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 sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game focuses on what you can do as an athlete to improve your mental game. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 70, we're going to look at mental blockages. Now, for you longtime listeners you'll know that I haven't posted a podcast in quite some time. In actual fact, it's been since August 2017. Now, just because we haven't been online in that time posting these podcasts doesn't mean we've been sitting back enjoying the Australian summer. We've been on the road putting a lot of these strategies into place with all our clients from around the world. We've also crafted and created a whole new suite of skillsets and experiences that we'll start sharing with you in another set of podcasts. We've also spent some time building an online video training programme called Building Champion Minds. This is currently at 13 hours of live training specifically dedicated to the mental preparation of athletes. I'll put a link in the description of this podcast for you to go directly to that. There's a free module at the start of that. It's about 30 minutes where it will let you assess your current performance and work out what's working, what's not working, and what you need to do differently to perform more consistently and smarter.
So let's get on with today's podcast.
A couple of days ago, I conducted a lecture. So we're talking January 2019, I conducted a lecture on mental blocks and the effect they have on performance for athletes and their development. Within that lecture, we focus on four key areas. Why we actually have mental blocks, what is actually happening inside our brains to cause these blockages, how we fix those. And then I outlined five key steps both athlete and coach can take to immunise yourself against future blockages. So without further ado, what I want to do is let you listen to this lecture. At the end of it, there'll be some links for you to be able to download the slides I used during that lecture, and of course, a link to take you directly to that Building Champion Minds platform. So enjoy the lecture.
I'll record this and I'll put a little link up for you. You can download it after. Okay? It makes it a lot easier for everybody and all the slides we'll go through today will also be there as well. You can download those and go through them. Like Lin said, I'm quite fortunate I get to work around the world. I was just explaining, last year I was on the road for about 250 days. The year before that, over 300 days. I get to work with racing car drivers, rugby teams, football teams, tennis players, and of course, because of my background, a lot of gymnasts. The topic we're going to talk about today is mental blocks. And over 90% of the time I get called into a gym, it's for this. I think everybody who's a coach and almost every athlete at some point has had a mental block. Even to this day, coaches struggle with this. I get bizarre phone calls in the early hours of the morning saying help from around the world, from the same kind of mental issues. Over 95% of those for female gymnasts, over male gymnastics. I'll explain in a minute why that's the case.
Whenever I lecture or whenever I give information, the most important thing for me is to make sure I address everything that you are looking for. Like I said, I'm a huge nerd. For me, it has to make scientific sense. Yet there's a lot of emotion that comes with this issue. So if there's something I'm talking about you either don't understand or you want to add some information to, this kind of session is 'hands up, let's all get involved and deal with whatever you need to be dealt with'. Okay? Is that okay with everybody? Yeah. As Lin said, I was born in the UK. So if you don't understand something I say, again, let me know and I'll translate it into Australian. I'll do my best, anyway.
So these are the four things we're going to focus on today; why we actually have mental blocks; we're going to look at what's actually happening inside our body when we have them; then we're going to look at how we can fix them; and then we're going to look at what we do if it continues to happen. One of the key things that we'll understand and understand why is, if you've got one athlete in your group that gets a mental block, the likelihood is that it will permeate into the other athletes. Which is why we look at why this happens in the first place, because it's really relevant.
I know when I was an athlete, there was a lot of people around me who suffered with mental blocks. The first thing to realise is it's a primal mechanism. It's natural. We're supposed to have them. I call it the stupidity surge. At some point, your brain is going to go, 'Click, something I'm going to do is either going to hurt me or kill me.' So we create this mental block. Like I said to you before, predominantly females. And this is why: males have a part of their brain where it doesn't allow them to focus on fear. We call it the Peacock process. Young males will look at what they can do to impress females. So that part of the brain will be suppressed. They will do stupid things. They will go out to impress females, they'll go out to impress the group. Humans are pack animals. The person at the top of that pack is more likely to get the female. So, this is all psychology, we're not talking about boys are better than girls or whatever the situation is there. We're looking at why we do what we do.
So this is why predominantly it's females that suffer with this, because they don't have that Peacock process. They don't have that part of the brain that gets suppressed, to say, 'What you're about to do could take you out of the gene pool.' Girls go, 'I ain't doing that. That's likely to hurt me.' Guys go, 'I'll have a go.' And we see that throughout, whether it be our education system, our sporting or anything that we do, boys are more likely to do stupid things.
