Sport Parents IV: Letting Go

In my roles as teacher, coach, and child and family therapist, I have had many interactions with parents.  But, one of my most remarkable experiences with a parent came at the hands of one of my wisest friends.  I visited her several days after she had given birth to her first child.  After many of the expected pleasantries had been exchanged, she said of her new child, “Well, she was inside of me and now she isn’t.  And I see my job as creating the conditions under which she can move ever more safely and securely, step by step, further away from me.”  That was 12 years ago and I think I’m still in the process of recovering from such an insightful and prescient comment from so new a mother.  I say this because it is exactly the opposite of every inclination we must have when entrusted with a new life so utterly and entirely dependent upon us.  All aspects of this reality must move us to hold on tighter, while the socioemotional and developmental truth remains that in order for this new organism to truly thrive and actualize, we must practice letting go again and again and again.  This reality is also true for sport parents.  You want to micromanage every aspect of your child’s sport experience, shield him or her from the slings and arrows of an outrageous bounce/call/seeding, from the pain of losing, that you grasp ever tighter to every aspect of the experience.  But, for your athlete to get the most adaptive growth out of the experience, for them to truly become the athletes they need to be (and this may entail not becoming athletes), you must practice the skill of letting go.  In this post, I will discuss this most crucial and challenging parenting skill, all in the service of your athlete’s better play, richer enjoyment of their sport, healthier relationship with you, and better life.  Yes, the stakes are that high.

Sport psychologists, studying the social milieu of the athlete, have derived a rubric for the levels of involvement by parents and their young athlete.  Basing their work on research conducted in the area of school involvement by parents, they have declared that sport parents fall into three categories: underinvolved, supportive and overinvolved (Hellstedt, 1987; Hellstedt, 1990; Fredericks & Eccles, 2004).*  In the eyes of these researchers, underinvolved parents produced athletes who were apathetic about their sport involvement, while overinvolved parents produced athletes who showed high levels of stress, performance anxiety and burn out (Fredericks & Eccles, 2004).  According to them, overinvolved parents had a deleterious effect on their athletes’ performance because the athlete absorbed a message of perfectionism, a cognitive distortion which has been proven to be corrosive of peak performance (Anshel & Eom, 2002).**  It is also easy to see how laboring under the cloak of perfectionism--explicitly or implicitly communicated--could lead to burn out in the young athlete.  In this post, I will elaborate on the position of the overinvolved parent, since it is the most destructive for the young athlete not only because it is so lethal to peak performance, but also because it interferes with so many of the positive developmental gains sport participation offers.

The Pygmalion Syndrome.  Think about Pygmalion, the sculptor from Greek mythology who created a sculpture of his ideal woman and then prayed to Venus that she come to life.  The myth has been converted to the stage (“Pygmalion” by G.B. Shaw) and the musical theater (“My Fair Lady”).  The myth has become a metaphor not just for the ardent wish of the artist to have his art have a life beyond his or her imaginings, but for the kind of control that the creative power wants to exert over its product.  Thus, the creation becomes more a projection or mirror of the creator than an entity in its own right.  So, too, with overcontrolling sport parents.  The young athlete becomes not just a project but a product, whose athletic prowess will gain a glory (entrance to elite college, college scholarship, lucrative professional career) that will ultimately reflect back on the parent.  While the parent may succeed in creating this product, it is my contention that both parent and athlete lose a great deal in this overcontrolling configuration.  But, no doubt, the wages on the young athlete are more costly.  One price is that the athlete loses track of why they participate in their sport, and a split opens up in the athlete between their true self that would rather quit and a false self that continues on in the sport for the parents’ sake, divorced from the passion and joy of sport participation.  The fallout from this dynamic can be quite severe, from dispirited performance on the low end of the spectrum to frayed parent-child relations and quitting the sport on the further end of the spectrum.  On the furthest end is the kind of dismaying behavior we see in the dysfunctional athlete: performance slumps, terrible conduct problems, and addictive behaviors.  Think here of famous Pygmalion sport parents and the very troubled behavior of the offspring: Stefano Capriati and Jennifer, Mike Agassi and Andre, Earl Woods and Tiger, John McEnroe Sr. and Jr., Richard Williams and Venus and Serena.  It is my contention that Agassi’s descent into methamphetamine addiction and Tiger’s into his sex addiction, were attempts to ford the gap created between the false self created by the parent and the true self languishing inside the athlete,  a self obscured by the parents’ hard-driving control and choreography of the child’s life.

Whose Experience is this?  Connected to this creation of the false self is the idea that the overinvolved parent has blurred the gap between the child’s experience and the parent’s.  That is, in overcontrolling every element of the child’s sporting life, with an extreme ego orientation, the experience comes to mean so much more for the parent than for the child.  The child is slotted into Pygmalion’s master plan in a way that completely overlooks and even overrides the child’s wishes for the experience.  The creator of the plan comes first and the child second.  In my qualitative study comparing American and international elite squash players, one difference between the cohorts was remarkable: for the American squash player, the entire experience was one of being pulled ever closer into the parents’ orbit and plans for the child, while for the international players, the experience of coming through the squash ranks was one of increasing independence and distance from the parents.  American squash players were told who would coach them, how often they would have lessons, which events to play and which colleges to apply to.  International players traveled to events on their own, were coached by people unknown to the parents and created their own goals and aspirations for their squash achievement.  Thus, the international crowd was able to pull important developmental gains in the areas of individuation and self formation, gains that were thus postponed for the American cohort.  Anecdotal evidence strongly suggested that the international group practiced with greater focus, competed with greater fire and spent less time injured than their American counterparts.

