An Athlete's Dialectic: Finding the Middle Ground

Athletes and athletics lend themselves to black and white thinking: you either have it or you don’t; you are either mentally tough or mentally weak; you are a good person and your opponent is a bad person; referees and umpires are either good or terrible; coaches either have a product focus or a process focus. It might be the case that all of these dichotomies stem from the queen of them all: you either win or you lose. But such zero-sum mindsets, so embedded in our culture, aren’t effective for athletes and their support systems. They corrode longevity in sport, one of the biggest problems in youth sport. And so, as in many of my pieces in this blog, I am turning to DBT ¹ to find an answer to this entrenched problem, that of finding a middle path between two extremes, threading the needle between the black and the white, finding the grey. To provide an example of the power of this principle, I thought I would lay out some of an athlete’s main dialectical dilemmas:

Process v. Product: Every athlete will tell you that a major shift in their outlook, performance, and enjoyment of their sport was this shift toward process and away from winning as the primary motivation. While, it’s important to have goals, even big ones (“I want to make the varsity.” “I want to play #1 for my team.” “I want to win the Nationals”), and winning is also very important and fun, it’s more important to set intermediate goals tracing from where things currently are and getting invested in the process of moving step by step toward those bigger goals. Have a process for everything (practice, preparation, competition). Even a process for processing the product in after-action reviews. Everyone in the athlete’s system needs to be practicing process, and those who aren’t—particularly parents—will bias the process toward product.

Talent v. Grit:This dialectic is such a common one that people don’t even notice it when it’s in play. When athletes perceive a competitor as better, they think there’s something inherently better in that player than in them. Players often panic when they see the draw and look at their first-round match in dread. And obviously, athletes competing at a high level are invested with a great amount of natural ability, perhaps nature’s most unfair luck of the draw. But, it’s been shown that the people who believe their raw talent is all they need, less motivated to work less hard, expecting good results to fall into their laps. Prodigious talent paired with a grueling work ethic was the “magic” of Tiger Woods, who was both a flashy front-runner and a gritty journeyman. The proof here is that very few golfers were as good at scrambling, as good at making the cut when he was near the cut line. True confidence—the ace up the sleeve of any successful athlete—is the birthchild of hard work. The primary resource for these two dialectics is Carol Dweck’s work on growth versus fixed mindsets², which is essentially explicates this dialectic I’m naming. She outlines quite well how detrimental to performance, satisfaction, and longevity a “fixed mindset” is to athletic and academic success.

Drilling v. Freewheeling:Every athlete knows the need for hours of rote practice before skills take hold and before they can be brought to bear in competitive situations. But, drilling can be inert and cold. An athlete also needs to practice freewheeling, improvisation, and flair. Follow your gut, try shots and strategies that emphasis virtuosity over function, shots you’ve seen your favorite athlete execute. Be bold, be spontaneous. Be you. In offsetting rote practice, it will reconnect you to the joy of playing your sport, you will get out of your head and into your body, and it will feel euphoric when you bring it out in competition. Think of it as honing your intergalactic funksmanship. ³ And it will completely catch your opponent by surprise, give him/her an emotional concussion, a distraction that you can capitalize on for the next few points. But, again, it can’t be your bread and butter. If you notice, some players are really good at one side of this dialectic, but everyone needs both. It takes discipline to practice something that is new, and might even oppose your natural inclination. Become comfortable with the uncomfortable.

The take-away here is obvious. Every athlete faces these dialectical dilemmas and every athlete is oriented more towards one end of them than the other. But, athletes need to identify which side of the dialectic they skew towards, and exercise new muscles on the other side of the dialectic in the service of finding the middle ground. While it sounds middling, it is actually the key to success, the path toward greater freedom, and thus, toward a more full-throated passion for their sport. Surpassing these dialectics allows access to transcendence and joy, for which there is no middle ground.

1: Linehan, M. 1993. Cognitive-Behavior Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder.

2: Dweck, C. 2006. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

3. Worrell, B., Clinton, G., Worrell, G., & W. Collins. 1972. “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up),” Mothership Connection. Casablanca Records.

Bearing the Unbearable

During the height of the pandemic, Melissa and I joined OrangeTheory Fitness to shake off the doldrums that had congealed in our veins, bones, and minds: sluggishness, pessimism, and perhaps even a bit of hopelessness.  Our days of being actively involved in fitness related activities seemed well behind us.  The workouts at OrangeTheory are extremely demanding: one hour of highly intensive cross training with your heart often working up to 90% of its maximum capacity.  And while the coaches can be relentlessly encouraging, the work can feel impossible.  The good news is that the cure largely worked for us: improved energy, mood, and outlook.  I even found myself thinking about making a comeback to competitive squash.  BUT, I did notice that while I loved the intensity of the workouts, if I found the music discordant, jagged, and loud (e.g. shredder rock, emo rock, some hip-hop [language!]), where I couldn’t find the beat, I found the workouts particularly challenging, and the self-talk fell in sync with my experience of the music, which is to say, discordant, jagged, loud, and even angry.  I would often want to quit: “I can’t do this!” “This is the definition of torture.”  “I hate this.”  “I pay for this?”  Sometimes, I even noticed some indelicate language of my own.  Needless to say, my performance on those work outs often suffered, and improvements I had gained weren’t there.  So, I decided to try to make hay out of noticing all of this and turn it into the overall challenge of the experience.  Here are the skills I employed:

 

Change Mindset & Talk Back: One way I managed this situation when it arose was that I would notice the turn toward negative talk and turn it around, talk back to it.  “I don’t need to love this music, I just need to finish this workout.”  “The workout is the same no matter what the music.”  “Don’t let the music get you down.”  “Push through.”  I even resorted to quoting Rudyard Kipling (“Or being hated, don’t give way to hating.”¹).  Often, I treated the music like it was a squash rival and I intensified my effort.  Finally, instead of making a snarky comment to the coach on the way out about the music as a passive aggressive payback for their torture (“That playlist killed me!”), I would thank the coach for a great workout (“Great workout. Thanks!” [Fist bump]).  That coach had planned a workout, a playlist, and had showed up for me.  It was my problem that I didn’t like the music.  In practicing all of these skills, I was tapping into the power of willingness over willfulness,² and working on my non-judgmental stance.²

 

Improve Focus & Find an Anchor: Obviously, focusing on my negative reaction to the music was scattering my energy, wasting it.  This energy suck was evident in my results.  Instead, when I noticed it, I would use it as a challenge to double down on my focus.  I would think about the part of the body most challenged, inhabit it, truly feel the burn.  The treadmill, the hardest part of the workout, has mirrors facing them, and I would set my gaze on my eyes, so I was literally making myself a rival of myself, staring myself down.  These skills helped distract me from the music and sharpen my concentration, perhaps the most valuable thing an athlete can hone.

 

Cope Ahead² for Difficulty & Set a Goal: I discovered that a serious part of the problem was that I only prepared for liking the music and plugging into the slipstream of the beat.  When it all syncs up, flow states are easier to find, and therein lies transcendence.  Time disappeared.  But, then, when my dislike for the playlist started, my disappointment made the next 59 minutes feel unbearable.  Time crawled.  Instead, I decided to plan for bad music, to prepare myself for the challenge of my negative change in mood and cognition.  I set the goal to treat the music, love it or hate it, like “Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same.”¹ This shift was crucial and hastened my ability to engage the other skills mentioned, shortening the time that my mind hindered my performance.  This skill speaks to the vital importance being fully prepared for every contingency you might encounter, including bad play, a slow start, or challenging conditions.  Young athletes often forget this skill, perhaps because they prepare their minds by visualizing good outcomes.