And in the reality of the real world, it's not a major issue. Yet in gymnastics, it's a huge issue. As I say, I work with a lot of athletes. We don't see the number of mental blocks in other sports. Gymnastics is by far, and I'm talking about 30 or 40% increase on other sports, so it is a major issue for us. It can be career ending and not just because we have injuries, but people get mental blocks and they're like, 'I'm out, I want to get out of this sport. I'm scared. I don't want to do this anymore.' And I know as coaches, that becomes incredibly frustrating, especially when you see kids who are hugely talented, yet they've got this mental block and they won't get past it.
So we're obviously going to talk about mental blocks primarily for skills, but it's the same process when we're talking about competition – where you see an athlete who does really well in training and then comes to competition and they get this mental block, or they forget their routines, or they go and do something you've never seen them do before, make mistakes that you've never, ever seen them make before. It all comes from exactly the same mental process.
That is me with my coach many, many years ago, long before they had colour photographs. So this is really important. I want everybody to recognise this, especially as coaches. Our perceived rationalised thoughts do not have to appear rational to others in order for them to be valid in our mind. So because we, as adults, say, 'That's okay, you've done it before. I know you can do this. We've done this weeks and weeks ago.' Because it's rational inside that athlete's head that that fear is there, that block is there, it doesn't really matter what you say. In their mind they say, 'But you don't understand. You don't see what I see, you don't feel what I feel.'
So as coaches and I've heard numerous coaches say this, and I used to say it too when I was coaching, 'Come on, I know you can get over this. Let's just push through it.' The reality is all you're doing is compounding that thought inside their head. Our processing criteria up until the age of about four is 100% emotion. For those of you who have kids, have dealt with kids, or were once a kid, you will know that when you were little, you only did what you wanted to do. If somebody tried to make you do something you didn't want to do, you would scream and shout. When we get to around about seven, that only drops to 95% of all our processing being emotional. Which means we can rationalise a little bit with a seven year old, but not a lot. The vast majority of it is still emotional. And when we get to teenagers, or just preteen like girls are developing way younger now than they used to about 30 years ago. So now we're looking at 10-11 year old girls who are starting to go through puberty, whereas before that you were looking at 13 or 14, maybe 15 on average.
So girls are starting to go through puberty much younger. So therefore their processing drops to about 75% emotion. Still, that's hugely high, especially when you think about boys at that age are around about 25% to 30%, which is a massive difference between a teenage boy and a teenage girl. Girls are way more emotive. And part of that is the way that our brains are constructed. Boys have a higher grey matter in their brain, so more order and sequence. That's why guys are really good at doing one thing. And girls have a higher white matter inside their brain, which is more chemically driven, more emotively driven, which is why women are really good at multitasking. So there is a reason why we have these issues. This statistic here – and as I said I'm a huge nerd, so these are really relevant for you, I want you to keep that in mind as we move forward – when you think about how we're dealing with these athletes who have blocks, keep this in mind and think about your athletes that you struggle with who have these blocks.
So let's look at what's happening inside the brain. Our prefrontal cortex, the decision making part of our brain, the most logical part of our brain, doesn't fully develop until our mid 20s, and that's all of us.
So if your prefrontal cortex, that decision making part in your brain, that logical part of your brain, isn't formally formed until your mid 20s, that explains why we do so much stupid stuff in our late teens – and again, especially boys. So the prefrontal cortex is at the front, the subconscious at the back. Or as I like to call it, the boss and the workers. So we put this into context for a gymnast, the boss at the front, even though it's not fully formed, is really, really diligent at creating strategies, it's really diligent in understanding how they do a skill. Yet it's incredibly slow. Our subconscious, or as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talked about with our flow – and most of you as athletes will know you've got to get in that flow – that's just subconscious talk. That's really fast. Our subconscious is three times faster than our conscious, yet it makes no decisions. It either just does or it doesn't do. It's black and white dichotomic. There is no negotiating with your subconscious. So it's a really cool thing, the prefrontal cortex can make decisions – but it's like government, it takes forever to do so. Your subconscious will do anything you tell it to do, however, if something's broken, everything's broken.
