Sport psychology

Clients ask me great questions about a wide range of issues.  They want to to know how to achieve positive performance states, deal with anxiety, accelerate their learning, regulate their energy, strengthen their motivation, and manage their behavior, just to name a few.  It is relatively easy for me to offer strategies which riders can use to address these concerns.  However,  I have noticed over the years that some clients take the skills I teach and run with them.  I may not see them again for many years, and when I do, they report that the tools I provided where marvelously successful.

There are other clients to whom I provide the same tools or strategies, and they have a different result.  They struggle to get new strategies/skills to work for them, or to use them at all.  The pathway to success for these individuals is just that, individual which requires  both patience and self-compassion in their search for effective solutions.

I have to admit, as a psychologist, this fascinates me.  What is it about individual differences or about the skills and strategies I teach that result in “magic” for some and struggle for others?  Perhaps there is another way to think about it.  If I were better able to identify the basic ingredients which are essential for success, I might be able to better predict who could make use of these skills right away and who would need to “stock their cupboard” before successfully applying and using these strategies and skills.

Imagine if I shared with you my “secret recipe” for Heifers Delight Chocolate Brownies and you went home to make them.  If you didn’t have all of the ingredients, you might be tempted to make substitutions.  This would require you to make determinations about which ingredients where essential and which ingredients would have a minimal impact on the end result.  Your choices would be made without the benefit of experience and would place you at higher risk for falling short.  For example, you might only have medium size eggs at home and substitute them for the large eggs.  You might have regular cocoa powder at home and substitute it for the dutch process cocoa. There would be no way for you to know that the type of cocoa would have a much bigger impact on the outcome than substituting the smaller eggs.

I find the approach of identifying the basic ingredients of success in addressing your riding challenges and enhancing your performance a strongly compelling one. But, at the same time, it is a great challenge.  I have spent a lot of time reflecting on this. One ingredient that keeps rising to the top of the list is an appropriate tolerance of discomfort.

Whether physical, mental, or emotional; discomfort is the very thing that often motivates people to seek my services.  It may seem odd that the very problem for which relief is sought is so intimately tied to the solution.  I am not suggesting here that people just have to learn to suffer as a solution to their problems.  Rather, whenever something new is learned, and behavioral or other patterns are changed, there is always discomfort.  If our threshold for tolerating discomfort is too low, we will end our attempts at growth or change long before they have had a chance to take root.  If our threshold is too high, we will not be motivated to change in situations that may be, at their worst, dangerous to our (or our horse’s) health and well-being.

There is another aspect of discomfort tolerance that is essential to change.  You may have noticed that using brute force to try to make yourself not feel something often backfires.  The very act of focusing on a negative experience will likely increase the intensity of that experience.  Add to that the frustration, annoyance, or harsh judgments of our negative feelings and we might just as well open the flood gates.  The most efficient and effective methods for dealing with a wide variety of negative thoughts and feelings is to notice and accept what we are feeling and then choose to focus our thoughts, behaviors and overall energy in a positive direction.  This is where discomfort tolerance is key.  In order to truly have and make a choice, we must be able to tolerate the negative feeling without reacting or responding to it.

If you have ever read anything about dealing with fear, you will notice that it is always suggested that you take one step outside your comfort zone.  Have you ever wondered why they don’t suggest leaping out of your comfort zone?  Simply put, leaping out of your comfort zone would make the discomfort intolerable.  In order to do the work of tackling fear, we always have to be able to tolerate the discomfort long enough for learning to take place.

It is important to recognize two essential ideas.  First, discomfort tolerance can be learned and developed.  This is one of the primary reasons I recommend mindfulness meditation for almost everyone with whom I work.  The practice of mindfulness strengthens our ability to experience and accept our negative thoughts and emotions without judgment or an attempt to change them.  In essence, the practice of mindfulness teaches us to better tolerate discomfort.  The second idea is that what gives us discomfort today may not give us discomfort tomorrow.  If we tolerate discomfort and then choose to move forward toward a more positive state, rather than getting trapped in the fight against the negative feelings, it is highly likely that our experience of discomfort in that context will lessen over time.