 

Of course, all of these skills rest on the mindfulness involved in noticing and observing² the problematic pattern in the first place.  So, I congratulated myself for that.  But, I experienced a tinge of shame when I thought about needing to resort to the very skills that I teach on a regular basis.  It was a comeuppance to remember that I needed them as well.  But then, I reminded myself that, like my athletes and clients, I also have a human mind and I’m not exempt from its devilish traps.  Far from it.  With the proper training and skills, we can transform the mind from a torture chamber & impediment into a shelter from the storm, source of strength & the sharpest arrow in our quiver.

 

______________

 

1=Kipling, Rudyard.  1910. “If,” from Rewards and Fairies.  Doubleday, New York.

 

2=Linehan, Marsha.  2015.  DBT Skills Training, Worksheets and Handouts. Guilford, New York.

The Container is Everything: The sporting body is the body politic

A MEMORY FROM my days on my college squash team haunts me regularly, ca. 1987. On one of our long van rides to a match, which averaged about 6 hours, we were somewhere between Ithaca and somewhere else, when our coach, breaking the silence, said, “I think it’s totally ridiculous that the Olympics are boycotting South Africa teams from participation in the Olympics. Politics has no business in sport. Something like that only penalizes the athletes. What do you think, Matt?” I remember distinctly that as my silence lengthened and my face reddened and tingled, words would not come to my mouth. Normally a galvanizing, good-time-Charlie, Coach was known for his larger-than-life personality, and everybody, myself included, worshipped him. Though Coach often led conversations, he never called on someone, classroom style. Was he calling on me because he knew I participated with other students in the regular gatherings outside of the Olin Library, protesting Apartheid and advocating divestment of any university financial interest in South Africa, then in the grips of a racist, white supremacist regime reluctant to grant full civil rights to its majority Black citizens? Indeed, at that time, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had been boycotting South Africa’s participation in the games since 1964 due to this system of segregation. Was he really espousing this position or was he calling on me because he thought I might disagree with him and thus, start a lively debate on the topic? Either way, I largely froze, and said something noncommittal, like, “I can see it from both sides.”

Some 35 years later, I found myself wanting to scream as my own history seemed to be repeating itself. During the Winter Olympics recently in Beijing, Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, was frequently asked the uncomfortable question of China’s dismal human rights record, particularly the ethnic cleansing program underway against its minority Uighur population. His response has been his stock and trade any time this kind of uncomfortable question is put to him: “The Olympics are not about politics. They are about uniting the world around our common love of sport.” In making this statement, he was not only conveniently forgetting that the IOC used its considerable clout to protest Apartheid for more than 20 years, but also this was a particularly galling statement to make a day after China voiced solidarity with Russia in its standoff with the US and NATO at the Ukraine border. Which is to say, that, contrary to Mr. Bach’s wishes, China doesn’t see the Olympics as a chance to unite the world, but rather, emboldened by the show of power that hosting the Olympics represents, has put its significant heft behind one side of a brewing international standoff. Additionally, the games in Beijing came only two months after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai “disappeared” after revealing that she had been sexually assaulted by a retired member of the Chinese Communist Party. In the face of these atrocities, countries, if they spoke up at all, issued a “diplomatic boycott” of the games. From what I can gather, this meant that there wouldn’t be any international treaties signed in China during the games, but that they would still send their teams and that the games will go on as scheduled. I imagine this is so that world leaders don’t punish the athletes, to use Coach’s logic, but say something in meek protest. I think these countries are saying their own version of, “we can see it from both sides.”

If I could go back in time to that moment in that van ride, I would say the following: “Coach, I think your argument is incorrect. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and from the smallest political unit of the family all the way to geopolitical superpowers, the container is everything. Indeed, politics is everything and infuses everything we do, from how we interact, to the conditions in which we go to the bathroom (Coach would appreciate a vulgarism here.).” I might add that, in fact, games with rules are nothing other than an expression of and metaphor for collective living. Thus, like anything else, playing sport is entirely dependent upon the context in which it takes place. And no athlete or sport is exempt. This fact is so obvious that those claiming otherwise must be participating in a willful and self-serving deception, further proving the point that Thomas Bach is a politician and not a sportsman, much less a humanitarian.

If Coach were to object to my line of argument, I’d ask him to think of athletes in systems that deny them power and exploit them for financial or political gain. I’d ask him to think of Peng Shuai, or of the athletes within the regime of the Russian Olympic Committee, or of the women in the National Women’s Soccer League, or of the athletes of the NCAA, alienated from the fruits of their labor reaped entirely by their institutions. I’d ask him to think of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. I’d ask him to think of any athlete whose parent used their child in the service of their own needs for fame, riches, and vicarious success. I would have to say that from this vantage point, some 35 years later, I’d say to Coach that until and unless large governing sport bodies fully acknowledge the reality of their political power, and use it to speak back to power in the service of the further liberation of humanity, sport will never realize its potential of being the truly unifying force that Mr. Bach and those like him pretend to celebrate.

What Simone Biles Can Teach Rory McIlroy (or any athlete managing burnout)

If you’re a fan of Rory McIlroy’s, then you will have groaned along with him through his disappointing performances in the big events this year. Sure, he is going through some swing adjustments. Sure, he won the tour event at Quail Hollow this year. But, when the chips have been down in important moments, he has looked somewhat hang dog and stuck in second or third gear: A missed cut at the Masters, a T46 at the PGA, a T56 at the British, following a missed cut at the Scottish Open. My blood ran cold as I listened to his press conference prior to the US Open, because it screamed of an athlete looking to get mental monkeys off of his back, of an athlete fighting with apathy, and having the pressure of huge performance expectations on his back. In the press conference, he said things like:

“[I’ve been putting] Too much pressure on myself, playing too carefully, being too tentative, not playing free.”

“[I’ve been asking] How do you take the pressure off yourself? By being indifferent. Not by not caring, but by not putting pressure on myself that I have to care.

“The difference between 2011 [when I won my last US Open] and now: “I had less going on in my head. I was less cynical.”**

I know that many athletes recently have revealed mental health struggles (Bubba Watson, Naomi Osaka), and this is great for sport and hopefully reduces stigma and increases access to mental health services. But, here, in facing yet more questions about why he hasn’t won a major in seven years, Rory is revealing just the kind of pressure he is under, and just the kind of deleterious effects such pressure has. One look at his face, and you can see that the fire that used to burn so fiercely in him has dimmed considerably. Furthermore, in that press conference, he referred to some advice he gave a young, female, Irish golfer, by saying that if she were to endure the “boring, mundane, and tedious” practice sessions, she could have a successful career. He’s crossed to line from convincing himself he doesn’t have to care, to dreading the monotony of it. He has pressure on his shoulders because he has to redouble his efforts when he has no interest in doing the rote work necessary to compete at that level. It’s no fun for him anymore, but the stakes are very high, and his sponsors are paying him a lot of money to care. It is just the kind of pressure Simone Biles cited as compounding the noise in her head, and helped derail her Olympic bid this year.

