Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sports smarter. Brain in the Game is the nerdy show for everyone with stuff that just never gets boring. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 55, we're going to look at slaying your performance demons. So what is a performance demon? We've all had We've all been there. We've all been haunted by past events or thoughts of past events. When we've gone out, we've missed those great opportunities. We've messed up a skill or a routine or a performance, or we've been completely owned by our competitors. They've gone out there and outperformed us, and made us look like we're completely unprepared. They're our performance demons. And then the next time we go out to perform the thing that's front of thought for us, was that past event. That thing right in front of us that's reminding us about that time that we did not perform, missed the skill, got completely owned by our competitors. It could be as simple as when we got an injury.
It could be as complex as the end of a poor preparation process. Whatever it is for you, then that's your demon. We've all been exposed to them, and it doesn't matter how far up the food chain you are, you still get influenced by those demons. I guarantee, next time, Lewis Hamilton, the F1 champion, goes out to compete in his next race, this last race where he went from being on pole to finishing way down the field, will be a demon he'll need to overcome. The likes of the Australian cricket team who are playing awful at the Ashes at the moment in the UK. They've got demons to deal. They're both as a team demon and also the individual performance demons. The English football team are the classic for this. Every time they get to a penalty shootout, it's their demons inside their head and that behavioural pattern that they have where they lose every single time. It shouldn't occur that way, but it does. It's their inbuilt demons that cause that outcome. Demons are something we've all had to face. If we've ever been out there and had to perform, we have those demons in our closet somewhere waiting to pop their head out and rattle us at a time.
It's that loss of focus, the loss of confidence, and that loss of momentum. Those key aspects to our performance, once one of those aspects shifts or isn't there at all, then outcome to negative, outcome those thoughts of, But what if? What if something goes wrong? What if I can't do that? What if that performance I did six months ago that lost me the championship comes back again? What What if I forget my routine? What if I forget how to do that skill? They're all internal demons. If you think about Tiger Woods, the golfer, he's still dealing with those demons that have been so prevalent for him since his personal life got exposed to the world. They're the performance demons. It's often hard to see past those. It's the most important thing in your life at that time. I have to overcome that last event, that last skill, that last routine, whatever didn't work for me, almost like, if I don't, then my career is over or that's what I'll be remembered for. Why do we have these performance demons? What's the purpose of them? We know that everything neurologically, psychologically, and often physiologically has a purpose.
We don't tend to do things for no reason at all. So it's hard to think why we would have such a debilitating reaction for for a positive purpose. However, those demons are actively designed to help us. They've been put in place and they're a purpose psychologically for us to protect us. They're the cousins of our fear mechanism, that fight or flight, that if something happens, our brain goes into those core behaviours and says, You need to either get out of here or you need to stand and fight. Same as fear is designed to protect so are these demons. And both of them are integrically connected to our imagination and that possibility of what could go wrong. So the reason we have such vivid reactions to these emotions are things such as messing up or losing, it's to stop us doing it again. If we go out and we perform a skill, and that skill either loses us the championships or we become emotionally associated to that because we think that people see us differently or judge us harshly, then our brain's going, That hurt. I don't want to do that again. Let me just keep reminding you of that.
Because every time you go and perform, we don't want to go there again. So I'm going to keep that front of thought for you. You don't do that again. So the core behaviour of it is actually quite smart. It's reminding us what we don't want. And those of you have listened to me before when we talk about motivation, we talk about the towards and away from motivation, it's important we know what we don't want, as important as we know what we do want. So our mind is quite simplistic in the fact that it thinks, Well, if I make this really, really uncomfortable for you, a really undesirable place for you to be, then you'll do whatever you need to do, not to do it again. The key philosophy, although it's right, is also incredibly flawed because we know we get what we focus on. I've explained to you before, one of the key things I do from stage is I bring an athlete out, I'll get them to sit on a chair in front of the audience so their emotions are a little bit heightened in the first place. I'll then place something of key value to them, be it money or be it a gold medal or something like that in one hand, and I'll place something very basic, very simplistic in the other hand, be it a lower denomination of money or a piece of paper.