So that's really important to recognise when you're teaching skills. So when you learn a skill, it happens in here. And we know that. When we watch a young athlete learning a skill and they take forever doing it, or they're constantly putting their foot in different places and they're trying to work out what's going on. That's this part of their brain overthinking. You can you see that concentration on their face. You can see them trying to work out, 'What are they asking me to do?' Whether that's a cartwheel, a handspring, double front somersaults, triple somersaults, twisting or whatever you're doing. They go through the same process. They'll break it down into bite sized chunks.
So I always say, how do you eat an elephant? A chunk at a time. Because that's what the prefrontal cortex is doing. It's breaking down these little parts. And when they learn the skill, you'll see they'll get a part of the skill and then they'll get another part of the skill, and then they'll get another part of the skill before that becomes a full skill. So we have to understand that that's exactly how the brain's working. And it's supposed to do that, because when it's got the skill, it links it all together and puts it in the subconscious.
Now, when you've done a skill a few times and you're really comfortable with that skill, it becomes really easy, doesn't it? And you seem like you've got all the time in the world. When you're learning it, you feel like, I don't have enough time. It's like learning to drive a car with the gears and you think, I can't look at the gears, I can't look at the controls and the steering wheel and the road at the same time. But when you've been driving for a while, you don't even think about it. You're changing the radio station, you're talking to the person next to you, you're even looking at people on the street. So that's why it works. And we get consistent in how we do a skill through consistently applying that skill.
So now we've got the fundamentals of how we learn a skill. This is what's naturally occurring inside our athletes brains. When they're learning a skill and you are teaching that skill, they go through that compartmentalisation, let's break this skill down, this overthink, 'What's the strategy? What do I do here? How do I make this skill work?' Then, 'Right. I'm going to delegate that to my subconscious, I'm going to perform that skill.' And they get really comfortable with it. That is, until something happens. It's normally a fear. The vast majority of what goes to break the concentration pattern of an athlete is fear. Now, we think back to that statement earlier, it doesn't have to be a rational fear to you, it only has to be a rational fear to them. What that does, the subconscious goes, 'I don't deal with issues,' and it sends it all straight back to the boss. The prefrontal cortex. Which is why they overthink it. And long before an athlete will lose a skill, you'll see them start doing this and you can see them thinking, you can see them like, 'What did they do, what's wrong with them? Why are they starting to take longer to perform that skill?' These are early warning signs we as coaches should be looking for.
You know when you're driving down the motorway and you're doing 110, if you're good. You know when you're driving down the motorway and you're sticking to that 110 and you come off the slip road and you hit those white painted lines on the road. Why do we have those?
Do you want the technical reason?
Yeah, go for it.
Because it's an auditory and a feeling, so you can feel it through steering wheel and it's also auditory. So you can hear it.
Absolutely. So what's the purpose of the lines? Because there's plenty of signs. You've been made aware there's a change coming up. You need to do something different. As coaches, we need to have those, what's called chevrons. We need to have those chevrons in our ability to observe our athletes. So when your athlete is doing a skill that they frequently do, then all of a sudden you start to see them take a little bit longer, maybe overthink it or maybe ask more questions, they are your chevrons. They are your opportunity to get in early and head it off. Because on the motorway, if you come off and you don't pay no attention to chevrons and you're still doing 110, when you hit that roundabout, you're going to crash. And the same happens in our brains for our athletes. So those of you who've had athletes go through this process of having a block, if it's something that's fairly recent to you, think back, was there an early warning system I could have seen now that – we don't know what we don't know, but now you know that – is there something you look back and go, 'Oh, yeah, I could see... I could see there was something ticking away inside their brain. I could see something was slightly off.'
Now, in an ideal world when you've got just one athlete in the gym and you're just watching them intently like this, that's great. You can see those kind of things. When you've got 4000 kids running around, it's very difficult. I completely understand that. However, most of you know your athletes really well and you'll start to pick up on those little nuances of, Maybe they're not as communicative to me as they used to be. Maybe they're speaking to other athletes more than they normally would, or less. Start to look for those chevrons.
So we go back to Nerdsville. What's happened is our subconscious has gone, 'I'm not dealing with this. Back to the boss. Let me break that skill back down again.' What they're looking for is things that can hurt them. The brain is given this task. Something in this is going to hurt you. You need to find it. It doesn't matter how good they do that skill you will be able to find something in there that's dangerous. You can be Olympic champions. You will find something in every skill that they do that's dangerous.
