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Art of Possibility

The Art of Possibility is an interesting collaboration between a husband and wife who are a symphony conductor and therapist, respectively. This results in a fascinating look at creativity, the change process, and unique approaches to performance and life. The initial chapter sets the tone for the book, utilizing historical and biological evidence to demonstrate that “It’s all invented.” This means that there is no objective reality, and our minds create a story to make sense of the information we receive from the environment. Once you realize that your story is an invention, it becomes possible to create a story that you feel good about. This simple yet liberating idea holds great promise for your performance and well-being.

What story can you create to facilitate confidence? Motivation? Happiness? Satisfaction? Fulfillment?

It’s your story, make it a good one.

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Trust: Mastery

What do you expect your performance to look like over time? Many of us hope for something like this:

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Unfortunately, that is not reality. In his excellent book Mastery, George Leonard suggests that the path to mastery looks like this:

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Not exactly what most of us hope for. Certainly not what most of us are patient and trusting enough to stick with when we are stuck on another plateau.

Yet this is the only path to mastery of any skill: gradual improvements followed by periods of seeming stagnation (sometimes even declines as we learn new skills/techniques necessary for improvement) prior to an outward expression of learning. The outward expression is the key phrase there. Certainly learning and improvement are happening the entire time we are on the plateau. But because we do not get the rewards (both internal and external) of improvements in performance, we tend to despise the plateau and get frustrated.

Trust involves learning to love the plateau. Knowing that this is the time you are preparing yourself for another little breakthrough in performance. Even more that that, it is your time with your performance. No distractions from the joys (and sometimes burdens) and attention that come with increased performance. Reconnect with your passion and inspiration for your performance. Know that another improvement is inevitably coming if you stick with it. Know that others will drop out while they are on the plateau.

Trust the mastery process. Trust yourself. Love the plateau.

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Inspiration: Competition

Competition is a major buzzword in our society. Perhaps due to our free market economy, competition has become essentially synonymous with survival of the fittest. The win at all costs approach results in a zero sum mentality: in order for me to win, you must lose. Thus, people will use the rationale of “I’m a competitor” to justify being obsessed with winning, or in some cases as an excuse for being a really poor loser.

Unfortunately, none of the above has much to do with the real nature of competition. Competition comes from the latin com petere, which means to strive together. Bringing out the best in one another. It is not about winning at all costs, or even winning at all. In the same way as being a success, the true measure of competition is only against oneself. This can also be seen in the Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius: faster, higher, stronger. Not faster, higher, stronger than your opponent – just faster, higher, stronger.

I’ve seen many performers derailed by being overly focused on winning. Patting themselves on the back for a win, when they know their performance was not of top quality. Or sabotaging their confidence by sulking after a loss despite putting forth a tremendous effort.

If you can reconnect with the true meaning of competition, you can find great inspiration in your fellow competitors and in yourself. By striving together, we can achieve more than when we seek to win through domination. Performances become an opportunity to exceed your own expectations, rather than tests to be anxious about. How can you use competition as inspiration?

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Focus: Confidence

Confidence, or lack thereof, is one of the most common challenges that sport & performance psychology consultants are asked to assist with. In order to address confidence, it is first necessary to understand it. Simply put, confidence is pre-knowing that you are capable of meeting the demands of the task/challenge you are facing. Confidence is different from arrogance or cockiness, which are both more often an overreaction to uncertainty: not knowing that you are capable of meeting demands and attempting to cover this up with (over) assurance. Another key difference is that confidence is internally focused, about knowing what you can do. Arrogance and cockiness are externally focused, falsely thinking that you are better than some external opponent or criterion. This is an important distinction because I have seen many people sabotage their confidence because they did not want to be perceived as cocky or arrogant. Because confidence is internally focused (self confidence), there is no risk of true confidence being misperceived as arrogance or cockiness.

Perhaps surprisingly, confidence can effectively be built through two points of focus. Of course, this does not mean it is easy to be consistently confident, but these are the tools to begin building your skill of confidence. These points are once again thanks to Dr. Rick McGuire.

