Tag: emotions

Mental Health, Performance psychology

Pressure

Dr. John Panepinto

Recently, one of the greatest athletes in the history of sports had a meltdown during an important stretch of one of the most important events of the year. Purposely, I am not naming names, because it doesn’t matter. This player is a champion who does the work, puts in the time and effort, and has a superior mental attitude. If there is such a thing as checking all the boxes, this athlete does it in every way possible.

Still, pressure caused an eruption, an emotional volcano, and a temporary lapse of direction.

I offer this piece for one reason.

The work is never done.

If you think fear is outgrown, or that demons can be locked away in the attic, or negativity is for the weak-minded—think again.

Everything exists in the tension of opposites.

You can’t set a goal without some sense of what failure is. You can’t perform well without knowing what poor performance is. You can’t be positive without the counterforce of negativity. You can’t make a good choice without knowing what the wrong one is. And conscience is all about informing us of darkness and light.

The heroic only occurs with a dragon to face up to. Pretending there aren’t any dragons is a fatal flaw. There will always be obstacles. The greater the task or adventure the more obstacles there will be. And the greatest challenge will be the one inside you. Best to be prepared rather than hope the obstacles don’t appear. Or worse, making believe they don’t exist.  

Take your mental approach to the next level with my sports psychology workbook: Above the Field of Play. Or to learn about other sports psychology services (including an assessment of your present mental approach), visit my website at DrJohnPanepinto.com.

Photo credits: Ben Turnbull; Caroline Pimenta; Gabriella Clare Marino– Unsplash.com

Performance psychology, Sports Psychology

Reflective Coaching Practices III

Dr. John Panepinto

In the first two posts, the reflective practices have moved from emotions to motivation, and now we connect the third practice with movement towards goals. Emotions reveal values, and motivation links to vision and goals. Reflecting on learning reveals how we accommodate our mental and physical structures and capacities on our way towards our goals.

Learning is an active process and requires a target, a plan, and a means of monitoring. Moving from level to level requires a change of mind and body. Sometimes it’s additive and we grow in breadth. Sometimes it’s transformative and we rise vertically to a new way of seeing things.

Movement, action, and following a lesson plan does not guarantee learning. There must be intention and attention to our process. And this process is facilitated and managed by a constant practice of reflection.

Reflect on the Learning Process. What improved today? Learning is not just for players, students, or teams. It is a process of continuous improvement for everyone involved. The learning process increases capacity and complexity at the growth edge. If practice relies on just routines and a static structure, it is easy to fall into habits and a stale process. Here, activity is confused with intentional actions. Learning at higher levels is difficult as it requires both player and coach to continuously refine and adapt to new challenges. Learning is a delicate process of physical and mental transformation. It requires a specific focus for what, how, and why we are putting energy into improving a particular aspect of performance. 

If you would like more structure to take your mental approach to the next level, consider picking up a copy of my sports psychology workbook: Above the Field of Play. Or to learn about other sports psychology services (including an assessment of your present mental approach), visit my website at DrJohnPanepinto.com.

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Photo credit: Meghan Holmes (unsplash.com)

Performance psychology, Sports Psychology

Reflective Coaching Practices

Dr. John Panepinto

The expression, “Nothing fails like success” offers a good mental space to reflect on what is working, not working, and why. And the connection to the future. The mind loves and thrives on patterns. It does its best to regulate and create equilibrium. But once a pattern becomes so engrained on the level of unconscious competence, we can easily confuse the sense of automaticity with balance. In other words, there is a significant difference between static and dynamic balance along the growth curve. 

Reflective coaching practices go beyond the data that describe aspects of practices and performances. It’s an exercise in quality that unlocks potential for the coach—and the athlete. Data and outcomes often miss the relationship between the context and the content. Data has to be abstracted from the whole. Reflective practices look at the whole. Data is often isolated and limited in scope. Reflected practices are inside-out and broad in scope. Both are useful, yet the latter is less used. Over the next few posts, we will look at these reflective coaching practices that have the potential to increase the quality of what is given and received in the player-coach relationship. 

Each reflective practice starts with a question that opens the internal dialogue critical to the powers of reflection. Leading off, and perhaps the most important:  

Reflect on the Emotional Level. What was the emotional tone of today’s coaching experience? Broadly, every practice or teaching session has an emotional valence. While we may experience the ups and downs during a session, there tends to be an overall tone of negativity or positivity.

Emotions move us and send meaningful messages in the moment and emotional intelligence is fundamental to our awareness of self and others. At a very basic level, our emotions are either managed or they manage us. Reflecting on the emotional information and tone of the practice increases our understanding of the learning conditions we create, as well as the ability to tolerate the roller-coaster of a very challenging task: improving. This implies we can both grow—player and coach—within the practice space.