But, consider Rory’s plight: He’s been at this for coming on 15 years. With the wrap around season, there is no down time. For golf superstars, their calendar is truly international, with globetrotting and all the ensuing punishments that entails for the body. Additionally, in the Tiger era, training for golf has become a relentless pursuit, with many hours in the gym, crafting a super-hero body. Ask Jack Nicklaus, Raymond Floyd, Lee Trevino, and Arnold Palmer how many hours they spent in the gym. Indeed, half of the guys on tour in those years smoked. Finally, Rory now has a young daughter, and his new role as a father complicates his time and pulls on his priorities in ways he couldn’t have imagined when he won his US Open at Congressional in 2011. At this point, watching Poppy toddle is probably a lot more fascinating than another “boring” range session, “tedious” gym workout, or “mundane” weekend travel to Dubai, no matter how large the appearance fee.

Here it is in Biles’ own words:

I say put mental health first. Because if you don't, then you're not going to enjoy your sport and you're not going to succeed as much as you want to. So, it's OK sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are — rather than just battle through it. ***

Here she is laying out a formula by which less is more, and which says that sometimes you have to get off the same merry-go-round that brought you all of your success and fame in the first place. Indeed, use your place in your sport to give yourself a sabbatical. Several things need to be in place in order to support and encourage athletes in doing that:

• The mindfulness to recognize stress responses to pressure; that poor performance isn’t indicative of the need for more work, but for a break.
• A supportive family, community, and entourage that will endorse your decision.
• Governing bodies that are willing to reduce the number of events to keep its star athletes fresh, even if it means a loss in revenue.
• Governing bodies that are willing to factor in breaks and sabbaticals into rankings, tour cards, and qualifications for big events so that stepping away from the sport doesn’t carry the penalty of needing to re-qualify for everything. Let them come back where they left.

These changes would be almost unfathomable changes for most sport governing bodies, but doing so would be a sign that they truly care about their athletes and see them as people rather than as profit streams. But the change has to also come from within the athlete to listen to the inner voice, and to have an authentic conversation with that voice to, as Simone says, “put the mental first.” It’s on the athlete to rediscover the joy in the play, and the play in the work. Have fun again. Or stop.

**USOPEN.COM

*** “Read What Simone Biles Said After Her Withdrawal From The Olympic Final,” www.NPR.ORG, July 28, 2021.

Justin Thomas II: Opposite Action in Action

Maybe you saw that Justin Thomas just won The Players’ Championship, golf’s fifth major with harrowing closing holes that guarantee a pressure-filled and exciting finale. And this year was no different. Of note, Justin Thomas was able to win such a difficult tournament so recently after a number of setbacks, just the kinds of life events that can often derail a player for a long time: he had a very publicized public relations gaffe referred to in my last post, he lost his grandfather with whom he was very close, and his good friend and Presidents’ Cup teammate Tiger Woods was involved in a catastrophic and career-ending car accident which he was lucky to survive.

Asked how he managed to hold it together during these tribulations, he made the following response: “I talked to people. I reached out to people. I mean, I’m not embarrassed to say that I reached out to people to kind of let my feelings out and just discuss stuff with them….some of the thoughts and things I was feelings, it wasn’t fair to myself and I needed to do something. And my girlfriend was very helpful with that and staying on me to make sure I was taking care of myself…”* In this response, he leaves out the fact that he also made an immediate, non-defensive, and total apology for his social gaffe, reached out to the constituencies he offended, and went on a training program to understand the root of his implicit bias and to show the genuineness of his repair attempt.

I don’t know if he is referring to seeking out a therapist, but in reaching out to people he is, perhaps unwittingly, referring to an emotion regulation skill called “Opposite Action.”** All of the events he experienced (embarrassment, grief, loss) elicit emotions which have action urges that bring the sufferer inward, to hide, to withdraw, to isolate. Acting opposite the action urge is a quick and effective way to change the emotion, and in this case, it was to reach out to people who could validate him, support him, and mainly relieve the negative voice stream in his head. In doing so, he had his sadness normalized, his thoughts re-balanced, easing his sense of shame and self-blame. Also, he shortened time frame of his suffering, and won one of the larger prizes in golf, including pulling off some particular nerve-wracking shots on the 72^nd hole.

To review: Justin Thomas experienced three events that had strong negative emotional impact, all of which could have derailed his entire season, if not his career. The negative emotions have action urges of avoiding and shunning. Instead, he acted opposite those action urges, made apologies, took action, and reached out for solace. Aspects of his practice that were particularly effective are that he went to people who wouldn’t reject him or reinforce his negative thinking. Finally, he didn’t just pay it lip service, he went all the way and he kept on doing it. Opposite Action works best when you do it thoroughly and repeatedly. So, the next time you are experiencing some emotional turmoil that might interfere with your game and noticing the urge to withdraw, practice some opposite action, and you may just find yourself walking tall and playing your best game.

*Morfit, Cameron. 2021. “Monday Finish: Justin Thomas Finds Better ‘Headspace’ at THE PLAYERS.” Pgatour.com. 03.15.2021

**Although the behavioral practice of exposure is not hers, the skill “Opposite Action,” as I’m using it here comes from Marsha Linehan and can be found in her “DBT Skills Training, Handouts and Worksheets,” 2 ^nd Edition. 2015. Guilford Press. New York, pp. 231-240 & 280.

Justin Thomas, the PGA Tour & the Stain of Homophobia on Male Sport

If you are a golf fan, as I am, you will have by now heard of the episode involving Justin Thomas, currently ranked #3 in the world, at the Tournament of Champions in Hawaii. And as disappointing as it was, you may have even been encouraged by his heartfelt apology and commitment to do the necessary self-examination to “be a better person.” However, there are still elements of the event that continue to unsettle me and reveal just how much, on a systemic level, homophobia is just as alive as it ever has been in male sport. To support this claim, consider the following:

1) Though a financial penalty is probably imminent from the PGATOUR, it has not been announced yet, nor has there been a statement distancing themselves from homophobia in any form and stating that it has no place on their tour. I gather that they don’t generally make public statements about players' fines, but it’s strange that they don’t see their silence as a tacit approval.

2) While Ralph Lauren was quick to drop their endorsement deal with him, with the rapidity one would expect from a product line so directly affected. Citigroup announced in a blog * (2 weeks later) that they were staying with him after a large portion of this year’s sponsorship money of his was donated to an LGBT cause. They believe this move will help “create change.” Other sponsors, Titleist, Footjoy, Beats by Dre, NetJets, Woodford Reserve, and WHOOP have all remained silent.

Maybe you haven’t noticed this silence, but I guarantee you it has been noticed by anyone in the LGBTQ community, for whom silence has not only been equated with oppression, but actually with death, and which has been fighting for acceptance in a world which is all too happy to have it remain in the shadows of the closet. It has also been noticed by gay men, for whom that particular word is associated not just with hatred, but with violence.

Making these omissions and delays more surprising is that they come at a time when “corporate America’s appetite for dealing with such public missteps has never been lower.”** Contrast this to what happened to Tiger Woods: the shattered glass from the back window of his Escalade hadn’t even been swept up before all of his sponsors swiftly dropped him. Apparently, you become a toxic asset if you’re a philanderer, but you’re still on the payroll if you just happen to hurl around the odd homophobic epithet.