1) Competence Builds Confidence

If you want to feel confident, the first step is to actually develop your skill so you have something to be confident in. While this may seem self-evident, we have all seen people attempting something where they clearly are not highly skilled still become frustrated that they are not performing as well as they “should.” The person on the basketball court that screams and curses every time the shot is missed…on the golf course cursing out their clubs for every shanked shot…the tennis court…the boardroom…the performance stage. Unfortunately for these folks, they are performing exactly as they “should” because they have not put in the time to build competence. Develop your skill, realistically appraise your skill level, adjust your expectations accordingly (you are not the person on TV for a reason), and watch your confidence blossom.

2) Focus Confidence on the Performance, Not the Outcome

In short, this means that even when we are capable of doing something it is not always going to turn out the way that we would like. This is the reason sports and performances are so captivating. We never know what is going to happen. It is also the reason so many people feel like their confidence is a mysterious force that comes and (more often) goes. If your confidence is wrapped up in outcomes, then just like outcomes sometimes it will be there and sometimes it will not. Do this long enough, and it is not there very often because we are constantly reminded of the unpredictable nature of performance, and this undermines our outcome-focused confidence. Focusing on the performance, on the other hand, puts confidence directly in our control. While we may not always get the outcome that we desire, we can always have a successful performance. Through our effort and will we can deliver all the capability that we have to deliver, and perform to the best of our capabilities on that particular day, at that particular event. Focusing on success will develop consistency in both our performances and our confidence.

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Decisive

While not intentional, the book I finished this past week went hand in hand with Intuition. We need to be able to trust our intuition when we do not have the luxury of time, but when we have at least 5 minutes to make a decision that is where Decisive comes in. Another excellent book following Made to Stick and Switch from the Heath Brothers, Decisive offers quick and sound advice on how we can make better decisions. Certainly making great choices and decisions is a vital part of performance excellence, and as usual the Heaths offer a pragmatic approach simplified to WRAP: Widen your options, Reality-test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding, and Prepare to be wrong.

Amongst much useful advice, I found two ideas particularly salient to performance. The first has to do with widening your options and understanding how we normally make decisions. The Heaths demonstrate that our decisions usually come down to whether or not to do one thing. Some examples would be whether or not to…continue my relationship, start a new training plan, give up on my dream, etc. What they found is that when you can add one additional choice, you are 6 times more likely to make a good decision. This can be as simple as thinking “and” rather than “or.” What whether or not decisions are you considering? Can you add one more (realistic) option by thinking creatively?

The other idea that could immediately impact your performance is to reality test your assumptions. The great example here was in selecting members for a 4 X 100 relay team. Would you rather put the potential sprinters on the track and see how they perform together or sit them in a room and see if they answer your questions like a good relay runner would? Seems laughable, but which method is more similar to your process of making personnel decisions? There are many ways this idea can influence performance in addition to people choices. When you are considering particular strategies or tactics, can you find a way to reality test them? Can you find a way to invest a little into a decision before you have to invest a lot?

If you are interested in making better decisions during the Performance of Your Life, give Decisive a read.

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Trust: Competition Mindset

In most domains of performance, much more time is spent practicing and preparing for competition than actually competing. This is obviously helpful for skill development. During practice, our mindset is analytical, focused on error detection and correction, and self-monitoring. This mindset is essential for skill development, but as discussed earlier is counter-productive to skill execution.

In order to successfully perform the skills we have trained, we must be able to shift to the competition, or trusting, mindset. In the competition mindset, we let go of conscious control of the movements necessary to perform and allow our learned skills to be automatically executed. The competition mindset is a skill in and of itself (and a difficult one at that), and thus requires practice just as any other skill we wish to develop.

The spectacular performers of Cirque du Soleil at times deliver over 400 performances in a single year. They are masters of the competition mindset, and this is part of their stunning showmanship. For the rest of us, we must intentionally cultivate the competition mindset by dedicating time to practicing in the mindset. This means setting aside time to simulate competition and performing skills without technical feedback, self-monitoring, and coaching. Similar to a physical periodization regimen, how you incorporate the different mindsets will vary based on the time of year. Typically, it would be effective to spend a greater proportion of practice time early in the season to the practice mindset. However, some time, perhaps 5-10%, should still be spent in the competition mindset. Later in the year as skills have been developed and refined and physical training is tapering, the majority of practice time will be in the competition mindset. These sessions will likely be shorter in duration and higher intensity (with some variability depending on the performance) and focused on developing trust in executing the skills already mastered.

