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.

Excuses & Radical Responsibility

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the goofy t-shirt that has common excuses tennis players use when they hit a bad shot.  The shirt says things like: “the sun got in my eyes,” and “my strings were too tight.”  You get the point.  While the shirt is intended as a light joke, it speaks to a natural tendency that all of us have when we make a mistake.  We immediately leap to the mitigating factors that led us astray.  Top athletes, in particular, fall prey to this defense mechanism, often called denial, because they have honed their games to such an extent that they feel as though they are no longer prone to simple mistakes.  This is why you so often see a player glance with a disbelieving look at his or her strings, racket, the ground or the air after a bad shot, trying to fathom the reason for their miscue.  But instead of excusing away a bad shot, I encourage you to use a skill I will call ‘radical responsibility’, in which you avoid the easy balm of environmental fluke and instead take full, personal ownership for the mistake.  Owning your errors is the quickest path to shoring them up, whereas excusing them away is the surest way to remain in the fiction-laden universe of denial and sour grapes.  In this post, I will expand on this common pitfall and promote the skill of radical responsibility as a way toward improved performance.

    Often, there are some other cognitive distortions lurking behind a defense mechanism and it’s important to know which one you might be using when you resort to excuses.  I have written about them both previously, but the first is perfectionism.  Many athletes understandably fall prey to perfectionism because they work so hard and are always striving for the perfect result.  This kind of striving is a good thing.  But it derails performance when the athlete thinks he or she has trained away all mistakes.  But even the best players hit the ball into the net or chili-dip an easy chip shot.  An excuse, then, masks the insult that the mistake has caused to the imagined perfection.  But, often a mistake can be a good opportunity to notice a technical flaw or to realize that your attention has strayed from the task at hand.  The second one is grandiosity, the idea that as we train and get better, we get beyond making certain mistakes, that somehow they are beneath us, that One so Great should never make an error so small.  They say that great mathematicians are not good at simple calculations.  But, that doesn’t make them immune to the laws of nature which addition, subtraction and division describe.

    No.  The real opportunities for learning from mistakes comes from taking radical responsibility for them.  Instead of “I had a bad lie,” try, “I didn’t account for my lie.”  Instead of “the wind really took that,” try, “I didn’t adequately judge the wind.”  That is, radical responsibility demands that you bring your own agency into focus before considering the environmental factors.  Doing so will give you more opportunities to know what you need to work on, and will give you a greater sense of ownership in the outcome.  You take credit for your victories, so you should also put yourself forward as the author of your mistakes.

    I will leave you with two recent examples of how this sense of radical responsibility can play itself out even among the best players.  After missing the cut at this year’s U.S. Open, 2007 Masters champion Zach Johnson remarked, “I’d describe the whole course as manipulative.  It just enhances my disdain for the USGA and how they manipulate courses.”  Now contrast that remark with one that comes from the 1996 P.G.A. Champion, Mark Brooks.  Many people might not have known that he was actually caddying for another tour player at this year’s Players Championship.  When asked what his years of competitive experience were bringing to his man’s bag, he replied: “One thing I try to get him to do is to take responsibility for his shots, really do it, deep down.  And the second thing is to work on his deficiencies.”  Note that the two are connected: take radical responsibility for your mistakes, see them as windows to deeper technical flaws, and then use that feedback to reduce their frequency.  Radical responsibility: put it in your bag and on your next t-shirt.
(For help with this or any other performance challenge, don't hesitate to contact Altius Performance Works at MattMunichPhD@gmail.com.)

Healing to run, running to heal

In the wake of the events at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent shootout and stakeout in Watertown, there has been much discussion of the strength and resilience of the Boston community.  Our Mayor crowed, “Boston will overcome,” and our president uttered his somber words, “they picked on the wrong city," and, "make no mistake about it, we will finish the race.”  The phrase “Boston Strong,” has gone viral.  Even our busses flash this slogan after their LED banners show the number of the route, as if, no matter what bus you get on, we are all headed toward this same impregnable fortress.  And indeed, many of the runners, even among the injured, have pledged that they will run next year, even if on new fiberglass limbs.  Such a display of strength in the face of such terror is both admirable and simply human.  We endure because we have no choice.  But, what of those who don’t feel this sense of strength, whose sense of safety has been so shattered that they are experiencing far greater disturbances than can be addressed with simple slogans of an imagined bravery?  What if they cannot fathom running the marathon again, or even, running again?  What do we say to them?

    The subjective nature of trauma.  The first thing to say is that trauma is an entirely subjective experience.  Just because you weren’t there, doesn’t mean that you weren’t traumatized.  The images of the explosions and the descriptions of the wounds were repeated so often by the media that we all had a very vivid pictures of the horrific event imprinted in our minds.  Some people can seem to regroup relatively quickly, while others--particularly runners and marathon participants--might feel that their universe has become so inverted that they just cannot imagine returning to their pre-event peace of mind.  The important thing to remember is that there is nothing inherently wrong with either response.