To understand the reticence of his corporate sponsors and tour, let’s look at the text of Thomas’ apology itself:

“I’m clearly not proud of what I said. It’s humiliating. It’s embarrassing. It’s not me. It’s not a word that I use, but for some reason, it was in there,” Thomas said. “ And that’s what I’m trying to figure out, as to why it was in there . It’s going to be a part of this process and training program or whatever I need to do, not only to prove to myself but prove to my sponsors and prove to these people that don’t know who I am that is indeed not the person I am.”

While he has been applauded for the sincerity of his apology, anyone who has been raised as a boy, with a male gender identity, and particularly in boys’ sport knows exactly why the “f” word is in there, and how it got there: it is still a part of male socialization that being gay is the worst thing imaginable. It is associated with everything bad in sport, being weak and losing. And that is exactly the way he used the word, apparently without even knowing that it had emerged from his mouth. It is not a comment on Justin Thomas that “it was in there,” but a comment that, despite the breathtaking advances that gay men have made (the right to marry, broad representation in TV, film, and advertising, a presidential candidate), being one is still seen as a liability to an athlete at the top levels of sport. Indeed, that word is so implicated into male socialization that it’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t be “in there,” hard to imagine it not being in there.

So, the major disappointment here is not necessarily that, in a moment of disparaging his own play, such a word slipped out of Justin Thomas’ mouth, but rather that his tour and many of his sponsors, in their silence, have sent the message that they tacitly agree with its usage, and are not interested in doing the work they need to do to help eradicate homophobia from where it resides in them and in the culture of those they are hoping to court as customers. In avoiding that responsibility and that work, they commit an injustice to all boys, gay and straight, struggling to a healthy sexuality and balanced gender identity. And, in doing so, they continue to make participation in sport a fraught and dangerous one for any aspiring gay athlete.

One effect of the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests was that many white people woke up to the fact that police violence against Black people is not a matter of one or two “bad apples,” but a part of a system that views Black lives as both inherently threatening and worth less. Similarly, here, it is not the Justin Thomases in golf who need to apologize, though their apology is welcome when they misstep like this. Rather, it is the tour and corporate sponsors who, in not denouncing homophobia in all forms, support and sustain the culture of homophobia that has stained sport since the inception of games with rules. In order for that stain to be removed, they need to repudiate it in no uncertain terms in both word and deed. Until then, you can expect to continue hearing the “f” word until you, too, don’t notice it.

**Hasan, Carla, “When an Apology is not enough,” citigroup.com. 1.25.21.

*Rishe, Patrick, “Crisis Management: Justin Thomas and his Endorsement Portfolio after being dropped by Ralph Lauren.” Forbes.Com. 01.23.2021.

Force v. Flow, part 2

In the last post, I wrote about the difference between force and flow energies. In this post I want to discuss ways to find, practice, and increase flow energy. There are two main steps to knowing flow energy more intimately and to cultivating it more committedly: 1) learning flow and practicing it, and 2) mindfulness to the difference between force and flow.

Cultivating Flow:

1) Find an activity whose intention is flow energy: yoga, tai chi, mindful walking. An easy entry point is a practice called Yoga Nidra, a yogic practice designed for more restful sleep. In Yoga Nidra we cultivate an energy that is relaxed, but alert, and aware. In essence, we practice dropping deeper and deeper into flow and away from force. Once this practice has become a part of one’s repertoire, we then have a frame of reference for the difference between force and flow.

2) Do things with the intention to do them in flow energy: with this difference in mind, and with mindfulness to force energy, bring yourself back again and again to flow energy. Everything can be flow when practiced as a such. Don’t wash the dishes to get to the next chore. Wash the dishes, as Thich Nhat Hahn has taught us: to wash the dishes. You don’t need to be practicing or performing your sport to practice flow energy, but rather, you can practice it all the time. Turn force into the exception rather than the rule.

3) Make an inventory of things that bring you out of flow (traffic, math tests, interactions with a certain someone, fifth set tie breakers, sprints); where do you rush? Where do you try too hard? When doing them, notice the dislike, discomfort, disease, and try to drop judgment or discontent. Lean into it. Allow it rather than fighting it or pushing through. Try slowing down, evening out the energy, exploring the difficulty or dislike. Enter it.

4) Of course, none of these steps matter if you aren’t breathing diaphragmatically. Learn this and do it all the time. It is the queen of all regulation strategies, and the portal to almighty flow.

Mindfulness to Force Energy is actually an umbrella form of mindfulness that comprises many levels:

1) Mindfulness to force emotions: frustration, impatience, anger, and even frenetic forms of excitement can be windows into the fact that we are in force energy.

2) Mindfulness to force thoughts: angry thoughts, racing thoughts, resentful thoughts, disbelief, rabid competitiveness, enemizing refs, rivals, crowd, and even one’s own entourage are all indicators of force energy.

3) Mindfulness to physical sensations: tension in the shoulders, belly, face; furrowed brow, clenched jaw; heat in the face and forehead; feeling “keyed up,” energized but at several levels too high.

4) Mindlessness to time: time is moving too fast or too slowly. You are rushing where pausing is called for. You are multi-tasking where one-mindedness is called for.

If this all sounds like a big deal, it’s because it is. Not only is force energy associated with bad performance outcomes, but it is often a window into deeper truths about the self. Maybe I am in force energy because I don’t like this activity. Maybe force is masking a confidence gap. Maybe I am in force energy because these are someone else’s goals and values I am representing. I am involved in false-self activity. In force energy I can win, but it will come at a cost. In contrast, it’s very hard to fake flow. If I am doing something that I love, and that resonates with my true self, it is much easier to find flow. If it is flow-syntonic, it is probably self-syntonic. In flow, we perform better because we are articulating something real, true and urgent about ourselves. And these are things we just can’t force.

Force V. Flow, part I

When I was at my competitive peak, with an intense practice and tournament schedule, one thing I particularly loved was the very intensity of it all: pressure  drills, court sprints, plyometrics, track workouts, squat thrusts with lots of weight on the bar, a really tough match or tournament weekend.  The soreness of it all was "weakness leaving my body," I believed, and acquiring the intensity that I lacked as a junior athlete definitely made me a more confident and steely competitor.  I've written often in this blog about the virtue of hard work.  But, for as fondly as I look  back on that period, I  also recognize that there was a certain  energy that attended all that work, fueled by my love of the intensity of it: there was a kind of force.  The force turned the intensity into a kind of do-or-die mentality.  I really pushed  through workouts, and I really pushed through matches.  At the time, I thought this intensity was my saving  grace, my superpower.  But, looking back, I see that it was all perhaps too intense.  I was too intense in practice, with no time for the crucial aspects of fun, flair or spontaneity, and too intense in competition, too edgy, too perfectionistic, the lens of  my gaze too narrow to enjoy the experience to its core.  I got hung up on bad calls, and I definitely got too judgmental with myself when I bunked a workout or lost a match that was within my grasp.  While there's much that could be said about this from a personality, or even maturity standpoint, today I'm focusing on the energetic nature of it, its quality of force.  Force energy is the energy that wants to make it all happen, that thinks that pushing is the only way through difficulty.  But, the flip side is that force has a certain violence to it, and as such, can have some serious negative consequences, as I'll outline below.  Of them all, the most detrimental is that it actually impedes peak performance and peak experience.  By pushing so hard, by having so narrow a focus, the richness of the  experience is lost, and with it, the joy.  I'm proud of my  competitive record,  but if I could  do it again, I'd try to temper the force energy, and dip below it to find an ease within the effort, the eye of the  storm.