I highly recommend playing with this idea of discomfort tolerance and explore mindfulness meditation as a tool for strengthening this ability.  Remember, however, balance in all things.  Don’t forget that discomfort can also be legitimate signs of the need to change or the need to protect oneself.  So, start by using this strategy for helping you face and overcome some of the smaller hurdles on your path.  Tolerating these small discomforts early on will inevitably lead to great rewards in you progression toward your goals.

This post was first published in 2013 and remains as relevant today as it was then or eighteen years ago when I first starting talking about the Pillars of Success and helping riders build a solid psychological foundation for their participation in equestrian sport.  I recently was asked a question about helping riders who crumble mentally as they struggle to learn and master their discipline.  Foundation, foundation, foundation.  This is always where I start.

Last Tuesday I had the pleasure of presenting my annual local seminar on equestrian sport psychology – Five Pillars of Success.  I look forward to this every year because it gives me the opportunity to reflect on how my thinking and my practice has grown and changed.  Each year I seem to have one or two new insights/ideas which need some time to germinate and grow before I am ready to incorporate them into my practice and talk with clients about them.  This year it was the seeming disparity between what people want or expect from sport psychology and what they ultimately need.

Most people connect to sport psychology through what they see in the media and what they read in the popular press.  In an effort to raise public awareness and market sport psychology, the vast majority of this type of information is focused on clearly defined and easily described skills and techniques.  While these skills are often very helpful to riders who are ready to apply them, it is important to be aware that not everyone has the same level of readiness to use these skills effectively.  Just like in any other learning situation, different people bring different levels of readiness to their learning.  This readiness can depend on many factors including life history, personal development, life experience, education, awareness, as well as many other factors.

What I realized in preparing for this year’s seminar is that sport psychology faces a great challenge in working with equestrian athletes.  In order for sport psychology consultants to attract and motivate athletes to give sport psychology a try, they have to present a picture of sport psychology that is approachable, appealing and understandable.  One of the necessary evils in following this path is that sport psychology and sport psychology consultation frequently get overly simplified.   Subsequently, riders pick and choose amongst the easily approachable techniques seeking the promised results.  Some enjoy a boost in their performance when adopting one or more “tricks of the trade.”  Others, however, continue to struggle and might get discouraged and dismiss the potential of sport psychology to help them in their riding.

If only there was a way to let people know that these simple, clearly described and well-defined mental skills are only part of the puzzle and that, as athletes who are also human beings, we are complex creatures that differ in our readiness to learn and apply these mental skills.  I wish there was a way to help equestrian athletes understand, honor and appreciate the richness of their individuality as it relates to their development as an equestrian and their participation in the sport.   I wish I could inspire riders to start where they happen to be, and build whatever foundation is necessary to get them ready to learn and effectively use all of the tools and techniques that so many athletes find helpful.  We would certainly want to do that for our horses, why not for ourselves.

One of the consistent findings in psychology is that our curiosity, courage and innate desire to explore and learn are governed or limited by how secure we feel.  We have to feel “safe enough” in order to push ourselves outside our comfort zone and to be open to changing and doing things differently.  So how do we promote this experience of being “safe enough” in our riding to engage our desire and ability to learn? How do we build a secure base or solid psychological foundation?

In my experience there are two steps that each of us can take to prepare ourselves for learning.  These are the things that I most often end up talking about with riders before launching into the mental skills work. The first is to make sure we have built a solid  psychological foundation for our riding.  For me, that means to explore your motivations, goals, resources, assessment of risk, and relationships as they relate to your riding.  We need to make sure that all of these factors are balanced with one another and that they are working together in concert.  Mismatches among these foundational aspects of our riding always leads to difficulty and ultimately a lack of security in one or more aspects of our equestrian experience.

The second step is to work on our ability to better regulate and/or modulate ourselves and ultimately have greater choice over our behavior.  I loosely define this as the ability to experience, tolerate and be more aware of our thoughts and feelings without having to automatically or reflexively act out on them.  Notice that I am not suggesting that we think or feel less, rather I am suggesting that we be more aware of our thoughts and feelings, accept what we think and feel, and grow in our ability to separate our internal experience from our behavioral reactions and responses.  Meditative practices are powerful tools in helping athletes grow in their ability to regulate or modulate their experience.

