What a week! I wrote down a few goals when I started my mental performance consulting. One of them was speaking at the NFCA National Convention! I’ve been a member of the National Fastpitch Coaches Association, or NFCA, for decades and always enjoy my time learning and connecting at the convention.
This year I reached that goal, and it was AWESOME! I thoroughly enjoyed sharing my passion for mental performance with my colleagues. I was blown away by the number of coaches who joined me at 7:30 am for my Friday session! Thanks to each one of you! I had a blast!
As always, the NFCA staff was amazing, and they left no detail to chance. It was a great experience!
Before my Friday session, I had the opportunity to spend three hours at our pre-convention seminar on building our mental game as coaches. I started the presentation with a video of an airplane…a descending airplane.
Here was the scenario. Imagine you’re a pilot. You’re 30,000 feet in the air when something goes wrong.
As the problem persists, gauges light up, it gets loud. People are questioning you…second-guessing your skills/knowledge, etc. You start to feel some pressure. There is frustration all around you…maybe even panic. (Sound familiar to any of you in leadership situations when things don’t go as planned?)
Although everyone around you may be losing their cool, panic is not an option for you. You have 250 people on board.
But you and your passengers are lucky. You immediately switch on your fail-safe systems, detailed protocols, mental and physical checklists and trained responses kick in – and since I’m sitting on a plane, I hope the same goes for my flight crew!
As coaches and leaders, we aren’t going to fall from the sky, but we do find ourselves in high-pressure environments, most of which demand our best performances. Unfortunately, we don’t have a light on the dashboard that flashes when we are headed for turbulence or disaster.
In fact, in times of pressure, our systems lean toward survival and without a “mental performance operating system” (MPOS) our thoughts and emotions can veer off course and out of control.
We spend a lot of time preparing for what is supposed to happen on the field or in the boardroom, but what happens when mistakes happen, pressure builds and setbacks disrupt our flow or expectations?
Similar to our pilot’s gauges, we often find ourselves flipping a switch into our sympathetic nervous system and fight or flight. Unfortunately, when we flip this switch, we also turn the dimmer down on rational thinking. Since the alarm in our brain is blaring, this can lead to poor decisions, emotional deregulation or shutting down entirely!
Like our pilot, this is not an option!
To avoid this hijacking or our ability to manage what is in front of us, we need our MPOS to act as our “fail-safe system”. Without one, we reduce the chance of performing at our peak as individuals and as a team.
What do pilots do? In an emergency, the turn off auto-pilot and turn on a different type of auto-pilot…what we might call “trained-pilot”! Our pilot, we hope, moves seamlessly into his training which prepared him for turbulence, emergencies and system errors. The work he did before the possible scenario had him ready for it. As an AD said to me when we were facing a tough scenario during my career, “You were built for this!”
Instead of panicking, he is prepared. But here’s the thing, had he not planned for the possibility of something going wrong, he and his passengers are screwed…and so are we if we fail to prepare for the inevitable pressures that build, no matter our profession.
We may not have others’ lives in our hands, but our brain reacts the same to our stressors as the pilots would in the cockpit!
Self-doubt, bad calls, fluctuations in the market, mistakes and uncertainty flip our fight or flight switch. And no matter who we are or what we do, we will encounter one (or all of these) when the stakes are high!
What can we do?
Aviation, medicine and so many other professions changed for the better once checklists were developed and put into place! WE NEED CHECKLISTS!
What’s on a performer’s checklist? Simple reminders. Implementation intentions (if…then plans).
Clearly defined steps to remind us that we can’t get to step 2 before we complete step 1!
“We can’t pull out a checklist while we are running down the court”, you say! Of course not, but every game, every meeting, every encounter stops at some point, and even if we don’t pull our checklist out and read it, having it on our body in a place we can touch (like in our sock or back pocket), can serve as a reminder of our PREPARATION and our PLAN. We had to know what to do when we made the list…that means we know what to do now! How’s that for a little boost of confidence when the stakes are getting higher?
Rehearsing our checklist helps us carve it into our system. We see what we want to do and set ourselves up to fall back on these preferred behaviors as opposed to behaviors that bubble up as our thinking brain shuts down.
The checklist needs to be used as a blueprint or script we rehearse, just like an actor practices her lines!
Rehearsing what we want is important, but as Gary Mack discusses in Mind Gym, mentally rehearsing adverse scenarios and implementing our plans to right the ship cultivates resilience and flexibility, both necessary to manage emotions and make sound decisions! This is just as important!
Tim Ferris calls this negative visualization. What can go wrong? Ok, then, if this comes up, I'll do X, Y and Z!
Research suggests that watching ourselves rebound or find a way to overcome an issue we are confronting worst-case scenarios which are usually surrounded by fear and playing them out in our minds desensitizes us to their sting. We get a good look at what we can control and allow ourselves to move the scenario from an issue that hijacks us to a situation we can solve which leads us to recovery!
It’s about expecting the unexpected. Too often, we know the unexpected exists, we just fail to go there because we don’t want to freak ourselves out. Like “if I don’t think about it, it won’t happen.”
Clearly, there is a time and a place to think about what can go wrong. Think about the water on a golf course and you’ll find yourself in it.But as the old “poor planning leads to piss-poor performance” saying goes, we need to plan for EVERY SCENARIO and be ready. Being ready and dwelling on problems are two different things. Once we “see” what can go right, we know how it is supposed to look and feel. Once we “see” what can go wrong, it won’t throw us off our game. It will shift us into our MPOS…that fail-safe system we have practiced. It is as second nature as anything else we planned to do!Plan it out. Make a checklist. Rehearse everything that can go right and everything that can go wrong. In both cases, we are watching ourselves succeed.
What’s on your checklist? You get to decide. Whatever it is, keep it simple. Keep it productive and focused on what you want (instead of our tendency to focus on what we are trying to avoid).
Make every move worth the time and effort. Add in something that slows you down enough to manage whatever comes next….like a breath or a mantra.
Whatever you decide practice it before you need it so it is automatic. Knowing you have this plan in your back pocket will give you a boost of confidence because you know the answers to the test…just in case you have a pop quiz!
None of this makes adversity less likely. It makes us better equipped to deal with it! And as we have seen in many sports over the years, better equipment can lead to better performance!
Manage the moments!
Julie
P.S. I WORK WITH TEAMS…athletic teams, sales teams and corporate teams! Bring me in to do a one-time seminar or work with me throughout the year. Either way, I can help your team build Mental Performance Operating Systems to improve their performance! Contact me to find out how!
Send me a text at 234-206-0946 or an email at juliej@ssbperformance.com and schedule a call to see how we can enhance your program’s mental approach!
Julie Jones
Mental Performance Coach
SSB Performance
juliej@ssbperformance.com • 234-206-0946
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