To clarify more about the opposite of  force energy is  what Mihaly Csikszmentmihaly (1990) has called  "flow."*  Flow energy isn't lethargic or  associated with bad outcomes.  It isn't lazy or passive.  Both force and flow are, indeed, goal directed, but the temperature of their focus is different, with flow being a cooler, less harsh energy.  The intensity is there, but the violence is gone.  "Try easy," is what my yoga teacher, Baron Baptiste would say in my first encounter of the concept.  What a riddling thought when you are trying to get yourself into one of those angular yoga poses.  Drop the efforting in the effort he's saying.  Drop the panting, the pedal-to-the-metaling.  There are two critical areas of divergence between force and flow energy: the attention and the intention.  Let's look at it this way:

Force Energy	Flow Energy
1. While there may be an intensity of focus, its temperature is hot, the focus is laser-like, and its vibration is frenetic. As such, it can get unmoored.	1. The focus is equally intense but its temperature is cool, the focus is anchored. It is a state of immersion.
2. The intention of force energy is on the final product, on getting there, on completion.	2. The intention of flow energy is on what is happening, the process.
3. The attention of force energy is superficial, on the surface of the task.	3. The attention of flow energy is on the core of the experience, its essence.
4. Shallow, suppressed, uneven, and vertical breaths comprise force energy, making the action more difficult and scattering the energy.	4. The breath is long, even, horizontal, and focuses the attention and supports the intention of the action.
5. Negative emotions of impatience, anger, and disappointment color force energy.	5. Flow energy allows access to emotions like contentment, gratitude, and even joy. Peak experiences happen with flow energy.
6. In force energy, we are usually having a dysfunctional relationship with time: we expect too much in too little time, we can’t believe how slowly time moves when we want it to speed up, and our bodies are out of sync with the rhythm of the universe. Force energy is asynchronous.	6. Flow energy is in perfect conjunction with time; time goes away; time flows without being noticed; flow energy is not a race against or with time. Flow energy and time are synchronous.
7. Force energy begets conduct issues, injury, and is at war with reality.	7. Flow energy, by definition in sync with reality, is easier on the body, on the nervous system, and more readily begets peak performance.

I hope it's also clear that  peak performance and peak experiences happen in a flow state.  The problem is that many aspects of being an athlete funnel us toward force rather than flow: 1) most athletes who are looking to improve and win practice hard, and so, practice with a certain amount of force; 2) many coaches, in yelling and emphasizing results, are directing practice and play towards force energy; 3) many activities that athletes practice are, by their nature, difficult, and difficulty often steers the attention towards force; 4) modern life with its pace, its value on individualism and competition over collaboration and collectivism, orients the organism toward force energy; 5) finally, since we are bathed in force energy as our cultural amniotic surround, we often have no frame of reference for flow energy.  We have to stumble upon it, or channel it from the flow state we may have once known but have since lost.

In the next post, I'll talk about how to cultivate this primordial treasure to start enjoying peak performance and peak experience.  Stay tuned!

*Csikszentmihaly, M. 1990.  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  Harper Collins.  New York.

On Winners and Winning

So much of we do at Altius is to improve performance with an eye toward increasing self-esteem, enjoyment of the pursuit of excellence, and enhanced self-knowledge.  But, at the same time, we’d like one of the by-products of that work to be winning.  Winning is a validation of the hard work logged, and indicator that we’re on the right track, often a vindication on many fronts, and finally, a great deal of fun.  Often, when there is a prodigiously successful athlete, we call that person a “natural,” and we think that s/he wins often because of those innate qualities.  But, it’s also useful to think of winning as almost a separate skill from all the others.  It takes a great deal to get there, but it takes another set of skills to bring it across the line.  I decided to dedicate a number of pieces to the topic of winners in the hopes that we could distill what it is that the seeming naturals have that we could learn too.  Winning is not a magic, innate quality that winners have and losers don’t.  The reason why so many post-victory interviews begin with the question, “So, what was going through your mind when….” is because if we know what a winner thinks in crucial  moments, we could learn to think that way too.  In the next few posts, I will feature insights from winners as they reflect on some of their more momentous victories so that we can distill the set of skills that separates doing the thing from winning the thing.  Before we hear from them, I will say that, without doubt, winning requires at a minimum the kind of skills we’ve been writing about all along in Floating & Stinging: 1) hard work; 2) the ability to regulate the emotions during moments of high pressure; 3) self-belief; and finally 4) joy: the love of being in that moment doing that thing.  But don’t take it from me, let’s hear what the winners have to say.

“Foot-fault!”: A Child-Centered Parenting Moment in Youth Sport

Recently, I had a very unusual encounter in my life as a squash referee.  As you might imagine, I am often the person at whom daggers of the eyes are directed, as parents don’t like a call or set of calls I made ‘against’ their child. And while I am rarely approached by a parent to explain a call, a conversation I would welcome, I have been approached with the snide question, “So, tell me, have you ever played this game?” I understand the move: they feel as though their child has been hurt or wronged, and so they want to defend their child and direct anger at the person who hurt them.  There are two problems with this scenario: the first is that they are taking their child’s temper tantrum at the call(s) rather than the referee’s line of decision making as the fuel for their ire, and secondly, they themselves don’t have much competitive experience, and therefore aren’t so clear about the best way to handle real or perceived adversity in the heat of the moment.

This recent event was different.  I was refereeing a 17-year old boy playing in a local tournament against someone several years his senior.  He lost the first few points of the first game, and then won one and came in to serve.  “Foot fault,” I called, as his foot was well across the line when he hit his serve. As often happens when you make that call, I got an incredulous look.  “Are you serious?!” He caws at me.  “Yes,” I say.  “Your back foot was well across the line by the time you struck your serve.”  Looking at the gallery for a shared sense of outrage, and not getting it, he muttered, shook his head, and went to receive serve.

After the match, in which the 17-year old lost, I was approached by his father.  While I braced for a verbal lashing about my call, the father surprised me and thanked me. He told me that his son was in a temper tantrum at the first game break about the call, asking him if he could possibly believe that he had been called on a foot fault and that I must be crazy. He told me that he responded to his son: “Yes, I believe it!  He saw your foot across the line.  Now your job is to accept the call, keep your foot in the box while you serve, and focus on what you can do to win this match.”  He thanked me for helping his son get ready for the next stage in his playing career.  (He is going off to college in the fall.)  While I could go on to tell you the many other differences between this situation and the one I’m generally in when refereeing junior tournaments, the main one here is that this father has considerable experience as a player on the professional tennis tour.  He went on to tell me: “On tour, one of the main differences between guys who made it and guys who didn’t was the amount of time the ones who didn’t spent in the locker room whining about calls they didn’t like.”