Lastly, emotions also tell us if we are immersed in meaning. If the practice or performance was flat, chances are the opportunity the event presented wasn’t fully engaged. Looking backward from future self emphasizes that the path is short. Hockey legend and all-time leading scorer, Wayne Gretsky, emphasized this when he talked about skating each shift like it were your last. As a competitive athlete there is always the chance it could be. Injury highlights this point. And as Gretzky states, each shift is one shift closer to the last one.

Opportunities are not infinite. Such is meaning and such is the importance of emotion. Everything we do is connected to something we value. Reflecting on this and connecting to the emotional background of our efforts vitalizes the challenges and victories and, importantly, connects the short and long-term vision.

If you would like more structure to take your mental approach to the next level, consider picking up a copy of my new sports psychology workbook: Above the Field of Play. Or to learn about other sports psychology services pricing (including an assessment of your present mental approach), visit my website at DrJohnPanepinto.com.

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Images credits (Unsplash.com): Mario Azzi, Roger Bradshaw, Donald Giannatti, JC Dela Cuesta

Performance psychology, Sports Psychology

Dealing with Fear: 3 Concepts to Master

Dr. John Panepinto

In the last post we raised two questions about practice and performance. The essence of the inquiry is the sense and feel of these two activities. Both are a form of playing. You could argue that the outcomes may differ as we aim to improve in practice, and we aim to win at the end of performance.

But maybe there is more to it. Maybe an expectation or idea underneath the activity changes the way it feels. Maybe fear or lack thereof changes the feel in the moment and effects performance. With that idea, here are 3 important concepts to master when dealing with fear.

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Valence: Our mindset reacts to experience very quickly and on a deep internal level. Our sense of safety is always activated and for good reason. Therefore, we assign a valence—first unconsciously—to what we are experiencing as either positive or negative. On a very primal level and in the blink of an eye this sense evaluates whether to approach or avoid what is confronting us.

We rarely notice subtle positive experiences because of the alignment with our expectations of how the world should work. A feeling of being OK or content doesn’t garner much awareness. Not typically true for subtle negativity which activates our awareness to assess the situation. The problem with this reaction during performance is that it impacts sustained focus and attention. Past experiences or negative pieces of narrative can come into mind and now you are no longer in the present, no longer in flow.

The required skill is emotional mastery. This involves self-awareness and the ability to sense shifts in states, to make sense of the emotional message, and to regulate the energy of the emotion (more on this later). We can’t turn off our connection to the environment. We have emotions, otherwise we would be numb. Understanding valence allows us to quickly make sense of shifts in states without pushing beyond the stress we can tolerate.

Loss: Fear is an intimate friend of loss. Yet in competition, loss (just like a win) is an outcome at some time in the future. Performing is a process, linking together actions in the present. A competition is the process of competing and the outcome is determined by this process. While this may seem a play on words, it’s critical to learn to be engaged in the present.

When loss seeps into the mind, fear engages the fight, flight or freeze response by ramping up the sympathetic nervous system. This energy is not the state of calm alertness required for fluid execution. The skill is to allow thoughts of loss to come and go without engaging, judging, or fighting them. The mind is a master storyteller always trying to weave a coherent narrative. Learning to let go of losing, losses, and projections of future outcomes is critical to maintaining flow states within the sweet spot of performance.

Regulation: Part of emotional mastery is the ability to manage states. But understanding comes before managing—a process that cannot occur in the reverse order. Emotions, feelings and thoughts ebb and flow. You can’t stop thinking. You can’t stop feeling. And the source of this is experience—and you can’t stop experiencing. Experience lives at the intersection of our inner and outer world, the connection between out mindset and the environment. This reveals why we first have to understand the process before we can manage it.

One of the most important aspects of mental toughness is the ability to regulate the cognitive load between our situation and our inner resources. Emotions can overload our capacity and wreak havoc with attention and focus. Composure is paramount and the ability to regulate the flow of information and energy requires self-awareness and emotional mastery. Like a regulator, we downshift or upshift our intensity, accelerate or brake in order to meet the moment. We emote, make space, make meaning, and move on.

Staying within the Zone of Optimal Performance requires regulating the ebb and flow of experience, a process that fear distorts and upsets. Emotional mastery requires this regulation summed up by:

  • Emote: acknowledge and allow the arc of the feeling
  • Make space: do not become the feeling, rather keep it as object distant enough to observe (you will still feel the emotion)
  • Make meaning: what is the message and purpose of the emotion? What actions and decisions follow based on what you value?
  • Move on: return actively to the process in the moment

Like all psychological tools, they require practice. Just like performance skills, the muscle memory builds and becomes efficient over time–and part of the performance process.

 

If you would like more structure to take your mental approach to the next level, consider picking up a copy of my new sports psychology workbook: Above the Field of Play. Or to learn about other sports psychology services pricing (including an assessment of your present mental approach), visit my website at DrJohnPanepinto.com.

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photo credits: Photo by Felipe Giacometti) on Unsplash (unspash.com)