatic in that it gets the individual to take much more responsibility for their technique.’
And that, in its essence, is the major benefit of Top Pocket. It gives us responsibility for developing our own technique, which encourages us to understand more about exactly what we’re doing. Once we start to want to understand more – how that throw felt and what we can do to improve it – then it encourages our negatively weighted mind to see the positives of persevering without any guarantee of success. And if we can do this, we will more readily commit to the ugly zone (see Chapter 3).
As Euan Burton says: ‘It makes the sessions much more mentally demanding. Rather than just throwing ten or twenty reps of a particular throw, you have to really think about each one and adjust when it’s not a zero and work out which way you have to make the adjustment – getting a little closer, perhaps, or keeping the distance so your opponent goes over your shoulder, rather than the base of your neck. It’s tough but it does make you think.’
We’re not used to quantifying feel, despite touch being one of our five senses. Unless we can objectively see or hear something, we’re not willing to trust it. But using Top Pocket allows me to tap into this element in a language both the player and I can understand. Ultimately, as a coach I have to work from the player’s map of reality in order to empathize fully with them and, as the player will be doing a lot of their work on their own, it’s a useful tool for them to measure and engage with their learning. In a match situation, things don’t always go according to plan; an improved understanding will give the player a better chance of knowing exactly what has happened – and what they can do about it. This tool is also the ultimate in implicit learning, as when you simply concentrate on the feel of the strike, everything else – the mechanics and all the technical stuff surrounding it – is relegated to your subconscious.
The inevitable criticism I hear levelled at this system is that the coach has to surrender the assessment to the player. ‘How do they know what a minus one really is?’ they might ask. But it actually requires trust in the player; for coaches, it means letting go of some control and putting our egos to one side. It can be extraordinarily empowering for anyone to take a more active part in their own development, and self-assessment is employed by all manner of industries outside sport, where pressure is just as powerful a force.
Don’t Fight the Feeling
For those working in psychology healthcare – that is, treating people suffering from depression, anxiety and other disorders – self-assessment is a powerful tool for patients. After all, this is a part of healthcare that is entirely built upon how you feel.
When someone is referred by their GP to a specialist psychology service, they are usually initially assessed through a process of, among other things, self-appraisal, when they are asked to rate their mood, as well as other things – such as suicidal or self-harming thoughts – to ascertain the severity of the condition, the likelihood of the patient being in danger and the best course of treatment. For very serious problems all manner of treatments and medications are used, but for a non-life-threatening case of depression a patient might see a psychologist once a week. Here, self-assessment is again a vital tool, as patients are usually asked to complete a questionnaire when they arrive for an appointment. These usually comprise statements such as, ‘I have felt tense, anxious or nervous over the last week’ with a sliding scale of answers from 1 (never) to 5 (always). These scores are used to help assess the patient’s condition and measure their progress, so that someone regularly ticking a 5 at the start of treatment who gets it down to a lower number has clearly made progress.
Of course, self-appraisal isn’t used in isolation. Trained psychologists and doctors also talk to their patients and make their own assessments, and there is some evidence to support the idea that patients ‘overstate’ their wellbeing in order to please the person treating them. But they are nonetheless an invaluable aid to getting patients to spend a moment assigning a tangible, numerical value to how they feel about various aspects of their lives. Clinical anxiety or depression is usually rather more serious than run-of-the-mill performance anxiety, and I certainly would not compare my work to the difficult and highly pressured environment doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists operate in, but if the NHS can see the benefit in using self-assessment of feeling as a tool, then surely it is an approach we can use in our own lives.
In business, of course, it is already used, particularly in staff appraisals: ‘How do you feel this last six months have gone?’ Some companies ask their staff to rate their own performance on a scale of 1 to 10, or terrible to excellent. Again, it’s a common complaint that these numbers might seem reductive, but surely the benefit is that the person at the heart of it is giving thought to their performance and communicating their feelings.
When we’re under pressure, our minds can be attacked by unhelpful thoughts, our anxiety can get the better of us and it can become difficult to gauge an outcome accurately. Our subjective judgement might be way off and we might feel something has been a disaster that has actually gone perfectly well. This is the ‘dentist effect’ striking again, and just a few small adjustments – if they feel significant – can make all the difference.
It is, however, still worth taking stock of how you feel when you attempt anything under pressure, maybe even marking it out of ten, and then look at how it goes next time and the time after that, so you can build comparisons and see how you’re progressing. You might have started a new job in a pub, working behind the bar. You’ve done several quiet shifts but never a Friday or Saturday night before, and now you’ve been moved to working every Friday night, when the pub is packed. How do you feel it went the first time, when the orders were flying in and you struggled to remember the drinks and you could hardly hear a thing because it was so loud and drunk people don’t make a lot of sense? When your conscious thoughts were overwhelmed with ‘How do I make that drink?’ and ‘Am I even up to this?’ What about the second time, and the third? What would the perfect shift feel like?
The truth is that, as we get better at something, skills like how to pour a perfect pint, use a till swiftly and expertly swerve a drunken punter become relegated to our implicit memory, and the more we learn, through the methods offered in this book, to disperse our emotive, self-doubting thoughts, the better we are able to judge our own performance. That is why I trust sportspeople, with their hours of deliberate practice, to tell me what they feel is a perfect hit,* in the same way that the NHS trusts their patients to tell them how they feel. After all, who’s had more practice at being you than you?