I'll ask them, what's the most prevalent and most important thing to you that has the greatest value. And of course, they're going to turn around and say the highest denomination of money or the gold medal over the piece of paper or the low denomination of money. And I'll say to them, okay, now that you know what's important to you, I want you to describe it to me. I want you to be really vivid about what it looks like, what it feels like, what it's going to give you, what it will enable you to do. And the more they focus on that key thing that has a value, an intrinsic value they've already recognised to them, the more their body will gravitate, the more their language will gravitate. So there's a physiological and there's an emotional and there's a psychological gravitational pull, round two, focusing on that key aspect. Now, obviously, I've used this in a real positive way as focusing on the gold medal or focus on the highest denomination of money. However, our brain doesn't know the difference. If I asked them to focus on that low denomination of money or that piece of paper, their body would have the same physiological, psychological, and emotional reaction to that.
It would gravitate round towards that aspect that they're focusing on. If we keep that front of thought when we're thinking about these key aspects of your brain saying, I don't want you to fall over again. I don't want you to underperform. I don't want you to be out there and everyone look at you and go, Oh, that was a bad one. What is front of thought for you, what you're most focusing on is not messing So the likelihood is you are going to mess up. So the flawed psychology here is if I really rammed down hard on, Don't do this, the thing that becomes most front of thought for you is what you're not supposed to be doing. So we get what we focus on. There's a key flaw in the way that our brain works, and it's just an imbalance. And it does that by showing us things that are distasteful to us. It increases the intensity. It makes it feel far more painful than it really was, so that we get shied away from it. If we think about it as a hot plate on a cooker, we teach our children, Don't touch that.
That's really, really hot. Ouch. It's going to burn you. Likely, livelihood is most children never actually get burnt by the hot plate because we've created such an emotional association to what that would do to them, how much that would hurt them, that they go, I don't want to go near there. Some kids obviously do. It get over curious or an accident occurs, but the vast majority of children grow up knowing never to touch the hot plate. Our brain does exactly the same thing. It frightens us. If we don't pay attention to us, it will frighten us even more. If we keep doing it and keep going, No, I'm just going to get past this, going to move past this, it will keep making it more and more incredibly painful to us, either emotionally or physically, so that we do pay attention to our brain. So that becomes part of our crystallised long term memory. That, I don't want to do that, that pain, that association. That's what happens if we don't pay attention to it or we don't deal with it, or we don't have a strategy to overcome that fear, then it becomes part of our behaviour.
And we've all seen that as a coach. I know I've seen a number of athletes go out and they go, Every time I play here, it never ends well for me. And all that is a crystallised memory, a demon that's become so front of thought, it's become part of what their belief system is. That's an incredibly dangerous place for an athlete to be because essentially, they've given up on performing well in that environment or at that performance level or in that team long before they have to physically perform. How do those performance demons really affect their performance long term? If we've got that crystallised memory, that in emotional thing that's saying, Don't go there. Don't perform like that again. Do whatever you need to do not to do that again. We can recognise that's flawed as a behavioural trait. That's a flawed behaviour. What do we do? How does this affect us long term? If this behavioural trait is designed to help us, not hinder us, why does it hang around so long? Why won't it allow us to move on? Well, that's quite simple. Because we don't tell it to move on. We We feed it.
Our imagination kicks in and goes, You know what? I'm thinking that's going to be bad, but it can be even worse. What if? What if not only do I look stupid in front of my team, but in front of 30, 40, 50, 100,000 spectators. And not only 100,000 spectators, what about the millions of people watching on TV? That's it. My career is over. What would my family think of me? What would my friends think of me? What would I think of me? So our imagination kicks in and makes it even worse. And the compilation between our brain telling us, avoid that, don't touch a hot plate, and our imagination kicking in saying, but if you do touch a hot plate, everything's going to fall around you. It makes it such an emotionally charged event. Something so simplistic as a missed performance or a loss of competition, if untreated, can become such a catalyst for a behavioural demon that we won't ever perform to our best again. So simply by feeding and increasing that emotion, the negativity and the negative consequences will keep on growing. They'll build to such a significance that the value of actually doing it is way less than the value of avoiding it.