Letting Go.  So, what’s to be done?  What does letting go look like?  Well, the first step of letting go involves letting go of the result.  If you have an end result of your child’s sport participation in mind, you will lose sight of the process and you will become ever more anxious when things look as though they are deviating from your plan.  This kind of anxiety, like all forms of the emotion, cause us to grip tighter, become less mindfully present and more rigidly committed to the old plan.  This rigidity can translate to exerting even more force on your young athlete to conform to the plan.  Instead, you can, starting from very early on in the athlete’s encounter with sport, invest the young athlete with increasing agency over practice and play time, coaching and tournament selections.  It’s not that you can’t point out the consequences of the athlete’s choices (less practice time generally results in worse results), but their practice, play and pleasure will always be greater when the choice is theirs.  And you can certainly provide pep talks through motivational troughs, if they communicate that they’re feeling flat.  Such morale boosters will go a long way, and they need to hear from you and everyone in their social milieu that hard works pays off.  But the well attuned parent-athlete dyad will know when the parent is motivating the child into the parent’s plan or helping the child articulate and actualize their own plan.  Clearly, the key element here is an open and honest communication pattern between parent and athlete, one that values both the agency of the athlete as well as the mature and tutelary powers of the parent.

     It is by no means my contention that letting go is easy.  Indeed, it might be the hardest parenting or life skill that we ever hope to acquire.  But our lives and our relationships with the people we love the most depend upon it.  Someone once told me that if you read the creation story in Genesis, God’s hand in creation recedes with each of the passing six days.  It is the writer’s way of suggesting that God is increasingly practicing the letting go skill even as he applies the finishing touches.  “You take it from here,” He seems to be saying to us.   Looking back at the arc of human history, many might wish that He had held on a little tighter.  But, I like to think that the writer of Genesis was using the metaphor of being a parent when he wrote that creation story.  What great insight into the generative process.  If the Old Testament God can let go, you can too.  Create something, love it with all your might, & set it free.

*Hellstedt, J. (1987). The coach-parent-athlete relationship. The Sport Psychologist, 1, 151-160.

Hellstedt, J. (1990). Early adolescent perceptions of parental pressure in the sport environment.  Journal of Sport Behavior, 13, 3.

Fredericks, J., & Eccles, J. (2004). Parental influences on youth involvement in sports. In M.R. Wiess (Ed.), Developmental sport and exercise physiology: A lifespan perspective. Morgantown, NY: Fitness Information Technology, Inc.

**Anshel, M. & Eom, H.J. (2002). Exploring the dimensions of perfectionism in sport.  International Journal of Sports Psychology, 34, 3, 255-271.

Sport Parents III: Game Day

Now that Matt Kuchar has become a very successful golfer and household name on the PGA tour, many people may have forgotten a back story of the 1998 U.S. Open, held at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, where the antics of Kuchar’s caddie, his father, made almost as many headlines as his son.  The front story is the following: Kuchar was 19, a college junior and playing in the U. S. Open, having gained a berth by winning the US Amateur the previous summer.  On the famously brutal Olympic Club, Matt was improbably tied for fourth after two rounds, and even reached as high as second place on Saturday, before a string of bogeys undid his run.  After a perfectly respectable 74 on Sunday, the young Kuchar finished tied for 14th, the highest finish from an amateur since Jim Simons (5th) and Lanny Watkins (13th) at Merion in 1971.  And now, for the back story: Matt’s playing partners and rules officials were appalled by the father’s overly exuberant celebrations of Matt’s success on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  At several times during the three rounds he was spoken to, glared at and corrected not only for his leaps of joy, fist pumps, and even, impromptu dance moves, but also for his distracting placement of himself and his son’s bag in his competitors’ sight lines.  One playing partner, Justin Leonard, refused to answer a question in his post-round press conference about Kuchar senior’s behavior, while the other, Ernie Els, commented,   “Matt is very calm.  His dad is from the other side of the coin.  He must get it from his mother.”  Kuchar, pére, meanwhile, was unrepentant and responded to the opproprium by stating, “ I don’t care.  Put yourself in my shoes.  Your son just chipped in for birdie.  What are you going to do?  Stand there and pretend you’re at a funeral?”

           Well, while we might point out to the senior Kuchar that potential reactions to a child’s athletic performance include more options than a lilting jig or looking funereal, our main point in this post is to help parents figure out the best way to comport themselves on game day, the way that brings out the best in the young athlete, has the most potential to improve parent-child relations, while at the same time guarantees that the main story is the child’s, not the adult’s, performance.  In this post, I will give you three tips so that you can be the most help to your young athlete on game day.