So if you go looking for it, you will find it and that's what the brain is really good at. What it does, it will then isolate and say, 'Right, that part of the skill is really, really scary. That's the part you've got to be aware of.' Now, we're born with two fears only. Only two fears we're primarily born with. Does anybody here know what they are? No, pain has nothing to do with early childhood because you've just been born, your head's just been squashed. Pain is not even in there. The only two fears we're actually born with is fear of loud noises which makes perfect sense. Back in the caveman days if it made loud noise it normally ate you, so you would scream. So when a baby startles, they scream. It's a natural reflex. The only other primal fear we're born with is falling backwards because we're the only animal that starts flat and stands up with the most important part of what makes us us the furthest from the ground. Which is why when you have a newborn baby and a doctor does this, and goes they're looking for the startle reflex like that. They're making sure that part of your brain is formed so they're the only two parts of our brain that are primal fears. Which is why by far gymnasts suffer with blocks more than any other sport. We spend the majority of our time going backwards and sometimes in gyms having really low coaches so you can get double whammies there. But really what the brains turn and say going backwards. This is not natural, you're doing something you're already highly aware that there's something that's dangerous and going backwards. So when I first work with an athlete and I go into a gym and I've been called an athlete's got a fear or a mental block. And those of you who've worked with a couple of people in here, I've been to your gyms, the first thing I'll do is I'll talk to the athlete, build that bond, get a bit of rapport, normally, tell a few really bad jokes. So they kind of go, oh, yeah, he's human. And I'll take him over to a crash map and I'll watch them fall back onto a crash map. What I'm looking for, do they have a real fear of going backwards or is it just a heightened emotion that they've associated to a skill?
And that is really critical because after we've been through this today, you go, yeah, I can fix these. They're easy to fix. And the reality is they are quite easy to fix, yet they've got a genuine fear of going backwards that goes across every aspect of their life. This can be incredibly compounded for them. So we need to understand, are they actually fearful? Do they have a phobia of going backwards or is this skill based fear driving this? So the brain recognises that. Then what it does, it removes that part of the skill from our memory, not actually from our memory. It's always still in there, but it blocks it. Our brain is really good at protecting us. And those of you who've experienced trauma in your life later years, you kind of go, I don't really remember. I know something happened, but I don't really remember it. That's what's happened. Your brain's gone. You don't need to know this. Nothing happened here. We can go back to your lives, move on. So no longer can your brain think about that really fearful part of the skill. It eradicates that from the memory. So what we've now got is a broken system.
So we learn that skill and we compartmentalise it and then we stitch it all together and go subconscious, this is how you do that. Part of it is now broken. So how many people here who've experienced these kind of blocks recognise, let's say roundoff backflips, which is a classic one for junior athletes, they'll do the round off and stop it's. This is what's happened. The brain is gone. I don't know what's next. I don't have no recall. I have no pattern inside my head that tells us how we do it. And as coaches are going, Come on, you've done this so many times. You know that round off, set, back flip, and the kids going, Why died? And going, yeah, I know that because my coach is telling me so, but in my brain, there's no connection. So this is why it's really important to us as coaches to understand what's happening, because we're doing the right thing in the context. We're supporting this athlete. We're trying to encourage them, pass this yet in their brain, there's a break. And this is where it can become incredibly dangerous because I've witnessed this. I don't know if you witnesses in your gyms where a coach has gone, push, push.
Come on, you can do this. Come on, I'll be standing there. You can do this. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. And the athlete does a round off, does that, and then bows out, lands on their head, lands on their back, puts her hands down awkwardly. I watched an athlete not in this country, in the US, dislocate both arms outside and look like et because she went backwards like that and went put her hands down that way and then just collapsed. What was happening was she could not connect all of those skills together. So does this make sense of why we're getting what we're getting? We can understand what's going on inside our brains. We know how we form skills, and we know what the fear is actually doing to that sequentialization in our brain. It's missing. The same thing happens when we're talking about if somebody has a mental block for a competition. And again, how many times have we taken kids and they've done really great training sessions, get to the competition, and they either perform poorly or go, I don't know what to do. And you're going, Here you do. We've just spent six months doing this.