Nothing to Fear, Not Even Fear Itself
As your attempted trolley dash earlier demonstrated, when there is too much explicit information for our minds to absorb, and the implicit–explicit balance tips too far the wrong way, our performance declines. However, when we are faced with a decision or a challenge, many of us would prefer to arm ourselves with as much information as possible, assuming that it would better insulate us against the possibility of failure. But if we return to an earlier example, when you’re late and lost in an unfamiliar city, would your smartphone’s map, with its three different walking routes and various alternative forms of transport, each with its own options (standard taxi or Uber? Should you take this train line or the other?), allow you to make a quicker or more effective decision than, say, simply hailing a passing cab? Perhaps, given an abundance of time, it would allow you to pick the most effective one, but you’re late, remember, you’re under pressure. The most effective decision is one that is made quickly.
Now, this should be a question that can be quickly answered. Which would you say was the more difficult to master: skateboarding or playing golf? Or, to put it another way: what is more complicated, hitting a golf ball or balancing on a piece of wood with little wheels while barrelling over ramps and rails? One way to measure this might be to consider how many manuals and instruction books have been written in the last ten years on each subject. Unsurprisingly, the golfing publications dwarf those on skateboarding. In fact, ‘dwarf’ doesn’t begin to describe the disparity.
If we wanted to be overly simplistic about the physics of it, golf is basically a game in which a club is swung towards a ball with its face moving towards the target at impact. If you were to write a book on skateboarding in the same manner in which a golfing manual is written, it would be as thick as a telephone directory. It would have to include weight distribution, moments of inertia, centrifugal force, friction, range and types of suspension, wheelbase width, centre of gravity, turning circles … it would be monstrous. Yet people do learn to skateboard and some become extremely proficient in it, as a quick search on YouTube or a walk past a local skate park will confirm. So, without these volumes of information available to them, how do skateboarders do it?
At the start of the previous chapter, I talked about my friend’s golf lessons. He’d spent several sessions learning about the theory behind playing – plenty of explicit learning – but hadn’t even hit a ball yet. This isn’t an uncommon approach in golf. The game has a culture of teaching vast amounts of theoretical knowledge, often cloaked in confusing language, at least to the beginner, about open and closed club faces and plenty of what not to do. The whole undertaking is riddled with potential failure. It’s this approach to learning, with an expectation to absorb lots of complicated explicit information, that makes golf seem so difficult. How about just hitting the ball?
In skateboarding, there is no failure. Skateboarders celebrate falling off – they call it ‘wiping out’. They don’t need a library of coaching manuals and expensive lessons with a pro, or to understand the maths and science behind their board speed or jumping angle, because they do their learning implicitly. They try something and, if it doesn’t work, they don’t turn to a coach or manual – they try it again, making the necessary adjustments according to how it went wrong and what they think they need to do differently until they get it right. They work through feel. Their feedback is immediate and visceral: if they fall off, it hurts. They don’t spend hours dissecting their foot position, wondering if that was the issue. They’re already up and trying again.
Granted, most skateboarders start young, so they have on their side the childlike approach to learning and getting in the ugly zone. But it is the whole culture of skateboarding that makes it such a perfect example of implicit learning. You can’t fear failure if there’s no failure to fear in the first place. Skateboarders, with their jeans ripped at the knee, embrace wiping out, celebrating where they go wrong. Could you imagine a golfer talking in the same way?
‘I was on the eighteenth hole, about ninety yards out. I took a pitching wedge, swing was pretty good … but I really thinned it, and the ball shot past the flag and straight through the window of the clubhouse behind the green! Apparently, the ball bounced off the bar, smashing a load of drinks lined up in the process and the barman slipped in the spilt alcohol, crashed into the club secretary and they both landed on the floor in a heap. They’re already talking about barring me from the course, but do you know what really upset me? The ball had settled on the club president’s desk down the hall. It was a great lie – with the window open it was only twenty yards to the hole – but they wouldn’t let me take the shot!’ Gnarly.
The skateboarder learns quicker and with less information than the golfer, even though skateboarding is more complicated than golf. They do this because they have reframed failure as simple cause and effect and they haven’t overloaded their brains with too much explicit theoretical information: their learning is implicit. A culture – a school, an organization, a sports team – that can reframe failure as part of a necessary facet of development can allow people to grow more freely, to use trial and error as a means of progression. Fear of failure can dramatically reduce a person’s potential level of performance, increasing their anxiety and forcing them to play safe when making decisions rather than having the confidence to try something new – or something again, if they have failed at it before.
The golfer is led by the belief that more information will lead to improved performance, or at least less failure, as the avoidance-motivated individual might say. And it’s not just in golf where this attitude prevails. We carry this with us to the workplace, where we imagine we can’t be too prepared in terms of information; when we’re late and lost in an unfamiliar city and we consult our smartphones; or when we worry about our health and decide to Google our symptoms and arm ourselves with a wealth of worrying information.
But as the skateboarders demonstrate, there is a great deal of benefit to be gleaned from the implicit approach: having a go at something, failing at it and trying again, making the adjustments necessary. Reading a manual on the intricacies of skateboarding or having classroom-style lessons seems absurd to us, yet doing the same for golf seems normal. But arming yourself with all the information in the world isn’t going to insulate you from failure. ‘Failure’ is a natural part of any learning or practising of a skill, and only by accepting this and embracing it, instead of fearing it can we hope to take risks and improve. This is the ugly zone, where great progress happens.
The key, then, is to develop the right implicit–explicit balance. Information has its place, of course, and the right amount of relevant information is a requisite to improvement. But if we overload our minds with too much explicit instruction and thought it will inhibit us when we are learning and overwhelm us when it comes to performing under pressure. Our systems will struggle and, as the pressure mounts, eventually jam, our conscious minds overloaded with too much information.
So, when it comes to performing under pressure, we need to have our relevant information – our feel, our ‘bounce, hit’, our dead aim – to fully engage our conscious minds and the vast expanse of our well-practised, implicit skills packed tightly under the waterline, strengthening our icebergs.