1. Have a plan.  Of all the things that scuttle peak performance, nerves might just be at the top of the list.  Therefore, having a plan for game day helps because we soothe the athlete by seeking to control as many variables as possible so that the he or she can focus on the task at hand.  It is important, then, that you work with your young athlete and his or her coach on how you can best be used on game day.  You will want to take their cue on such issues as: how you can help or not help; advice you can give or not give; where you should sit; what should be in your bag versus the athlete’s bag; who will talk to the young athlete and what will they say during whatever breaks they have; and even, what sort of cheering helps or does not help the young athlete, pace father Kuchar.  And once you have a plan, stick to it.  Very few things throw a young athlete off more than trying to focus on an athletic endeavor while wondering why their parent just did what they did.
2. Don’t interfere.  It must be equal to one of the labors of Hercules not to interfere in an athletic competition when you feel as though your child has just received the wrong call, you have just observed an unnoticed rules’ infraction of an opponent, or when someone has called the wrong score.  And yet, you must avoid interfering at all costs.  For one, your child will be embarrassed.  Secondly, if the sport is run well, your interference will not be welcome by the officials, so you might get yourself ejected from the premises.  Thirdly, your child will now be needing to manage their own nerves, their embarrassment and their anger, a distracting combination which is unlikely to elicit his or her peak performance.  Rather than interfering, it is always a better and more effective strategy to tolerate your distress and voice your concern to a tournament official after the event, preferably out of earshot of your young athlete, than to interject yourself into the melee.  And yes, snide remarks and malicious leers directed at the referee constitute interference.  (I would point to one major exception to this rule: when your child’s conduct is out of line and/or out of control.  In this instance, particularly for the younger athlete, you should intervene, forfeit your child from the contest and have a serious conversation with him or her, saying that such behavior is unacceptable and that you won’t tolerate it.  Don’t expect the officials to do it, and anyway, your actions will carry much more weight than anyone else’s [see tip 3, “Storming,” in “Scattering and Husbanding,” Nov, 2012].  Such a strong intervention is likely to communicate to your child how seriously committed you are to their character and thus, to a mastery orientation.  This is one way in which, to paraphrase an expert, you can be the solution, not the problem, in your child’s life.)
3. Manage your anxiety.  In this age of ubiquitous recording devices, many parents are video taping their child’s athletic performance.  And that is a good use of both technology and nervous energy.  But many should turn the camera on themselves.  Were they to do so, they might be surprised at the footage:  herky jerky bodily movements in concert with the action on the court/pitch/ice, pained facial expressions at their child’s misfortunes, and the anguish etched across the brow.  It doesn’t look like they’re having fun and yet they wouldn’t miss it for the world.  Nor should they.  But, what they should do is manage their thoughts and feelings in the moment so that they can maintain impassive and encouraging expressions for their young athlete.  They should reflect the kind of composed and confident strength that their child needs to prevail over his or her own battle with nerves.  Thus, the formula is simple: be the affect you want to see in your young warrior.  If you are a nervous wreck, shipwreck.  If you are  calm, you will serve as a beacon in the storm.  Again, it sounds Herculean to do this, but you and the athlete will be stronger for it.

To return to the Kuchar family.  Is it my claim that young Matt would have won the US Open at age 19 if his father had been able to control himself a bit more?  Well, maybe.  I can guarantee, though, that his father might have been more useful to him when things started to falter late on Saturday had he not been so ebullient leading up to the tough string of bogeys.  There’s no doubt in my mind that Matt was having to manage what he imagined as his father’s disappointment along with his own.  Even if his father was saying encouraging things during those holes, the imprint of his father’s unbounded joy could leave no other conclusion in Matt’s mind than that he was letting his father down.  I’m sure Matt would have loved nothing more than to win a US Open as an amateur with his father on the bag.  On Father’s Day, to boot.  But, Father Kuchar just might have made that greatest of golf stories an impossibility.  So, the message is simple: use these three steps to develop a game day process with you and your young athlete and stick to it.  Make a plan, don’t interfere, and manage your emotions.  Oh, and don’t forget number four: have fun!

Sport Parents II: Ego & Mastery Orientations

In my last post, I wrote about the importance for sport parents of setting the proper framework for their young athlete.  This framework is the one where the player inculcates the values and attitudes of the parents and uses it as their own internal compass for their ideas and feelings about such important matters as winning and losing, the treatment of opponents and officials, and the overall meaning of the endeavor.  In that post, I called the framework around the young athlete “the amniotic air” that they breathe as they engage in their sport because while parents and children may not think or talk much about it, the athlete absorbs it with every interaction with the parent.  So, as we can see, we are dealing with a very high stakes enterprise and one that bears thoughtful consideration.  In this post, I will discuss the two most common cognitive frameworks that sport psychologists have identified as the ones that parents set for their children.