I know you know, and you go, no, I don't. I can't remember. How does my routine start? Where do I start? Do I start here on the beam? Do I start there on the beam? What's going on? And you're going insane. What's happened inside their brain? They've got what's called performance amnesia. It gets so overwhelmed in here. The boss goes, I'm going home, shuts the shutters and leaves. So there is no connection. We're getting frustrated as adults because this part of our brain is formed, yet they're left blank and foggy and then shaking because emotions rise. So it's a very, very common thing. It's very, very natural. And gymnasts, we don't do natural things. We're not supposed to be bouncing backwards. We're not supposed to be doing multiple somersaults. That's not how our bodies were designed. It's great fun, and we love doing it. Yet we're actually fighting nature constantly. And this is where enthusiasm over strategy comes undone because just pushing will never allow them to understand it. They may do it because they're more fearful of you than the skill. And then when you turn your back and you walk away, they go back to be fearful of the skill again.
Then they become more fearful of you because you go, I've seen you just do it. Let's do it again. Now, I'm not painting coaches to be mean, horrible things because I spent many years being a coach. What I'm trying is I know how frustrating it can be because I felt that frustration not understanding what was going on. Look, and in part, that's why I decided to come out of coaching and get into this aspect of performance, because for me, it's the number one missing aspect in all elite sport. We've got these awesome machines we build physically. Technically, these athletes are phenomenal. What we don't do is work on the pilot. We kind of go, there's an assumption that if the body is right and the technique's right, they can do this when the reality is not always. So before we move on, any comments, any questions? Any death threats? No. Can we see a correlation to what you're seeing inside your gyms or you're seeing maybe when you was an athlete? So there's two primal reasons. We've got fear and we've got gauges. And this is where it gets to become really important in your job.
Let me work out what's actually going on here. The two fears we have our actual consequence and imagined consequence, or perceived consequence. This is why I'm going to give you the slides, because a lot of terminology is just nerdy terminology, but the reality is we can break it down. Actual consequences. If you see something and it hurts somebody or it hurt you, that's an actual consequence. You've got a connected reality to that. Oh, look, I did this. I did a backflip. I bailed out, put my hands down and look like et. I ain't doing that again. That's a self preservation. It's actual consequence. If you watch somebody else do it, that's actual consequence. The way that I describe this. And some of you guys I know have heard me lecture before. So excuse me if I go over the same analogy, but it's really a good analogy. When we were in a caveman days and we came out the cave, if we saw our best mate John eaten at the watering hole, buy something, the Sabertooth Tiger, that's actual consequence. Our brain goes, don't go there. You do not want to go to the water hole.
You will be eaten. So that's the actual consequence. So we go back inside and send somebody else to get the water. We're the only animal that has an imagination. So what our brain then kicks in and goes, you know what? If that sabertoothed Tiger's at the Wolverine hole, maybe he's in the bushes over there. So I better not go there as well. And if he's in the bushes and maybe he's over there in the mountains as well. So I'm not going to go there either. So that's imagined consequence. So we've created this picture in our brain of, well, it could be dangerous in these places, so I'm not going to go there. So actual consequence versus imagined consequence. Actual consequences, a lot easier to deal with. Imagined consequences are all about emotion. So this is how we deal with it. So we're going to deal with them in order. We're going to go. Actual consequence. Imagine we've either seen something or we've experienced something that scared us, that's broken that link inside our brain, it no longer hyperlinks to where we want it to go. The link is broken, so we've got to look at cause and effect.
So if it's actual consequence when you did that, what caused it. This should be the first conversation you have with your athlete. If they fell off the beam, if they pinged off the bars, if they missed the ball and went into the front of the horse, whatever it is, cause, in effect, what did you do or did you not do to cause that? And they might turn to say, I was on the beam and I didn't think about where my feet were and I slipped.
Cool.
Now we've got something to fix. So it's only a fear if it's going to happen again. So if you understand what caused that, what do we do? So we use collective language. What did you do to cause it? What do we do to fix it? Okay, so you isolate and then create connection. What did you do? What did you not do? Well, I didn't count my steps and my run and vault. Ok. What do we need to do? We need to make sure the lines in the same spot. We have exactly the same steps each time. You will lower the fear of actual consequence because they now know how they do it. They now know what they need to do to fix what scared them. Visualisation. How many people here teach visualisation in your gyms? Cool. Very few of you. Those of you do it. Outstanding. So who is it? Did you say you did? No. Can I borrow you for a second, please? Can you explain to me and everybody else how you teach visualisation?
I'll tell them this is what I want you to do. Sit down. Watch carefully. Watch my entry.
So I go into it correctly and I'll do this because I'm an extremist.
Okay.
And they learn by watching.
And it gives them enthusiasm because their coach can do what I'm trying to teach them.