The pathways to creating a secure base for ourselves and our riding are not  easily defined, and are as varied as the individuals that seek to build them.  The vague and varied nature of this adventure can make it hard for people to value this work or commit themselves to it.  Yet, it is this work that prepares us to effectively use the skills and techniques that sport psychology offers. The next time you bump into a roadblock in your riding, or find it difficult to make good use of a well-known and respected tool or technique, take a step back and ask yourself if you have put in the time and effort to make your psychological foundation strong.

While I understand the importance of “mental toughness,” I have never liked the phrase.  One problem I have encountered is that it often evokes images of pushing through no matter what, without any consideration of context.  In my career as a sport psychologist, I can honestly say that there has been more real damage done when clients have been pushed (or pushed themselves) to “cowboy up” and exhibit their toughness in situations that were objectively unsafe either physically, psychologically or emotionally. On reflection, I think we are much better served by exploring the many foundational qualities and characteristics of mental toughness such as courage, resilience, and persistence rather than the dogged pursuit of mental toughness itself.

Yesterday I posted a meme on my Facebook page which contained a quote by Mary Anne Radmacher that I thought was brilliant.  “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying I will try again tomorrow.” I love many things about this quote but I particularly delight in its measured quality.

So often we think of toughness or courage as an intense act that is unleashed all at once against impossible odds.  In that way it feels so much like a “once and done” and also leaves us vulnerable to acting impulsively rather than out of our internal wisdom.   As a rider that has faced and recovered from serious injury, I am all too aware that the essence of my physical as well as psychological and emotional recovery was grounded in patient persistence and the kind of quiet steady courage referenced in this quote.

We all know that there is no courage without fear.  What we sometimes forget is that fear is often a reasonable reaction to real danger.  Sometimes the danger is found in the situation like a mismatch between horse and rider or a technically challenging sequence of jumps on a cross country course.  Other times, the source of the danger may lie within ourselves as a lack of necessary skill or knowledge.  If we are to progress, we all must face our fears with courage.  But, let us marshal our courage with wisdom, patience and persistence in order to ensure that we will have opportunities to exercise our courage in the years to come.

Recently my friend and colleague, Dr. Janet Edgette, had an article published in the Equine Wellness Magazine about dealing with performance anxiety.  I strongly recommend reading the article.  Dr. Edgette was an early mentor of mine and I have always respected her ability to see beyond the mental skills techniques to the underlying individual and family concerns, producing meaningful and lasting results for her clients.

In her article, Dr. Edgette raised concerns about visualization and pointed out numerous ways in which visualization can go wrong and potentially make problems worse.  These concerns make sense and riders should be cautioned that the pitfalls she points out are worth being aware of and avoiding whenever possible.  As I reflected further, however, I got to wondering about why so many of my clients have had success with visualization techniques.

I realized that the reason visualization can be a problem is the fact that it is a potent technique.  If visualization did not have an impact, it really wouldn’t matter how it was applied.  Dr. Edgette is wise to highlight the pitfalls of the pursuit of “perfect” when using visualization.  The mere fact that a rider is practicing both the impossible and the impractical can only lead to disappointment, stress, and an increase in nerves or anxiety.  Yet, poor results when misapplying a technique does not justify abandoning the technique.

So, how can you get visualization working for you?  One key to successful use of visualization in preparation for sport is to focus on practicing a positive or effective state of mind, rather than practicing perfection in execution.  If feeling anxious or nervous is your problem, clearly identify how you do want to feel as you compete.  Identify the feelings or state of mind you wish to substitute for the nerves or anxiety.  You can connect to that positive or productive feeling state or state of mind, and then visualize your ride in a way that you carry that feeling state throughout.