According to the experts, there are essentially two different frameworks that parents adopt and that they do so by the implicit and explicit systems of rewards they establish around their child’s sport participation.  The first one, often called an ego orientation, places as high emphasis on winning, compares their child’s results to those of other children and sees success in sport as being better than others.  The second framework, often called a mastery orientation, stresses improvement over performance, process over product, and values a child’s sport participation for the larger lessons about life and the self that sport participation offers.*  For ego-oriented parents, sport is about teaching their child to be a winner, while for mastery-oriented parents, sport is about the process of adaptive growth.  The ego-oriented parent judges the success of the endeavor on results, the mastery-oriented parent on how the child’s  sport involvement supports emotional maturation and successful social integration.  People have come to sum up the positions this way: the mastery-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything, it’s how you play the game,” while the ego-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything...it’s the only thing.”

Now, of course, many parents adopt an ego orientation quite consciously because they feel as though it’s the only way to raise a successful athlete and person, caught as we are in this cut-throat, race-to-nowhere culture.  They feel that in order to raise a winner, they need to forefront winning, and that ruthlessness trumps process every day.  But this is not true, and my research on young athletes and their social milieu suggested this truth to me pretty strongly.  Indeed, psychologists in the realms of both education and sport have strongly argued that mastery orientations provide greater motivation toward goal-directed behavior over a longer duration.**  Furthermore, parents, athletes and coaches who privilege winning to the exclusion of all else often overlook the incredible value of losing for motivating improvement, the data it provides for skill & strategy interventions, and the bright light it can shine on the athlete’s thoughts and feelings in the heat of competition.  Of course, if you have a mastery orientation, you are much more likely to attend to and mine this useful data, whereas an ego orientation seeks to sweep a loss under the carpet of easy excuses as quickly as possible.  (For a view of what some of this work looks like, see my prior post from August, 2012 “Scott’s Lytham Opportunity.”)

The next question, then, is how to put into practice some of these insights.  The first is to frame as many of your interactions about your child’s sport performance in terms of questions rather than statements.  For example: “what do you think it would take to beat so-and-so?” rather than “I think you can beat so-and-so.”  “What do you think happened in that match?” rather than “I think you could have won that match.”  “What do you think you need to work harder at?” and “where would you like to see yourself in your age group?” over “If you’d only do what I’ve been telling you to, you’d be top ten.”  “How do you think you could have better handled that bad bounce/bad call/poor seeding?” over “you were robbed!”  Additionally, you should monitor (and control) your child’s bad conduct, because behind bad conduct lie some of the most ego-oriented cognitive distortions, apart from the fact that bad conduct is almost always the tell-tale sign of poor performance.  (For more on this, see my prior post to this blog “Scattering & Husbanding” November, 2012.)  But, one thing is for sure: you cannot fake it for your young athlete.  If you engage superficially in mastery-oriented questions, but have ego-oriented answers in your heart, your reward structure and your outward behavior towards tournament officials, referees, your child’s opponents and their entourages, then your child will absorb your actions far more strongly than your words.

Often, when people compare ego and mastery orientations, they feel as though the “mastery” people stand on the side of losing over winning; that inculcating process over product teaches complacency with a middling result.  In fact, nothing is further from the truth, and let’s be clear that I’m very pro winning and strongly prefer it to the alternative.  It’s just that winning is only one aspect of successful sport performance and very often isn’t nearly the most salient feature of a particular performance.  I firmly believe, based on my years of competitive play, coaching and qualitative research, that a parent’s adoption of a mastery orientation provides a more stable base for the young athlete’s best performance to emerge, greater enjoyment of the sport for a greater length of time, more successful integration into a competitive and complex world, and even, a better relationship between parent and athlete.  And if that’s not winning, then I’m sure I don’t know what is.

*Roberts, G. & Treasure, D. (1995): Achievement goals, motivational climate and achievement strategies and behaviors in sport. International Journal of Sports Psychology, 26, 64-80.

**Turner, E., Chandler, M., & Heffer, R. (2009). The influence of parenting styles, achievement motivation, and self-efficacy on academic performance in college students. Journal of College Student Development, 50, 3, 337-346.

Sport Parents I: Setting the Frame

In the 1993 movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher” Joe Mantegna plays the father of a chess prodigy who has to learn how to manage the myriad challenges that come with shepherding a very talented child through elite-level competition, the parent-child dynamic being only one facet of this maze.  In one scene, a tournament director summons all of the parents into a room for a pre-tournament meeting.  When they are all gathered, he locks the anxiety-stricken crowd in the room and tells them he’ll be back to liberate them at the end of the tournament.  Anyone involved in youth sport can identify with this fiction.  Parents, so eager to help and do the right thing by their children, often veer from being helpful and supportive to being intrusive, controlling  and destructive of both performance and enjoyment.  Parental involvement in sport so often stems from the most natural of all parental feelings: to protect a child from harm and to celebrate a child’s natural gifts.  But often, the behaviors parents exhibit with respect to their child’s sport involvement are anything but protective or admirable.  In the next several posts, I will share some insights that I gained while doing research on this very problem with an aim toward helping parents avoid some of the understandable pitfalls of being a sport parent, while at the same time steering them towards harnessing some of the great opportunities sport involvement offers for parent and child alike.