    Know the signs of acute traumatic stress.  The second thing we might offer them is to recognize that certain reactions to trauma, though distressing, are normal and can be overcome.  Professionals often break down trauma symptoms into clusters, the most common of which are: re-experiencing (flashbacks, nightmares, hightened sensitivity to reminders of the event), avoidance (social withdrawal, difficulty having or naming feelings, avoiding stimuli or activities associated with the event, difficulties with memory), and hypervigilance (an edgy feeling of always being on, of always thinking the event is going to happen again).  Experiencing these symptoms can often make a person feel as though they are going crazy, when in fact, they are part of the body's natural protection system that went into overdrive during the event.

    Grounding exercises.  One good way to help yourself if you are experiencing any of these symptoms is to first recognize that this is what they are.  Then, you can practice some fairly simple grounding exercises to help you through.  If you are having re-experiencing symptoms, it is important to stop the thought or wake up from the dream and say something to yourself like, "It's over.  It's not happening now.  It was only a flashback/dream.  I'm safe."  If you are having some social withdrawal, try to make yourself do something socially that maybe stretches your comfort zone but isn’t impossible.  Ask a friend to do something that feels pretty easy and then expand from there.  And if you are experiencing some hypervigilance, practice some grounding exercises like some deep breathing (exhaling twice as long as your inhale), guided meditation, or even some physical exercise that gets you out of your head and into your body.  One thing that you will notice about these grounding exercises is that they attempt to give you back some control that was lost during the traumatic event.  Loss of control is one of the signal aspects of trauma and by addressing these symptoms yourself you are taking back some of what was lost.  

       Yet another thing that was lost in a traumatic event is some basic trust in the universe, our faith that bad things like this shouldn't happen.  In that regard, trauma represents a spiritual injury as well as a physical and psychological one.  For this sort of injury, I might suggest that running does offer the best bet for a return to spiritual health.  Your running has been a spiritual exercise for you, a time when mind and body synchronize with your surroundings and gave you that sense of transcending the here and now and participating in something larger than yourself.  Thus, running can be a way to re-harmonize what has gone so badly out of tune.  Recognizing and treating the signs and symptoms of acute stress rather than pretending they're not there might just be one way for you to put those shoes back on to begin the long journey back to the starting line.  But, if some of these symptoms are particularly severe or last longer than a few months, don’t hesitate to contact a mental health expert with some experience working with traumatic stress.

On Rivals & Rivalry

When I arrived as the new coach of a squash team, I entered unknowingly into a long-standing rivalry between my new team and that from another local prep school.  The bitterness between the two teams ran long and deep, with charges of thievery at games, boyfriend stealing, slurs on social media, and the standard suspicion that somehow the other side was gaining some competitive advantage through unfair means.  I was, quite frankly, shocked at the level of nastiness to which this rivalry had descended, particularly in the genteel sport of girls' prep school squash, and dedicated my first season to cleaning up the tenor of the rivalry and getting my team focused on the squash and not the banter.  For it seemed obvious to me that not only was this grudge antithetical to the entire mission of the school, we were the ones whose squash was suffering the most and who always came up on the losing end of our close encounters.  I often wondered if my team had decided that they would never beat this team and so had decided to take the consolation prize of winning the smear campaign.  The recent and very public kerfuffle between Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods has brought my old experience back to me quite vividly, and so I thought I'd share some things I tried to impress to my team back then about what a fantastic opportunity a rival represents and how to transform the negative feelings a rival elicits into performance gains.

    Violation of the first commandment.  Becoming embroiled in the negative aspects of a rival violates the first commandment of good sport cognition, namely, to focus on the things you can control, not the things you can't.  Though we need to be mindful of our opponent's moves and gamesmanship, a rivalry starts hurting our performance when our focus moves exclusively on that behavior rather than the appropriate performance response, which will usually just be to commit to focusing on the task at hand.

    Elevate the rival.   Two important distortions occur when a rivalry has gone south.  The first is that a rival is in our way and the second is that the rival is somehow less than human.  We see this latter in the terrible name calling we engage in toward the rival and in attributing evil intent to the rival.  Both of these thoughts elicit hostility, a motivator sometimes, but more often a distraction.  Instead, we have to shift the thinking and recognize that a rival offers a great opportunity to strengthen weaknesses in our own games and train harder, focus more clearly and play better.  In essence, the rival is calling us to a higher place, knowing all the while that if we engage in the negative thoughts and behavior that a rivalry offers, we are actually descending to a lower place.  Use the rival to motivate improvement, not to feed the impulses of judgment and rancor, which, if we are going to achieve our highest potential, need less attention rather than more.

    Take the higher ground.  Always take the high ground in these instances.  Always resort to better sportsmanship when you are being lured into gamesmanship.  Compliment rather than criticize  ("nice shot," rather than "lucky bounce!").  Don't take away your opponent's humanity by imparting evil intent to them.  Doing so is not only better for the game, it's better for your game.  You will find yourself less caught up in your opponent's shenanigans and more focused on your own play.  And, you will not have a moral hangover for slights and injuries that you were lured into, behaviors that linger into subsequent points and games and drain your focus away from the moment at hand.