Another key is to use visualization in different ways to attain different goals.  In his book The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle explores two kinds of practice, deep practice and what I will call practice for performance.  In deep practice, we are perfecting a particular skill.  As we develop that skill, we may stop what we are doing and go over the skill repeatedly until we “get it right”.  In practice for performance, we are practicing quickly recovering from any mistakes and moving on in a manner that maintains the integrity of the whole be it a dressage test or a jumper round.  We can use these ideas to get the most out of our visualization.  When mastering a technique or movement, we can use visualization in the “pursuit of perfection” (our own personal perfection) as a pathway to learning and repeated practice which is often not possible on our horses.  When preparing for competition we can use visualization to practice an effective mindset or feeling state.  We can also practice our resilience and adaptability which will often contribute to our best rides.

As consumers of sport psychology techniques, we can easily get seduced by the simplicity of how they are presented in books and articles.  Like many meaningful and impactful sets of tools, however; there is an art of application that is learned through guided experience.  If you want to develop your own set of effective tools to improve your performance and tackle performance problems, my advice is to not take the short cuts.  Get help and assistance in evaluating your situation and guidance in choosing, learning, and applying the appropriate skills.  In the long run, both you and your horse will benefit.

It has been a long time since I have published a blog post.  Recently, I have had a few loyal followers check in, asking where I have been.  Others have been concerned because several of my last posts dealt with the riding accident I had almost two years ago now.  They worried that my recovery had not gone well.  I am happy to report that all is well.  I fully recovered from my accident long ago and my horse Revel and I are developing a stronger partnership than ever before.  I have been absent from the blogosphere simply because I have been busy with new adventures.

While there have been many adventures in the last year or so, the grandest adventure of them all has been teaching.  After almost 25 years of full-time work as a psychologist, I was hungry for a change.  I wanted to do something that was fun and challenging yet, would allow me to use the knowledge and skill I had developed over the years in a new and different way.  I also wanted to do something that would give something back to the community that has supported me and my family for over two decades.  My opportunity came when I learned that a teaching position was opening up in the science department at The Hill School in Middleburg, VA.  I had a long-standing relationship with Hill as a psychologist and parent, and I was grateful for the opportunity to join such a skilled and dedicated community of educators.  I recently completed my first year of teaching science to 7th and 8th graders.  It has been everything I had hoped it would be and more; fun, challenging, rewarding and above all energizing and life affirming.

The coolest part of the experience for me is that, in addition to giving me an opportunity to change things up in my professional life, it has made me a better sport psychologist.  Here is what I am aware of so far:

• I have a much better understanding of how people learn.  Sure, I already knew a great deal about learning from a psychological perspective,  however, it is a different thing altogether to sit every day with the challenge of helping scores of unique individuals learn.  When I sit with my sport psychology clients now I have a broader perspective, greater awareness and a much larger box of tools.
•  I am a much more effective presenter.  Taking time each day to carefully think through how you are going to present a lesson is fabulous preparation for presenting almost anything.  As a presenter, I am more effective and organized.  I am also more creative in developing experiential activities that enhance learning and engagement.
• I am more connected to, and understanding of, what people deal with on a day-to-day basis.  In my traditional practice I would see people for an hour or two each week.  While teaching I see my students almost every day and not just in class.  This has reaffirmed for me the importance of life context for my clients and has allowed me to be more attuned to their larger lives and ultimately more helpful to them.
• It has reaffirmed the importance of positive relationships and connection in the process of learning and changing.  While maintaining professional boundaries is extremely important, it is easy at times in a clinical practice to be detached and emotionally distance in the guise of maintaining boundaries.  While I have generally been good at building positive working relationships with my clients, teaching children has reminded me that solid professional boundaries can easily be maintained in warm, caring and emotionally connected relationships.

So what does all this have to do with sport psychology?  Maybe very little if we think of sport psychology as a set of techniques to enhance sport  performance in the moment of competition.  However, if we take a step back and think about ourselves as athletes, it is clearly my experience that taking the risk to seek out new experiences, especially those that offer opportunities to step outside of our usual roles and activities, can be a spring-board to participating in sport with greater awareness, broader perspective, increased knowledge, renewed energy and more solid connections with those that are important to us.