This creates a larger than life NPR, which is a neurological point of reference. It's our blueprint in our brain. It's that thing that when we go to do something, our brain goes, Have Have you ever been here before? Because if you haven't, let's just make it up as we go along. If you have been here before or something very similar, let's use that as a blueprint. We don't have to go through that whole process of reinventing the wheel. That in itself is a really good, effective, and efficient use of our memory. I think I've said to you guys before that our memory isn't designed to just remember absolutely everything that we've ever done. Our brain isn't like a hard drive that just keeps copying files. What it does, it takes key significant situations that we've been in, events in our life, so that we can learn from them. Our brain is actually designed to think about forward process. Every time we go to step forward, our brain goes, Right, what do I know to make this efficient, effective, and safe? It goes back through those crystallised memories that we've created over our lifespan so that we do make informed decisions.
However, our brain doesn't have, or we don't think it has, access to absolutely every second that we've ever lived up until that point. It's key crystallised memory, things that we give such a significance to that we remember them. And that's what we do when we go to sleep at night. Those memories that we give value to during the day crystallise overnight and become long term memory. Hence, when we do our journaling, those of you who are part of our programme and do journaling every night, that's why we journal at night. We put that positive process into our brain. We put those key things that we've learned into our brain, and then we talk about what we're going to do different the next day and forward plan. Solution-based thinking into our brain, go to sleep, and that becomes part of our memory. I've got a 17-year-old son, and he's coming to the end of his traditional schooling and a lot of exams at the moment. I spoke to him about a lot of friends who get up the morning of their test and they'll go, I've got to cram. I've got to do something right now.
I've got to remember those last few things. The natural fact that what that does, it makes it much harder for your brain to remember because you're stuffing stuff in that can't crystallise. So you've got this big melting pot of information that has no structure to it. And I keep saying to him, It's better for you to read what you need to know the night before and a couple of nights before, and then just Trust when you get up in the morning that, Hey, it's crystallised. What I've given value to, the things that I've thought that will be in the test will be in my memory. And it's hard when you're talking to a 17-year-old who's worried about the exams. However, it's no different when we talk about our memories as athletes and what we're trying to teach our students as coaches. When we think about performance, we think about competition, what our brain is doing is going, Have I been here before? Of course, if you're a competitive athlete, there's numerous reference points you have in your brain for competitions. What your brain will select will be the most emotionally charged memory. That will be the most front of thought.
That's the thing that are going to be sticking out above everything else. If you've got negative association, if you've got your brain going, Last time you competed, this happened, and the world nearly fell off its axes, and your career was almost over, that's going to the thing that you neurologically point of reference, reference. So the likelihood is we're focusing on the broken, the things that didn't work for you. And then you go out and you replicate that. And then what happens is your brain goes, Told you so. This was really, really bad. We've got to avoid this. You've done that twice now. And so we compact that memory. That is how these performance demons can affect our performance long term. It can ruin careers. I've seen athletes who have given up the sport because they think, That's it. I'm on a downward spiral now because every time I go out, I keep underperforming or replicating really poor performances. You and I have watched who we think, Wow, they are so talented, and they just keep having shocking performances. All of that is performance demons. They're the front of thought, memories that they're replicating despite their desire to overcome it.
Before long, it becomes their only reference conference. It's almost like nothing ever existed before that performance. You know that one, that one performance that's become every performance. Okay, so I don't want to just paint a really negative picture in your mind of how creative and outstanding your brains are. The neural plasticity of our brain is phenomenal. So how do we slay our performance demons? Well, the reality is we've got to understand, first of all, why we have them. We've gone through that. You now understand what your brain is trying to do is protect you. However, it's that pitbull that you've let off the leash, that really aggressive dogmatic, I'm only going to do one thing, and that's this thing you've let off the leash, and it's just gone wild. We want to put it back on the leash. We want to give it structure. We want to do is make sure when something doesn't go right, it doesn't become your whole focus. Your whole existence is to avoid ever doing that again. So we want to put it in perspective. And you've heard me talk about what worked well, what didn't work, and what would I do different.
So that balance, that what worked well, what didn't work, and what would I do different. That solution-based thinking, that WWW, WDW, and WDD. What worked well, what didn't work, what would I do different. By having that in your mind every single time that you perform long before you have a performance demon that is debilitating you, will allow you to manage that event when it happens. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, Whoa, show up, Dave. Way too late. That demon and me are best mates. He's there every single time I go to perform? What we want to do is unpack that event. If you've got a demon in your mind and you're listening to this and you're thinking, How do I debilitate this demon before this demon debilitates me? We need to put it in perspective. We need to step back out of that event, take away that emotion, and look at the mechanics of that. Okay, what happened? What worked? If you look at that whole performance, that whole skill, that whole event, the likelihood is 95% of what happened worked. You're just focusing on that 5% that didn't. By referencing or emotionally stacking, positively emotionally stacking, that 95% of what worked, it shifts your perspective.