The first aspect of this interaction that I will call your attention to is perhaps the most important of all, and what I will call setting the frame.  Parents of middle and high schoolers feel as though their children stopped listening to them a long time ago, lost as they are in their new world of intense and dramatic peer interactions, increased homework pressure and frenzied extra-curricular activities.  But this is not true.  Sport psychologists who study the social milieu of young athletes call the people in that athlete’s life ‘influencers’, and include in that lot peers, coaches and parents.  Furthermore, they add that of all of those influencers, parents are the most, not the least, influential.*  This power comes from the fact that parents often serve in two vital roles with respect to the young athlete: they both provide the experience for their child and, more importantly, interpret its meaning for the child.  It is in this latter function, that of interpreter, that parents have the most power and why I call it “setting the frame.”  The parents’ own meaning and understanding of their child’s sport participation sets the whole cognitive and emotional framework for the child.  You might call it the amniotic air that surrounds the athlete as they engage in their sport.  Parents might not see it, but their children absorb it as they breathe.  Andre Agassi, in his remarkable book, Open, vividly portrays the way a child comes to acquire the socioemotional framework of the parent.  After his first loss ever in a junior tournament, he finds that his self-talk is blisteringly self-loathing.  Lost in his misery, he contemplates quitting.  As he portrays it, it is a revealing moment:

After years of hearing my father rant at my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant.  I’ve internalized my father--his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage--until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own.  I no longer need my father to torture me.  From this day on, I can do it by myself.

Agassi is nine years old at the time of this event.

Agassi’s painful vignette speaks to a truth about parents and their children: all children internalize their parents.  That’s just part of the developmental bargain.  So, the question for sport parents is this: what kind of framework with regard to your child’s sport participation do you want them to internalize?  You can set a framework that promotes the kind of socioemotional development that participation in sport is particularly good at offering.  Or, you can set a framework that overlooks those potential gains and that proves corrosive to the kind of enthusiastic engagement, adaptive growth and longevity of participation that encapsulate the promise of healthy sport participation.

In the next post, I will talk in greater detail about how sport psychologists have thought about these two opposing frameworks and how you can cultivate one and try to avoid other.  For now, I will leave you with a quote from golfer Davis Love III’s book about his father, entitled Every Shot I Take.  The title itself should tell you about how powerful the child’s internalization of the parent is.  This quote will also give you a sense of just how opposite a force that internalizing can be than the one Andre Agassi absorbed.  In the introduction, Davis III says of Davis II:

My late father, for whom I am named, is still my hero.  He always was; he always will be....The way he introduced me to golf is the way I plan to introduce my two children to the game.  The way he taught me is the way I plan to teach them.  The he way he raised me is the way I hope to raise them.

Now, needless to say, there are many points along the spectrum between torturing perfectionist and benign tutelary force, but these two views of internalized fathers give clear proof of just what is at stake in setting the frame for your young athlete.

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* Fredericks, J., & Eccles, J.  2004.  Parental influences on youth involvement in sports.  In M. R.  Weiss, (Ed.), Developmental Sport and exercise physiology: A lifespan perspective.  Morgantown, NY: Fitness Information Technology, Inc.

"Focus?"

“Focus!”  This utterance must rank as one of the most frequently offered bits of sports exhortation you are likely to hear at a sporting event.  Participants, parents and coaches alike all seem to toss this pabulum out as some sort of magical panacea as a goad for better performance.  And, indeed, we all seem to know what it means: play has gotten messy; errors are piling up; the score is going in the wrong direction; the mental chatter is whiney and disjointed.  Gone is the kind of effortless, effective clarity of vision that comes with excellent play.  We are mired in slop.  So, with this encouraging imperative, we are trying to right the ship, get back on track and home in on the matter at hand.  The problem, though, is that this simple injunction “focus!” begs the very question: “On what?”  When we frame the question this way, we realize that at least one true thing about focus  is that we are always putting our attention somewhere, and that when play goes sour, it represents an attentional shift rather than a loss of attention.  In short, it’s not that we are not focusing, it’s that we are putting our focus on an improper resting place.
    Try this thought experiment.  Imagine that one of your senses has suddenly become more acute by a certain factor.  Imagine, say, that you were all of a sudden miraculously invested with the smelling capacity of a dog.  Now, imagine performing an important task like writing a paper, preparing an important report or playing a competitive sport event under these circumstances.  You would constantly need to tune out the incredible number of smells bombarding you and pulling for your attention and bring it back to the matter at hand.  You would constantly struggle to filter out the prominence of the smell data from the other, more relevant data that you needed to notice in order to perform your best on that task in that moment.  I hope you get the analogy: it is more apt to say that a player who has lost attentional focus has really lost his or her attentional filter.  Now, I grant you, encouraging a player to “Filter!” rather than “Focus!” is decidedly less glamorous, but perhaps more apt.  Secondly, focus is that rare sport skill that is both a skill and a state of mind.  We rarely say “I was really in a backhand state of mind,” when our backhand is particularly hot, but we do say, “I was really focused,” to describe being in the zone.  Nevertheless, the more we treat focus as a skill, and therefore, practice it, the more likely we are to reproduce that glorious state of mind that good focus produces, that state of mind in which our highest potential emerges.  In the remainder of this post, I will offer you some suggestions of how you can more consistently have the kind of focus which is the bedrock of excellent performance.