I’m not one of these “tough love” parenting types, but I will say that a parent does a child a great disservice when he sides with the rage of the child against the referee.  Regardless of whether the calls are good or bad, learning how to deal with any and all calls is an essential aspect of being effective in competition. There is an array of skills you can help your child with when they are in this situation, but colluding with them in hating, or what I call enemizing the referee, will always yield bad results.  Here are some skills you can teach your kid instead:

1)    Radical Acceptance: encourage your child to accept all calls with grace, and move on to the next point.  But, this means really accepting and really moving on.  He or she can certainly appeal to the ref for an explanation so that they understand the ref’s line of thinking and help them avoid the same situation in future points, but they must generally accept all calls and keep the yelling in their head to zero.  This may require the subsidiary skills of pacing and breathing.  Remember: a player has 10 seconds to prepare for the next point. Use them to embrace reality and re-regulate.

2)    Do not rile your child up by getting into an ‘enemy mindset’ vis-à-vis the ref.  That is, don’t look exasperated and outraged in the gallery after a call. Your child will see this and it will only increase the complaining, whining, and feelings of victimization on the part of your kid.  This mindset is not clean, it focuses the mind in the wrong direction, and often produces bad performance and worse conduct.  Therefore: you, too, must engage skill #1 above, radically accept reality and self-soothe.  Doing so will help your child do it.

3)   Encourage your child to have a polite conversation with the referee after the match to explain his calls.  There might be something that your child does not understand about the rules that will help him in future matches.  It will emerge that the referee is not, in fact, a raving lunatic.  And, having this conversation will also be an exercise in self-advocacy, an interpersonal effectiveness goal which will result in greater self-esteem.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the skills I’ve outlined here.  Parents so often ask me how they can help their child in the fracas of competition, but they take “standing up for their kid” as so much a part of nature’s bargain that their default mode ends up being exactly the wrong track to take in the face of difficult, confusing, or even bad calls.  Using the skills I’ve outlined here will help develop a resilient, interpersonally effective athlete whose attention can be focused on the correct performance goals at the right moment.  Who knows, you might even be thanking a referee one of these days.

Jon Rahm, David Duval & The Lessons of The Players Championship

Anyone who watched the final round of this year’s ‘fifth major’, The Players Championship, will have seen the ascendant Spanish golfer Jon Rahm make one of the worst decisions I have seen in my years of watching tournament golf.  Holding a share of the lead when he came to the par 5 11th hole, his drive found the bunker on the left side of the fairway.  He was blocked from a straight line to the green by trees on his left sight line, but he decided—against the counsel of his caddie---to go for the green.  The shot required him to hook a shot out of the bunker, against the prevailing wind, over water, and to a pin that was on the right side of the green.  His shot did not hook enough, found the water, provoking a temper tantrum, as he swore, “I was so fu**ing sure the first time,” implying that it was his caddie’s fault for instilling the fatal dose of doubt to the shot, and revealing he had way too much going through his head to do anything well.  Probably an imprudent shot under any circumstances, but with one of his biggest wins on the line, it was downright self-destructive.  The commentators: Hicks, from the booth: “That is very, very perplexing;” Maltbie, from the course: “Really a poor decision;” and finally, lead announcer Paul Azinger, the new Johnny Miller: “You know, when you’re nervous, you don’t just hit poor shots, you think poorly.”  His comment supports the point I made in my post “Mastering the Moment.”  One of the reasons that players play and think poorly in pressure moments is because everything has sped up in their body and their mind, and they are not doing enough to counteract the very normal hastening that comes with elevated nerves.  In that piece, I lay out some protocols that will help slow everything down the next time you are nervous.  Furthermore, Rahm and his caddie need to do some serious processing so that they are not at odds the next time a big moment comes along.  As I have said in yet another post, that processing should start by reviewing tape of this incident multiple times, and for Rahm to be brutally honest with himself to see if he felt in his right mind, and to be honest about all the physiological reactions he remembers having, so he can use them as cues next time to slow down and rely on his caddie more not less.  The sad thing is that, even after his bogey on 11, he was still in the tournament, until three bogeys later when he wasn’t.  Sadder still is that golfworld magazine had written a piece after his Saturday 64 saying that he had overcome his temper tantrum days and would be very difficult to beat on Sunday.  It looks like there’s more work to be done.*

In a lead-up piece to the tournament, PGATOUR.COM ran a piece about David Duval’s win at The Players in 1999 during a dominant period when he had a 30 percent win percentage in his tournament starts, a remarkable statistic.  Duval speaks of that win as one of his most special because of how difficult the course was playing (e.g. highest winning score in the event’s history), and how much patience he had, and how he “held it all together.” And what he said about that tournament and that period is, “It becomes pretty easy.  There’s a hyperfocus…There’s an emptiness in your mind, if you will.  Some clarity.  It all kind of ties together.”  Here, too, he is validating a point I made in these pages (“Think Like Dustin: A Lot Less.”), and while you might not be able to play like Duval at his prime, you can certainly practice getting into that mind state.  One thing such practice does is slow down your subjective experience of time.  I know it will help you, and I certainly know it could have helped Jon Rahm last weekend in The Players.**

*Powers, C., “Players Championship 2019: Jon Rahm Claims he’s a changed man.  If that’s the case, watch out.” Golfdigest.com, Mar 16, 2019.

**Martin, S., “Duval’s Win at Sawgrass: an extreme test of patience,” pgatour.com, March 10, 2019.

Getting Lost in Your Own House: The Complete Collapse

If you’ve ever choked in an athletic event, you will know that it is one of the worst experiences an athlete can have.  I often differentiate two kinds of choking: a flub and a complete collapse. This piece will focus on the complete collapse, and the next one on the flub.  For now, let’s let it stand that the difference between them is one of time: the flub takes place in an eyeblink, whereas the collapse unfolds over time, making it all the more awful and harrowing.  Thus, it deserves a bit more attention.

In the collapse, one player or team goes from being in a dominant position in an event only to completely unravel, committing a number of almost inexplicable errors standing in stark contrast to the type of supremely wonderful and confident play that put them in the leading position in the first place.  Examples of this include: Serena Williams’ meltdown at this year’s US Open; her loss to the unseeded Italian Roberta Vinci in the 2015 US Open final, keeping her from the remarkable feat of holding all the Grand Slam titles in one calendar year; Jordan Spieth’s back nine unraveling at the 2016 Masters; Dustin Johnson’s limb-loosening effort in the 2008 US Open at Pebble Beach; Rory McIlroy’s belly flop in the 2011 Masters; Jean Van de Velde’s awful gut wrench on the 18^that the 1999 British Open; and perhaps most famously, Greg Norman’s storied collapse in the 1996 Masters.