I had the pleasure of auditing the William Fox-Pitt Clinic at Morningside Training Farm last week.   While I was struck by many things I heard and observed, the most striking for me was his focus on the fundamentals of good horsemanship.  Whether he was working with 3*/4* riders and their horses or with riders and horses of less experience, he started at the beginning.  The first day’s sessions on the flat started with a discussion of, and work on, the warm up.  This was followed by a focus on connection, relaxation and rhythm.  All of this before any upper level movements.  The second day’s jumping sessions started over fences at the trot and the walk before moving on to more challenging exercises.  The focus of all the jumping work was on supporting a positive attitude in the horse and encouraging the horse to “find” the jumps.  His commitment to good fundamentals and to the welfare and nature of each horse was both admirable and refreshing.

All that focus on fundamentals of horsemanship got me thinking about the riders and what it would mean to focus on the fundamentals of their mental game.  So often riders (and I include myself here) are impatient and unforgiving when it comes to ourselves.  When a problem arises that is determined to be psychological or mental in origin, we tend to want it to change and change quickly.  Riders want their confidence back or their fear and anxiety to go away.  NOW!  Yet, we all know that change is a process and, while I have tools to help many people effect quick changes in certain circumstances, most of the important psychological attributes of a solid equestrian competitor are nurtured and developed over time.

What is interesting to me is how much of our psychological development within the sport is left to chance.  What I mean by this is that we most often hope that our instructors and trainers help us develop mentally and emotionally as competitors solely through the process of coaching and instruction.  I have met many gifted trainers who have great instincts and display as much talent and ability helping riders grow mentally and emotionally as they do training horses.  Unfortunately, this is not always the case.  As students of riding, we are most often concerned that our trainer/instructor is good with horses.  How often do we evaluate our trainer/instructor on their understanding of their students and how their students learn?  Or, on their ability to help their students develop mentally and emotionally as riders?

So… what would I teach if I was to focus on fundamentals of the mental side of the sport?  Would it be motivation or goal setting?  Energy management or visualization?  I have given some thought lately to what lies at the core of what I believe helps riders develop their mental and emotional skills. For me it boils down to three things: emotional tolerance, capacity to focus, and self-awareness.

In order to face the challenges of our sport and succeed, a rider needs to be able to tolerate a wide range of emotion which may include feelings such as anxiety, frustration, disappointment, fear, anger, excitement, etc.  The capacity to accept what we feel, without the immediate need to discharge the feeling or react to it, is the core of emotional fitness.  Carol Dweck calls this “grit” and identifies it as an essential underpinning of achievement.

There is an old saying that “What you think is what you do.”  If this is true, then you might be wondering why I highlight focus as fundamental and not thinking.  The inevitable truth is that most of our minds are very active and produce thoughts at an incredible rate.  My wife learned a long time ago not to ask me what I am thinking, because if I am honest and don’t filter my thoughts, that moment of thinking takes about 5 minutes to explain.  The great challenge is to focus our minds on what is meaningful, important or helpful in that particular moment.  I often use the metaphor of a stage.  A skilled director can focus the attention of the audience on one part of the stage using lights and action.  In that moment, many other things can be going on in different parts of the stage and we don’t even notice them.  If we can strengthen our ability to focus our attention and our minds on the positive and productive, the negative thoughts and feelings may still be there but they are relegated to the background and they lose their power to disrupt our performance.

Finally, I would teach self-awareness.  By self-awareness I am talking about knowing oneself on a multitude of levels.  One of the most obvious might be physical self-awareness so that we have the ability to know what our body is doing and when.  This way we can grow in our technical skillfulness.  I am also talking about awareness of our strengths and limitations.  Whether we are talking about skill, knowledge, experience, or other personal resources it is profoundly helpful be able to access and apply what we do well.  It is equally helpful to know what we don’t know and can’t do well, so that we can ask for help and assistance when appropriate.  Self-awareness also includes an understanding of our thoughts and emotional reactions.  Knowing how we characteristically respond to the world and its challenges can go a long way in helping sidestep many of the detours and pitfalls commonly experienced by students on the path to better horsemanship.

When you are prepping for the next show or event, I encourage everyone to draw an all the mental skills and strategies that you have found helpful in the heat of competition.  And, if your interested in making those skills and strategies even more effective invest time and energy on strengthening your fundamentals.