1. Garbage in-garbage out.  Someone once told me that a famous dictum of computer programming is “garbage in, garbage out,”  meaning that any problem, no matter how small, with the code that creates a program will surely result in a poorly running program.  Such words prove equally true for mental focus.  When you are putting your attention on the distracting inputs so readily available in sport competition--bad calls, ambient noise, spectator’s heckling, personal animus toward an opponent--you are adding garbage to what could otherwise be better cognitive code for your program.  The answer here, well-known to all top athletes, is to learn to focus on inputs that are useful and contribute to good performance: sticking to a strategy, picking up cues of your opponent’s bad play for you to capitalize on, an encouraging mantra, keeping your emotional thermometer even-keeled.
2. Change the channel.  As I said above, when we are playing in a way that feels unfocused, our attention has shifted from more valuable inputs to less effective ones.  The first skill here is to have mindful awareness of the very fact of the attention having strayed.  That is, you have to first notice that your attention has wandered in order to shepherd it back to an input of your choosing.  Here, it is useful to have a mental picture that helps you visualize this change.  I have offered the image of using the TV remote to change the channel as a useful rubric, but you can generate an image that works for you.  Secondly, re-focusing rituals are always helpful: taking a stroll about the court; re-tying your shoes; taking some deep breaths.  As you do these rituals, tell your mind what you want it to focus on for the next point.  The point here is that you are being intentional with your attention.  You are directing it rather than chasing it, its master rather than its slave.
3. Practice, practice, practice.  If, as we are arguing, focus is a skill just like any other--though, perhaps, more valuable than any other--then it follows that the way towards better focus is to practice better focus.  Mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises and physical disciplines like yoga, tai chi, qi gong are all excellent ways to hone attentional capacity.  But everyday life also offers endless opportunities to practice.  Start noticing attentional drift in your daily life.  Start practicing ‘one-mindedness’, that quality of immaculate concentration on one thing.  As you practice being aware of your attention and focusing it, you will be able to do it better in competition.  Secondly, practice better focus when you practice your sport.  Whatever form of practice you are engaged in, put your attention on it.  That sounds simple, but we are all too accustomed of going through the motions, deleting a bucket of range balls, slopping our way through a drill, dogging it.  What we are doing in these instances is strengthening the ability to be unfocused rather than honing attentional capacity on the whetstone of one-mindedness.

More and more people seem to decry the barrage on attention that modern life entails.  Cell phones, text messages, televisions in every conceivable public space, social media all corrode our ability to maintain sustained thought on one thing at a time.  There is no doubt that our attention is being increasingly bifurcated and that the bifurcations are bifurcating.  But, much as I myself incline to nostalgic arguments about the good old days, sages from Seneca to Siddhartha have been pointing out that the human mind is rather more like a puppy than a laser beam, but that like (wo)man’s best friend, it can be trained to sit.  Wise men like these argue that our supreme cognitive challenge is to cultivate a tranquil cognitive landscape that successfully navigates rocky shoals with the kind of equanimity that enables right action.  We know the stories of Earl Woods fiddling with coins in his pocket or dropping a ball on the green as young Tiger was putting.  Jack Nicklaus talks of his pre-shot crouch as so focused that someone could have blown a fog horn near him and he wouldn’t have heard it.  What these examples make clear is that if we want to float & sting with the gods, we must first master the fun house of our own mortal consciousness. The stakes are high, the rewards inestimable.

Charlie Beljan & The Panic Miracle

I don’t know if you caught it, but this year at the season-ending PGA tournament, the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals Classic, something miraculous actually did happen.  Tour rookie Charlie Beljan, needing a big weekend to finish in the top 125 and thus keep his card for next year, not only accomplished his goal, but won the tournament.  In doing so, he jumped from 160th on the money list to 64th, more than doubled his earnings for the year, snagged a two-year exemption on the Tour and saved himself from returning to the dreaded q-school, the Calvary of all Tour wannabes.

But, that’s not the miracle.

The miracle happened on Friday.  Not feeling well before the round with chest pain and shortness of breath on the practice tee, he nevertheless chose to play, largely because he was cleared by the Tour medical staff, who found nothing “medically” wrong with him.  But, at several points in the round, he was seen hunched over with hands on knees, or resting on the ground, or trying to take huge gulps of air.  As he acknowledged later, he actually thought he was going to die.  He spent Friday night in the hospital where, again, doctors found nothing medically wrong with him and it was determined that he was having a panic attack.   And we still haven’t gotten to the miracle yet.