One thing that unites the flub and the collapse is a breakdown in the player’s ability to regulate their physiological response to the moment.  With the proper monitors, you would be able to detect quickened breathing and elevated heart rate, sweat glands would be more active, and thoughts would race more, indicating the shift from parasympathetic to sympathetic nervous system.  That is, even if it were to take place over an extremely short period of time, the brain of the sufferer would experience itself as under attack.  These kinds of changes, even on the subtlest of levels, are enough to cause corresponding changes in the fine muscle work required for skillful action, no matter how rote, routinized through hours of practice, forged in decades of competitive experience.  But, during a collapse, in addition to the physiological changes mentioned above, there is the additional one of nausea in the gut, owing to the activation of the vagus nerve, running from the brain to the viscera.  This is why so many people in the midst of a collapse experience extreme nausea, and may throw up, or even lose control of their excretory functions.  This is also why we have the expressions of “puking on oneself” or “soiling oneself” to describe this kind of event.  Other physiological changes include an over-narrowing of vision or hearing, disorientation with respect to time, and even a sense of dissociation, that one is leaving one’s body altogether, watching helplessly as this is happening. All of a sudden, you cannot execute skills which have been so well honed they almost feel automatic.  You are lost within your own house.  And worse, you can’t find your way out.  Such a collapse, and the resulting shame, can be extremely difficult to recover from, as you can tell from Jordan Spieth’s not having really made it back from his Masters’ episode, and from Greg Norman’s comments in his press conference after that round, saying that he’d be alright, that it was just a game, and that he had his money and his Maseratis to keep him warm.  The puker doth protest too much.

OK, so what can you do?  1) Well, the first thing is to recognize the physiological signsearly and accept that a collapse is upon you. You have to be consciously attuned to the elevated heart rate, hastened breathing, rapid thoughts [disbelief!], jittery hands, nausea, and then 2) intervene with THE BREATH.  The breath, always crucial, can nip a collapse in the bud, if anything can.  Make sure your breathing practices are solid. Breathing is the bedrock, the salvation, the true hail Mary of sport performance.  Next, 3) plug back into your senses.  As you feel yourself telescope back into the fun-house mirror of your head, plug back into the reality that is happening around you: the sights, the smells, and sounds of your competition.  These are not just cues for you to get back into present reality, but they can be pleasant reminders for you of why you love your sport, and therefore shift you from fear to passion.  If you have gotten to the point of leaving your body, 4) use your “snap out of it” skill.  This skill, developed with your coach, can be a slap to your thigh, a snap of a rubber-band on your wrist, or a gentle slapping of your club or racket on some part of your body.  Finally, 5) believe in yourself. Self-belief, another form of faith, is so powerful in a collapse.  A confident stride is just the thing you need when you think you have forgotten how to walk. During a collapse, self-faith can be expressed in a number of mantras developed with your coach.  “C’mon, Matt, you know how to do this.”  “This feels new, but it’s old hat.”  “You LOVE this.”

That said: the collapse might be such a totalizing experience that there’s not much you can do. Many people think that such collapses are due to inexperience, and that they’re more likely in younger athletes than in older.  But, that’s not so true, as the Greg Norman and Serena Williams examples make clear.  One thing is true: whether you ever recover from your total collapse is based on how you handle it.  Athletes with a growth mentality, a process-oriented approach, can recover and use the experience to make themselves even better competitors.  But, it doesn’t happen automatically: you have to be willing to walk back through it, moment by moment, in exposure format, to help rid yourself of the shame, and to learn as much as possible from what happened.*  Just think about Rory McIlroy: two months after his Masters’ fiasco, he hoisted the US Open trophy, and three more major victories later, cites his collapse as the most important day of his career, and that “ I learned so much about myself” (http://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/12603182/rory-mcilroy-says-masters-2011-collapse-was-most-important-day-my-career).  And, as I say at Altius, if that’s not winning, then I surely don’t know what is.

*On learning from losing, see my earlier posts: (“Learning from a Loss,” January 1, 2014; “Lessons from a Loss,” January 12, 2014; “Scott’s Lytham Opportunity: The only way out is through,” August 17, 2012.)

Mastering the Moment

People who play games with a clock, which is to say, most team sports, know inherently that the time allotted to periods or quarters or halves is not absolute, but can be manipulated. They know that they can speed up or slow down play based on what is best for them at any given time.  People who play individual sports, or sports where the race against time is not an obvious aspect of the game, need to learn how to use time strategically, because left to its own devices, it will work against you.  For example, at certain crunch times in your event do you speed up, slow down, or become completely disoriented with respect to time?  People who have had the experience of a mental collapse, or choke, or even slight, but costly, mental lapse know that time is one of the dimensions that they lost control of as they slid into their demise.  These people often say things like, “Before I knew it, I was shaking the guy’s hand” (having lost), or “It all seemed like just a blur.” Whereas people who were able to master the moment can tell you with the utmost specificity what happened when and how they reacted, as if they were narrating a movie frame by frame.  The fact that we lose track of time is completely understandable because it is such a deeply entrenched cultural phenomenon, particularly for hard driving athletes embedded in hard driving cultures.  Fast gets rewarded, where as we have the impression that slow gets left in the dust.  But, actually, if we think about it, most of our wisdom comes retrospectively, which means that we were ignorant to the lessons taught in the moment.  Thus, it only makes sense that if we could slow down time, we might, might, have the opportunity to learn important lessons as they are happening, and not need to wait until later to see what was right there in front of our face.  It’s often remarked that the truly great athletes respond to the moment because they can react to inputs as they are coming in, and notice them calmly and with bare attention.  They don’t need to wait for the post-game analysis to see what was happening and how they should have reacted.  Here are some skills to help you become one of those players who reacts in the moment rather than one who regrets after the fact:

Find Time Opportunities: Together with your coach, find the parts of your sport where you can control time: game breaks, intervals between points, even ways within points to hasten or relax the pace.  All of this should be done with the rules of the game in mind, which is to say, though you are being strategic, you are not cheating or resorting to gamesmanship.  Then, practice those skills.  Often.

Review Tape: If you don’t tape your matches, start doing so. It will be valuable, particularly during losses, to see how you react to being under pressure, particularly with respect to time.  If, when you are watching, and you notice yourself speeding up, try to remember the emotion at that moment: excitement, anxiety, anger.  Remember that emotions are OK, but we succeed by lopping off the peaks and valleys of those emotions when we are playing.  (There are skills for that, too.)

Mindfulness to time: In your non-sport life, pay attention to time. Are you impatient when waiting for something?  Do you rush through things you like, and plod through things you dislike?  Notice if you lose track of time.  Say things to yourself like, “I’m rushing,” or “I’m being impatient,” if those things are true.  Or, “I’m dallying,” or “I’m avoiding,” if those are true.  Make these observations and take appropriate curative action without judgment.

Practice patience: Try the “watched pot” drill.  Fill up a teakettle with water, set it on the stove on high, and stand there until it boils.  Notice all of your urges to leave, notice all of the times you are fighting the process and rushing the pot along (“come on, already!”).  When you notice this, bring your attention back to the pot, to your breath, and say to yourself, “it will boil when it boils.”  There are all sorts of variations on this drill of patience in your life: in the car, in store lines, with your children and partner.  Believe me: the world will be better for a more patient you.

Practice bare attention: Find a drill that focuses you just on what’s happening.  For example, I often tell squash players (or tennis players) to try the “bounce-hit” drill, which is to simply say (in your head) “bounce,” or “hit” when the ball is bouncing or being hit.  Banish any other thought, but those two: bounce and hit.  This drill can be tailored to any sport.

Don’t just do something, sit there: Yes, meditation. Many athletes have discovered the performance enhancing power of meditation, and almost all of them praise its ability to slow down time and put the power of controlling it increasingly into our hands.  Being fully present is both completely necessary for athletic success, and a skill that can be practiced.  Some of that presence comes with the joy we experience in playing our sport, but it is greatly amplified when we practice having a widely observant mind, consciously free of distracting, time-hastening clutter.