No matter what your performance area, spending time in the trusting mindset can be a welcome relief from our tendency to be overly critical and caught up in our own heads. Give yourself time to enjoy performing the skills you have developed. It will result in more effective and consistent performances while fostering confidence and motivation.

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Inspiration: Perspiration

There are times all of us feel something less than inspired. During these times, we often wait for inspiration to find us. There are two problems with this: 1) it draws our attention to external sources, and 2) while we wait we miss out on lots of opportunities to create inspiration.

Regarding the first point, as discussed earlier, inspiration comes from personal values, purpose, and meaning. Values are choices we make about the life we want to live. While they may be influenced by external sources, ultimately it is an internal process of deciding what we want our lives to stand for. This is why the energy and positive feelings that come from motivational speakers tend to be so fleeting: they are not connected to values, and if they are it is not our values, but rather those of the speaker. So, the next time you are waiting for inspiration, look internally about what you value and who you would like to be.

And after you do that, do something about it! We miss out on opportunities to be inspired by feeling trapped by our jobs, our relationships, our circumstances, etc. While all of these things may make it more difficult to pursue our dreams, they seldom (if ever) make it impossible to do so. Building on the concept of Have Fun First, rather than waiting for inspiration start doing something that you enjoy. For example, if you are working a job that pays well, supports your family, but does not leave you fulfilled, set aside time to pursue something you enjoy. Many a successful career has started as a trivial hobby.

Wondering where you will find the time? How about starting with the time you spend saying how much you dislike your job? Most people find when they start putting time and energy into something they enjoy, they find they have more time and energy to be present with family and other important aspects of their life.

By doing more, working harder at something you enjoy, and having fun, you’ll discover your inspiration.

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Focus: Have Fun First

Another lesson learned from my mentor, Dr. Rick McGuire: Have Fun First!

Typically, we pursue a particular area because we enjoy it. Enjoyment leads to improvement, and then somewhere along the way we get labeled “good” at it. For some, that moment ends the pursuit of fun. Fun becomes secondary (or worse) to advancement, achievement, and acclaim. We constantly think that we’ll have fun when….we master the next skill….we get the next promotion….we get off the plateau….we win the next award. Sometimes those moments even end up being fun. And then we move on in pursuit of the next accomplishment.

Many of you may be caught in this cycle right now. I’ll have fun when….

When is the last time you truly enjoyed your performance? Not for what it got you, but for the simple pleasure of engaging in something that you enjoy?

If that sounds too touchy feely, keep in mind that it was your enjoyment, your passion, and having FUN that allowed you to be good in the first place. Ask yourself, “How do I perform when I am having fun?” For most people the answer is, “Great!”

Are you waiting to have fun? Focus on what you like about your performance. Focus on enjoyment. Have fun first! I’ll bet you’ll like it….and you just might get the results you’ve been struggling for.

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Coalition II

The Coalition wrapped up its meeting today with everyone having a chance to add their ideas to everyone else’s ideas and a think tank-style discussion. Overall, we shared some ideas we are passionate about, and we also rehashed some of the challenges and roadblocks that have been encountered. The good news is the challenges seem to be less salient and/or less intimidating to the Coalition, and there is optimism that we will be able to move forward with defining sport psychology and graduate training. One of the resources for defining sport psychology was created by Steve Portenga and others (including me) and can be found here (click on Defining the Practice of Sport & Performance Psychology).

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Coalition for Training in Sport Psychology

I spent the day today as a participant in the 2nd meeting of the Coalition for the Advancement of Graduate Training an Applied Sport Psychology (I didn’t come up with the title). It was gratifying to see the presence and influence of the University of Denver Sport & Performance Psychology Program there with fellow faculty Artur Poczwardowski and alum Dolores Christensen participating today and several other DU faculty and alum members of the Coalition.

We are working to resolve the longstanding questions of what appropriate training and preparation for the practice of sport psychology consists of, and what will these practitioners be called?

Thus far, we have made some progress, and it will be interesting to see where things end up at the end of the meeting tomorrow.