Let’s take a look at just some of the symptoms of a panic attack, as outlined by the DSM-IV (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders): accelerated heart rate, trembling, chest pain, feeling of choking, shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea, de-realization (“this isn’t happening”) and sense of impending death.  So, clearly, the miracle here is that he managed to shoot a 64 under the grip of symptoms such as these.  Indeed, after a birdie on the fourteenth hole which brought him to 9-under for the day, he was officially on “59 watch.”  He may be the only player in PGA Tour history who at one and the same time was on both death watch and 59-watch.  Most of us couldn’t deliver the club head to the ball under these circumstances, much less play the round of our lives.

But let’s look a little closer at what a panic attack is and how you might handle one, should it occur.  From the symptoms I listed above, it is clear that, regardless of the external reality, the body is responding as though it is facing an existential threat.  Indeed, these symptoms are all reactions of the sympathetic nervous system, one of whose main jobs is the injection of adrenaline and cortisol as part of the body’s “fight or flight” response.  Now, I hear what you’re thinking: “Give me a break, Matt. This guy was playing a round of golf, he wasn’t being chased by a lion in the Serengetti.”  Here, we remember that trauma and stress are in the eyes of the beholder.  That is, the degree of stress attached to an event is up to the person experiencing it, not those of us commenting on it later around the pinochle table.  From Charlie’s point of view, he was fighting for his life: his tour card was on the line, he had just become a father, with the attendant stress of providing for his family, and he was staring down the barrel of the twin indignities of q-school and begging for tournament exemptions.

To address a panic attack, we have to realize that one of the main triumphs of any form of stress is that it steals us away from the present moment and forces us to focus on future outcomes, generally dire (“I’m going to lose.”  “I’m going to miss this shot.”  “I’m going to die.”).  So, the first step is to have some awareness when you start getting nervy and the self-talk is becoming anxious.  Remember that nerves are a sign that you care and are engaged in something important, not a sign that you are panicking.  Every athlete gets nervous.  Take it as a sign that you are alive, not dead, and doing something for which you have trained hard and are well prepared.  You are lucky to be in this position.  If you transition from nervous to panic, center and ground yourself in the here and now.  Respond to the negative self-talk with mantras like “I’m here”  “I’m not dying (losing, missing)” “stay tuned,” “isn’t this great?!”  You may even need to lightly pat or pinch yourself.  By continuously bringing yourself back to the here and now, you can avert the precipitous slide into dismal future projections.  Secondly, as to that most common symptom: hyperventilating.  When we hyperventilate, we are not oxygenating our blood, and the oxygen deficit leads to light-headedness and an increased urgency on breathing, but with diminished returns.  This is why so many panic attack sufferers say, “I can’t breathe!”  Here, the fix is obvious: breathe!  But, breathe gently, not frantically.  The breaths should be long, extended inhalations that bypass the chest and go directly into the belly.  Exhalations should fully empty the lungs.  (This takes practice. The belly should go out, not in, when you are deep breathing properly.)  People often ask me how long they should continue belly breathing.  The answer is: always, but certainly for as long as the stressful situation pertains.  For Charlie on Friday, the answer would have been the entirety of his round.  The fact that he was seen on multiple occasions literally gasping for air showed that he wasn’t breathing properly.  The third solution is to find a way to be distracted from the stress.  This can be difficult during a competitive situation, but any sporting event, and particularly a golf round, affords many opportunities to bring our focus away from the stress of the moment and onto other things.  It’s useful, during a hiatus in actually performing the actions of the sport, to bring the attention to one’s sensual experience of the surroundings: the smell of the air or grass, some beautiful sight, often plentiful on a golf course (a dramatic cloud formation, the play of light, a pretty bird), or some ambient sounds.  When we put our focus on these things, we generally exit the battlefield of the mind and attend to experiences that are occurring in the here and now.  We leave our world and enter the world.  In moving out of our head and into the senses, we more fully enter the moment.

        In this regard, Charlie’s panic attack may have been his saving grace.  In focusing on the fact that he thought he was dying, he thus turned earning his Tour card into a matter of little significance.  Still, I don’t recommend that you try that strategy.  Having a panic attack and thinking you’re dying might help you avert some other stressors, but it’s not generally the way to float & sting your way to victory.  And while it is metabolically and metaphysically true that we are dying every minute, let’s save that ultimate reality for later and invest our energies in being here now.

Scattering & Husbanding: The energy economy of bad conduct

Recently, I have been helping US Squash out at some junior squash tournaments, particularly in the area of refereeing and conduct.  In this role, I have had the opportunity to witness, up close and personal, the various forms of bad conduct that infect any competitive event: ball abuse, racket abuse, referee abuse, opponent abuse and, reality abuse.  While my role is to help younger referees deal more firmly and effectively with these sorts of outbursts, and while I could dilate extensively on the importance and value of good sportsmanship, my main message here is that bad conduct is a sign of bad cognition and, as such, corrosive of good performance.  Like all instances of faulty cognition, you should do your level best to root it out whenever you feel it, notice it, or if you’re lucky enough to have a good referee, be given a conduct warning for it.