The Romans knew that time slips through our fingers as we focus absentmindedly on other things, and so they gave us the phrase “tempus fugit.”  Unfortunately, we have mistranslated that to say, “time flies,” as if it were a bird. Whereas they were telling us that time escapes, we lose track of it, it is a fugitive.  With these skills, you can be in a better position to be its warden and master rather than its plaything and chump.

Raymond Floyd, Corey Pavin, Shinnecock, & the Life Lessons of the US Open

Everyone wants to know how athletes manage situations of intense, seemingly unbearable pressure. Kids famously practice putts saying in their heads, “this is for the US Open,” to accomplish the job of all play: simulate mastery over situations that seem well beyond control.  This year, in advance of the US Open at Shinnecock Hills, the USGA has done us a great favor and provided video interviews with the winners of two previous winners at that storied venue: 1986 (Raymond Floyd), 1995 (Corey Pavin), calling these segments, “My US Open.”  I encourage you to watch them in full, but I wanted to comment on two moments from Floyd’s and Pavin’s because of the window they provide into supreme moments of good cognition when the stakes are as high as they can be.

Raymond Floyd and the Stepping Away Skill

Perhaps the most important shot of Raymond Floyd’s victory was his third on the 16th hole in the fourth round.  When he is in his crouch, on the cusp of hitting the ball, he walks away, distracted by the noise of some cameramen off in the fringe.  You can watch the action starting at 3:25 in the video: http://www.usopen.com/watch/features/2018/05/16/my-u-s--open--raymond-floyd-5785577578001.html.  As you saw, having noticed that he was distracted, he stepped away, and yelled at the photographers.  Whether or not you think his yelling at anyone would be a good move for him in that moment, his remarkable skill was stepping away rather than just going ahead and hitting.*   Many golfers know how difficult it is to step away when you have committed to your shot and are on the cusp of making it, particularly at that moment, with that kind of pressure, when nerves are on a hair trigger.  As you look at the video, try to put yourself in his shoes, and ask yourself if you would have had the presence of mind to hold off your shot, rather than be distracted, be irritated, hit anyway, and make a mess of it. This video segment is a terrific testament to the power of stepping away when all is not just right.  This is a skill you can practice, too, and I encourage you to do it, so that it’s not foreign to you when you need it.

Corey Pavin and the Self-regulating Power of Prayer

One of the more famous golf shots of the modern era is Corey Pavin’s four-wood into 18 in the final round of the US Open in 1995.  We remember him running to the top of the hill and, seeing the result of the shot, raising his arms in exaltation.  What his narration of this moment brings to our attention is that after his bit of celebration, he thought he was showing too much emotion, getting too worked up, knowing that, in theory, such elation could derail effective action.  He then tells us that he gets down in a crouch, and says a prayer to help calm his nerves, and the video shows a close-up of him doing this:  (http://www.usopen.com/watch/features/2018/05/16/my-u-s--open--corey-pavin-5785572358001.html, start viewing at 5:20).  Now, whether or not we might think he was being a bit too uptight by punishing himself for showing too much emotion, he reveals in his video that prayer, or taking a pause to regulate his emotional response, is one important skill he relied on at this most crucial moment.  This is another skill I recommend that you add to your repertoire.  It doesn’t need to be prayer, per se, but, I do suggest that you work together with your coach to come up with several techniques for regulating your emotions, and work on how and when to insert those skills into your sport since they will invariably be sport specific, and each sport will have its myriad of situations which will demand these skills.**

Both of these moments have two very important skills in common, and I recommend you work them into your repertoire as well.  The first skill is a keen awareness of your inner state***, and it is the sine qua non of successful sporting life and life in general, and it is a sub-skill of mindfulness writ large.  It is absolutely crucial to know what it is you are experiencing, as you are experiencing it, so that you can know how to respond to it effectively and in the moment.  I have written about the many forms of mindfulness in sport in this blog, and in a sense, working on one aspect is as good as working on all aspects of it. But, this is crucial: we spend so much time in our culture, particularly if you happen to be male, squelching, suppressing, or fleeing emotional experience, much to our detriment.  And it is engrained in us that success in life and sport requires an eradication of our emotional experience.  “Just do it,” we are taught.  But, many a tragic moment in sport and life has as its seed disavowed or unacknowledged emotion.  So, keen awareness of your inner state is about as crucial a skill as you can imagine. Secondly, both players make use of a mindful pause during their action. For Pavin, it involves a prayer in a prostrate position.  For Floyd, it involves walking away from his duties to ream someone out.  But, both men knew they needed to intervene in the action, take a pause, and then return to the action.  In doing so, they are mastering not only themselves, but that most elusive of all demons in sport, time.  They are orchestrating the moment, rather than being pawns of it.

*Note: As you can tell from my commentary, I think it is generally antithetical to good performance to engage in the kind of yelling Raymond Floyd did in that moment.  And, as you can also see, he defends his actions staunchly.  He did what he did so that he could know that they wouldn’t do it again in when he went back to execute his shot.  Still, generally, in this day and age, you see players’ caddies do the work of managing such exigencies for the player.  This kind of orchestration between player and his entourage is key.  You do not want to further enflame your anger, and then need to perform the delicate kind of surgery required of your nerves in this kind of situation.  Clearly, it worked for Raymond Floyd, but I think this is more a testament to his concentration skills, and perhaps to his particular fiery constitution.  While this is not the focus of this post, I write frequently of adapting the correct ‘landscape of the mind’, and I encourage you to court one that is lukewarm rather than excessively hot or cold.  The skills I discuss in this post all work toward a well-regulated, or lukewarm mental landscape.  Which leads me to another point:

**Note, too, how different these players are with respect to their response to their emotions.  Corey Pavin does not trust his happiness, or rather, knows that he should keep it under wraps, as if it is something unseemly. We don’t know if he is praying to stay calm, or to ask for forgiveness for showing excessive pride.  But either way, he thinks he needs to do it to stay in his performance zone.  Raymond Floyd on the other hand, seems to feed off his fire.  He is making of his fingers a pretend gun and shooting at the hole when the ball goes in, he is winking at his caddie (an action whose derivation he couldn’t even fathom), he is yelling at people in the rough, and increasing rather than slowing his gait.  He is clearly a different animal than Corey Pavin.  Whereas he is not holding anything back, Pavin is urging himself toward restraint.  So, what this tells us is that not everyone’s competitive engine revs at the same speed. It is a tricky, but vital, thing to know what your range is and how to cultivate a landscape that keeps you in that range.  One important aspect a sport cognition specialist can help you with is, in conjunction with your parents and coaches, know which temperature suits you best in competition, and how to keep yourself revving at that perfect heat throughout your competition.

***While I have not used her language, Marsha Linehan’s “Mindfulness of Current Emotions” skill (her Emotion Regulation Handout 22) is a useful reference here.  She has been one to successfully integrate Buddhist mindfulness practices into Western mental health practices geared towards managing extreme emotional states.  See, Linehan, M.  2015. DBT Skills Training Manual, 2ndEd.  Guilford Press. New York, New York, pp. 403 ff.