    To return to the earlier example of Sergio and Tiger.  I think it was fairly clear to everyone on Saturday at the Players Championship that Sergio's blaming Tiger for his own bad shot on the 38th hole of the tournament was an example of bad sport cognition which bit him very bitterly on the 71st.  I have written in these bytes before about Sergio's bad thinking, but his behavior at the Players and his subsequent offhand and racist comments really reached a new level, and in it we should recognize the self-destructive power of the kind of negative thinking involved when a rivalry goes awry.  Think of him what you may, but Tiger Woods is clearly calling the golfing world to a higher level (of golf) and if Sergio could only transform his negative thoughts about Tiger into motivating ones, he might be the one raising the jug on Sunday.  Believe me, no one would be more motivated to play better golf by such a sight than Tiger.

On Yelling & Yellers

In one of the schools where I taught and coached, a story fairly well-known to students and some of the coaches circulated about one of the coaches.  At halftime, during one game when the team was not playing particularly well, they received a verbal lashing, all-too common from that coach.  When his rant reached its apogee, the coach became so apoplectic in his rage that he picked up a folding chair and threw it, catching one of his players in the forehead and causing a deep cut that required attention from one of the trainers.  Players collaborated in squelching the event and in contriving the fiction that the injury had happened during game time.  The incident was never discussed publicly and the coach was never censured for an event that conveniently never happened.  I bring this story out of my past for several reasons.  For one, it has always amazed me how the abuser gets protected by the system, and how a group under the thrall of an abuser colludes to keep the abuse a secret.   For another, I have always been perplexed and dismayed at the problem of yelling, a pathology at any time, but one that is particularly malignant in parenting, leadership and coaching; that is, when there is a power imbalance between the yeller and his target.  I hope that with the very public firing of the Rutger’s University men’s basketball coach more people will feel empowered to take a stand against the yeller in their life,  but I have my doubts that the fate of Mike Rice will start a national campaign to eradicate this sickness.  In this post, I’ll give you some reasons why all coaches (parents, bosses, people) should seek to eradicate yelling from their communication repertoire.

    The Pygmalion Effect.  Separate from the locution I coined in my last parent post, psychologists have discovered a phenomenon that shows that if you demand a higher standard, you can get it.  That is, if you have high expectations of people, you will get more out of them than if you don’t.  Yelling is an egregious misunderstanding of this concept.  Yelling, physically abusing them or hurling homophobic epithets at them will definitely have an effect on them, that is, of triggering their fight/flight/freeze mechanism.  So, while some players’ fight response might engage, you are just as likely to have players feeling more timid and even freezing in the face of performance challenges.  Coaches are much more likely to elicit peak performance by setting high standards and by giving more attention and praise when their athletes achieve those levels and by simply paying less attention to gaffes, misses and miscues.  In a team that identifies and rallies around high standards, mistakes are taken in stride and no one needs to get excoriated, singled out or put in the penalty box of shame, from which best results are rarely achieved.

    The Messiah Fantasy.  All groups fall prey to the fantasy that the leader will lead them to the promised land (more wins, greater profit, increased safety from external threats).  The successful leader will always seek to thwart this fantasy by communicating to his group that achieving those gains falls on everyone’s shoulders.  Harnessing the power of the group will always be more effective and reality-based than by having everyone believe that they are following some invincible Magus.  Furthermore, the truly empowering leader will forefront his or her players’ hands in victory and downplay his or her own, but (s)he will always take blame for defeats.  The yeller misunderstands these basic tenets by communicating--through their dysregulation--that their players will succeed only through their obedience.  For the yeller, it is all about him.  For the coach, it is all about the group.  The yeller communicates to his players that they will sink or swim because of the coach, and that they should never forget that.  Whereas the coach communicates that they will sink or swim through the collective efforts of the group and that the coach will do everything to help them swim.

Cohesion.  So, as you can see from above, team cohesion is really the holy grail of successful team play.  The yeller and abuser shatters cohesion because (s)he will split the team’s allegiances between those players who agree with those methods, perhaps because they had a yeller for a parent, and those who think (s)he’s insane and should be overthrown.  But mostly, the yeller creates a code of silence, evidenced by the team I referenced above, where open communication is shunned in part because it is not tolerated, and in part because no one wants to step out of line and feel the capricious wrath of the lunatic in their midst who mistakes himself for a visionary.  Finally, and perhaps most tragically, players will simply ignore the coach during yelling jags, retract their heads into their shells, thus missing important opportunities to process mistakes, clarify misunderstandings, and learn & cohere as a group.

       If history hasn’t then psychologists certainly have taught us about the wages of obedience for the sake of obedience.  They have also echoed the lessons of history in how quickly and easily power is abused.  So, coaches should set their bar much higher than mere obedience and should be much more circumspect about how they use their tremendous authority.  Which is not to say that they can’t reprimand, give consequences or even deliver impassioned lectures about what does and does not float on their particular squad or why that particular drill was not performed well.  Setting high standards and providing the road map to achieving them is a far cry from yelling.  The difference can almost invariably be seen in the results.  Mike Rice’s Rutger’s team didn’t break .500.  The team I referred to above wasn’t even close to .500.  And as for that team’s coach?  He was hired away by a more prestigious institution with a more storied program.

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.

"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.