Of the many reasons why bad conduct results in bad performance, the one I will call your attention to is that it is a total waste of energy, an athlete’s most precious and finite resource.  When you are freaking out about the last point, you’re well on your way to losing the next one.  And furthermore, when you are squandering your energy that way, you are draining your tank and re-fueling your opponent’s, who notices and capitalizes on your little tantrums.  So, in the energy economy of competition, bad conduct is a lose-lose scenario.  In this article, I am going to call your attention to the three most prevalent conduct errors I witness and provide direction about how to channel your energy more effectively.  When you fall prey to them, you are scattering your energy.  When you avoid them, especially in tough times, you are husbanding your energy.

1. Imprecating: You hit a ball into the tin, out of court, or fail to retrieve an opponent’s winning shot, and yell any or all of the following: “OH, MY GOD!!!” “JESUS CHRIST!!!”  “YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!!”  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!”  “WHAT THE (expletive deleted)??!!!” Sometimes these outbursts come in singlets, pairs, or as a tricolon crescendo.  In this scattering error, you appeal to some absent tribunal, some Olympian counsel for answers as to why the universe has turned suddenly inimical.  Zeus snickers, “foolish mortal, plaything of fate,” as you go on to lose the next several points and petition the divine ever more vociferously.  The first fix for this error, which aims at husbanding energy, is to keep it inside and find a way to transfer the negative energy to positive.  Follow this husbanding routine: note the mistake and validate the frustration to yourself (“Damn!  A tin.  That’s a mistake.”)  Then, give yourself, again, to yourself, an encouraging correction (“Get the next point!” “Hit it higher!”).  In moments of extreme frustration, pace around the service box, tie your shoes, check your strings.  But do so, all the while being clear that you are re-focusing your mind for the task at hand and giving yourself a pep talk.  Don’t use that time to continue wallowing in your misery.  Following this routine will minimize the damage from a mental error, get you back on track, and, most importantly, save vital energy for when you need it most.
2. Disputing.  Things are not going well.  You have lost the last few points and the whining din of negative self-talk has become deafening in your ears.  Because you haven’t succeeded in re-focusing the mind, you become disputatious.  You question the referee’s calls, doubt your opponent’s retrievals, question appeals for lets and strokes, since obviously these things must be at fault for your poor play.  These external disputes are signs that inwardly things have continued their downward spiral.  That is, you are externalizing an internal struggle, all the while leaking and sputtering energy willy nilly.  The husbanding fix here is a bit tricky.  It requires some mindful attention to the self-chatter.  Has it become whiney, harsh and tinged with anger and righteous indignation?  If so, notice it and nip it in the bud!  Give yourself a quick scolding (“Come on!  Snap out of it!”) and then administer a pep talk (“Let’s play a couple of really strong points.”)  Even if you don’t win them, commit to changing the cognitive landscape toward the positive.  If you lose an entire game in negative talk, make sure your primary intervention during the game break is on the cognitive thermostat.
3. Storming.  Things have reached their nadir.  Now, when you lose a point, instead of just imprecating or disputing, you storm in the following ways: ball abuse: kicking the ball, slamming the ball into the tin after the point is over; racket abuse: nicking the side wall with a violent swing, throwing the racket into the corner, or even breaking the racket on the wall.  You also abuse reality: change the score, claim that a ball retrieved on the 2nd and a half bounce was up, swear that the opponent’s ball was out even though it was two feet inside the line.  In this frame of mind, a conduct warning or stroke can be the best signal that you have really lost your tether to the rational world.  The referee is trying to give you a lifeline back with that warning, though you take it as further proof of all the forces arrayed against you.  When things have reached this point, often a strong intervention from the entourage is the only fix.  A coach can help.  S/he can speak truth to the madness (“You’re going to lose if you carry on like this.”) and get you focussed on the present (“Just play one point at a time.”), as well as give you a good strategy.  But just as often, words don’t penetrate the rabid frenzy, and a parent provides the best intervention, who, after warning you once, will default you from the match if the tantrums don’t stop.  No doubt, this is the nuclear option, but it should be left on the table for players who can’t manage their own behavior.  Of course, if a parent doesn’t step in, a good referee will oblige by awarding your opponent a conduct match, the ref’s nuclear option.

   In this piece, I have outlined three forms of bad conduct, all of which betray poor cognition.  I have also written with an eye toward young athletes, but we know well that athletes of all ages fall into these traps.  And, while I have focused on squash, these remarks apply equally well to all sports. Indeed, to all life.  An important thing to recognize about poor conduct is that it violates the two main injunctions of good sport cognition: that you stay present and that you focus on the things you can control, not those you can’t.  When we are in a bad mental framework, and letting that framework ooze all over the court, it is because we are perseverating on past moments, as well as on negative rather than positive inputs.  Secondly, we can’t control referee calls, an opponent’s good play or bad shenanigans, but we can control our own conduct and play.  A huge step toward being able to control these two variables is by controlling our emotional response to the challenges of the moment. Controlling emotions saves energy.  Freaking out squanders it.  It is only by husbanding our energy rather than profligately scattering it that we avoid getting mired in the hellish quicksand of bad cognition and can get down to the more joyous and liberating business of floating like butterflies and stinging like bees.