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 their parents who are looking to do this sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is an opportunity to look inside the Minds of the Elite. I'm your host, Dave Diggle. In this, episode 39, we're going to look at Consistent Outcomes, Need Consistent Actions. Now, this is one of those podcasts, so I could leave it there, and it's self-explanatory. In order to get a consistent outcome, we got to take consistent action. However, I am going to explain it because it doesn't always seem to be understood and applied in the way that it needs to be to get the outcome that we want. Now, I want to start by, as always, having a little story. A couple of weeks ago, I was called to see a client that I'd seen six months ago. If we go back six months, when I first met this athlete, they They were dealing with anxiety issues around competition, and they were in such a state that they did not want to compete anymore. Not only did they not want to compete, they wanted to give up the sport.
Now, this athlete was at the top of their profession. We're not talking an amateur athlete here. We're talking about somebody on the world stage, and they're at this endpoint where they'd had enough of the anxiety that came with their sport. We're also talking about somebody who's in order to get to the level they're at has applied their training, their sport, to such a degree of diligence that they've made it on the world stage. So it's not somebody who gives up easy. However, when I worked with this athlete, we spent just one session and we looked at the structure of their competition preparation. And they went out, they competed, and the anxiety had dissipated to the point where the athlete felt back in control of their competition. Hunky dory. Everything's brilliant. I went on my way, they went on their way. Two weeks ago, I got a phone call from their coach saying, Hey, we've got that issue again. I went, Okay, let me come back and let me speak to the athlete and the coach and let's look at the structure that we applied and find out where it's fallen off the tracks. When I met with the coach and with the athlete, I said to them, Okay, the first question I have to ask you is, what changed?
And they both looked at each other, bewildered it and said, Well, nothing, really. We've been doing exactly the same thing. We've had a bit of a break, came out of competition season. We've had three months off. And so we got back into training. We've just had our first competition, and the anxiety is back. And I went, Okay, so did you apply all the systems that we put together? And the coach said to me, Oh, no. We just assumed it all be there. You came along, you fixed the problem, and we just thought it was fixed. So we went back to doing what we did before. The red flags in my mind instantly went flying up. Because no matter how good at what I do I am, there's not a one-hit wonder. It's not a wand that fixes everything. In order to get a behavioural change that's sustainable, we need to consistently do. We need to be familiar with that behaviour. So when we're put under duress, we don't revert back to old behaviours, our old familiarity, which is clearly what What's going to happen in this situation? Because it was at the end of the competition season, it was the big competition.
I've come in, I've helped them overcome that specific issue for that specific competition. They've had a break, and when they've come back into the competition preparation process, they've not continued to apply the new strategy. They went back to the old strategy, the old familiarity. Their environment hadn't changed enough for them to go, I do this differently now. I do it this way. Consequently, they got the old issue. Now, this is a very painful way for that athlete to recognise that in order to get a consistent, replicable, and reliable outcome, they need to consistently action the new system. Now, this athlete has now taken on board. They've learned their lesson, I hope. I don't want to get a phone call in six months time. As much as that's good for business, it's not good for my business because my business This is built on athletes succeeding and moving on and learning my stuff and then sharing it. I want all my athletes to go out there, and coaches, of course, go out there and apply this stuff and get outstanding results because that's how I get business. I don't want people to keep coming back week after week, month after month, year after year, because they fixed one problem, they've not applied it any further, and then come back, Let's do that again.
That's not a desirable place for me as a specialist in what I do, and it's certainly not desirable for the athlete or the coach to consistently having to keep coming back for the same issue. There's no growth in that. There's no movement forward, and there's certainly no traction to keep moving. Behavioural change or behavioural mastery needs four aspects in order to be consistently relied upon. Number one is specificity. You got to know exactly what you do want. How do you want to perform? How do you want to feel? What are the words that you want going through your head? What are the behaviours and the beliefs that you want to be relying upon? Number two is emotional buy-in. We need to know the why. Why do you want it? That emotion is going to enable you, when things are tough, when things aren't going the way you want them to, to knuckle down and get through that. Emotion is our meat. It's the hard yards. It gets in there and gets the job done. Number three is time. Now, like I said at the start, there's no magic wand. As much as I would like to be able to come in with a magic wand and fix people's issues like that, I'd charge a lot more.
But also it would enable me to walk in, fix, walk out. That doesn't happen. It has to take time. Our behaviour has been built up over time. I've never seen an athlete who's gone out and done one thing once and gone, I've got this habit now. This happens every time. Because that isn't a habit. That's an action. A habit has to be nurtured. It has to be grown. It has to be used to become a habit. We've talked in the past about if you do something five times, you own it. You have the neurological pathway then to replicate that. That's a good thing and a bad thing. It doesn't matter if it's a positive action or a negative habit. Five times, you have to do that to have that action. Number four feeds that. That's the consistency. We need to apply the behavioural change or the behavioural mastery that you're after consistently. It's no point to come and say, I did it last Monday, and then I did it on the Thursday, and did it once on the Friday, but I haven't done it since. There's no embedding within that process. There's no buying, there's no emotional, This is what I now do.
This is how I now behave. This is how I now think. It's, I did that now, then I did it over there and I did it over here. And it's fractured, it's sporadic. We want consistency. Consistency feeds our emotional buying and that familiarity. Those four aspects were specificity, emotional buying, time, and consistency. The other aspect of making sure we have a consistent behavioural strategy is ensuring that we reward successes. And I want people to measure our success, not our failure. Too often I come and I hear people say, Yeah, I've failed six times. And I'll say, Okay, how many times have you succeeded? And they're like, I don't know. They have no idea. If we have no idea what we want, how it looks, how it feels, and how many times we've done that, then our focus isn't on what we want, it's on what we don't want, and we always get what we focus on. If I say to you, Don't think about pink elephant, of course, you think pink elephant. So we want to make sure our focus is on what it is that we want. We're heading in that direction. Our trajectory needs to be towards what we want, not necessarily avoiding what we don't want.
Part of that process is our debrief process, which is recognise what works. That is our emotional buy-in, our momentum, our traction. As I say, it's our meat. It's what gets us through those tough times. We need to acknowledge what hasn't worked. That there is a reality to the situation of that didn't work, something in that isn't working for us or it's broken. We need to recognise that and acknowledge that. The third one is the action. What can I do different? How do I then go forward from this? Changing the outcome with action, not regret. So consistent outcomes need consistent action. They need for you to buy into it and apply it. The action step is so important. It isn't just knowing. Otherwise, we said before, all this information that you get, both from these podcasts, from my articles, from the video trainings we do, and the live trainings that we do, all of that stuff is really, really interesting information. Unless you do something with it, it will always remain just interesting information. Used correctly, it can change and be sustainable so know that your performances are exactly what you want. Hope you've enjoyed this.
I hope it gives you a different perspective on what you need to do rather than what you need to know. Until next training session, train smart, and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm a Performance Mind Coach.