Then you look at what didn't work because we got to make sure we know what didn't work. We look at it from a dissociated perspective. We look at it mechanically and go, You know what? What I should have done was this. That didn't work because I put my foot here or because I was in the wrong location or I didn't think about that skill in this context. Okay, what would you do different? If you had a Doctor Who time machine, you went back and you did that performance again, that event, what would you do different and why? The second you start to recognise what I would do different and why I would do it that way, you're solution-based thinking. No longer is your focus on that event ever happen again. You're always, Okay, I now know what to do. I have a solution. I have something in my mind that's very, very clear about what I would do different. That takes away a lot of the anxiety because if you get faced with that again, you know what to do. You're not blind. It doesn't sideswipe you. Yep, okay, wow, that happened. Now I can do this to move past it.
I said this becomes a neurological point of reference, a set time in our timeline that we reference every single time we go and perform. What we want to be able to do is go back before that because clearly it was working before that. We want to make sure that we have this perspective. We want to make sure that when we go and perform, we also reference all the key times that did work. We want to recognise key events, force ourselves back past that glitch in our timeline to times that did work. We go back before the event and reestablish earlier neurological points of reference. Envision them, bring them to the front of thought, visualise them, recognise, bring all those emotions in, those sense of sight, sound, feeling, smell. Our senses reestablish that that was a memory, too. That had significance to us. And once you're doing that, also visualise the reward at the end. You know what? When I perform that well, this is what happened. I won. Or everyone recognised how the great routine I done or great performance. I had a great recognition of why I did that and why that worked so well for me.
See it both from a mechanical perspective of what you did to make that happen, but also an associated perspective of, wow, how did that feel? And once we're visualising that and we bring that front of thought, that again becomes a valid point of reference in our brain. No longer does our brain only see the mistakes, it sees the successes, too. There's an exercise I created which was reinventing their outcomes through new learning process. We can even go back over that event that caused that negative neurological point of reference and learning in a different way. We can recategorize it and catalogue it in our brain. So it's no longer this big beacon of keep away from me. It's, well, I can have changed it by doing this. And you make it more referenceable. You can go back and say, I can learn from that. I can do this from that. This was really great within there. So that process of the associated disassociated learning strategy enables us to recategorize in our brain that negative event. We also want to add new objectives moving forward. We want to create that traction and that momentum again. So we're not in that loop, that glitching loop, going back to that event.
We want to focus on moving forward, and we reference all the things that have worked and what we've learned to move forward. So key objectives, new, highly stimulated key objectives are important to us. And the last thing we want to focus on is transparency. Our internal emotions, often because of our imagination, are like a volcano. They're rumbling up inside us, and they feel like they're going to overwhelm us. The minute we share our concerns, our observations, our processes with somebody who can look at it from a disassociated, more logical thought process, enables us to have balance. You need to find somebody who can turn and go, Wow, every time I go out and I perform, this is what's going through my mind. I'm only seeing the time before when I fell or when I underperformed. Then someone, a professional mind coach, somebody who's very au fait with being able to use key language and key structures to move you past that will enable you to articulate how you move. And once again, once you start to articulate forwards, think forwards, and move forward, that event has less significance to you. So as I said, performance demons are something we will all face from time to time.
My wife is a very successful consultant for publishing, independent publishing, and I've watched her work with some of the most renowned authors around the world, and I see key behavioural traits in them. When they go to release a new book, it could be their baby, their one book that they want the world to remember them for, but their demons pop up, too. What if people don't like the book? What if I've put my heart and soul in this and people just go, That's rubbish. Everybody has demons. It's not just a sport-orientated behaviour. It's a life-orientated behaviour. We have them on every aspect of our life. If you're a coach, you have the same demons. So this strategy and structure will allow everybody to be able to focus more clearly and move forward more effectively. I hope you got a lot out of this session. This is something that people frequently ask me to talk about. How do I overcome that performance? This is the key structures to allow you to do that. Until our next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