Absolutely. So you're giving them an image inside their brain. How do they see it?
They see it. Oh, yeah. I'll give it a go.
Okay.
No fear.
They just give it a go.
Okay. Awesome. So what I'm actually looking for here is, do they watch themselves or are they involved in that skill when they see it inside their head? Now, this is a really important aspect. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood visualisation. So when we look at it from what we call disassociated perspective, that's you standing back and watching yourself do a skill, what we're actually embedded into our brain, if you remember that little gymnast inside the brain, we're actually showing them, this is what I want you to do. As you explained, you got up and you showed them, right? That's cool. Now I want you to close your eyes. I want you to watch yourself do that skill. I was at the gym a couple of days ago, and I got a young lady to do this skill who's having a mental block. And I said to her, when you watch her because she was on beam, when you watch yourself on beam, what do you see? I said, what are you doing? She said, I keep falling off. Went, okay, cool. So the pattern that you're putting inside your brain is one that falls off?
She says, yeah, but I always do. Went, okay, so the reality is you're putting inside your brain that that is what's going to happen. You've just raised the consequence of actual fear inside your own brain. What we want to do is create an ideal option inside our brain. If I asked an athlete to do five carcasses on a beam, how many of those five carcls be identical? Now I'm talking precision identical. The reality is none of them. You'd have five options inside your brain. You've just created doubt by saying to an athlete, you just go and do five. And again, as coaches, we're all guilty of that, right? Guys going do five of these, going to do 15 of those, going to do 22 of those. Off you go, come back when you've done them. If that skill isn't exactly perfect, every time. Every time they do that, they're adding options inside their brain. Absolutely. I see that so frequently where a coach will go, I'm trying to encourage them to get past that block. I'm trying to push him past that block. But all you're doing is compounding the emotion. Absolutely, 100%. So this makes perfect sense to what you've just described.
So visualisation is such a critical skill set because our brain doesn't know the difference between doing something and imagining something. We create exactly the same neural pathway in our brain. Visualising. So if I ask an athlete to visualise the skill five times, we've got more chance of getting those identical. So we're actually compounding growth in our brain. Along that neural pathway, they become way more confident. There was a study done in America, naturally, because it was snipers. There was a study done in America on a team of soldiers that become snipers. And they broke into three groups. One group went and done the normal sniper training. One group did nothing. And then one group went and did visualisation. Never touched a gun. And the whole period they were assessed, first of all. And then that whole period, they did nothing other than those visualisation nothing or normal training. When they got the stats back and they reassessed them at the end of the course, the guys who did the normal training stayed on that normal trajectory that they'd seen throughout many years of taking people through the system. The guys who did nothing clearly didn't move.
The guys who visualised were actually more accurate than anybody else. They had not picked up a gun. So we're obviously using this as an example, but it was a really prominent study that allowed us to better understand what's going on inside our head. So I'm not saying that you shut down all your gyms and get your kids to sit there and visualise competitions and then go and do them. As nice as that might be. Sometimes what I'm trying to explain to you is how important the quality of the information goes in dictates the quality of what the body does. So visualisation is such a critical skill set. And the way that we teach visualisation is there's multiple different ways of doing visualisation. The two core ones I teach gymnasts are disassociated and associated. So disassociated is watching yourself. And what you're looking for is a biomechanical perfect representation of that skill or that routine. So what you're doing is embedding into your brain. This is what I want you to do. The second one is associated. So now, as you step into your body and you do that skill, I want you to see what you'd see, hear what you'd hear and feel what you'd feel.
So we add emotion to that. So we've got mechanical and then we got emotional. If we had emotional first, we'd never get consistency. And that's what certainly when I was an athlete, we had a Russian coach come over to teach us one period of time, and he says, Right, we do visualisation. Be in your body and do it. And that was all he said to us. You got all these people doing, like, flares on pummels and doing all these things inside their head and their bodies are all over the place. And it had no great impact on our consistency of what we were doing. It's only now that I understand what he missed was that critical part. First of all, how do we do this? So we actually create that front part of our brain. Let's break it down into an ideal perspective. And we eat elephants. It's really important that we eat elephants. We break it down. We try to eat a whole elephant, we'll choke. So break it down to bite sized chunks, making sure that when you're teaching the visualisation, when you're teaching the skill, when it's something that they've seen and they have a fear of actual consequence, let's break it down.
So if it's a round off, backflip, back, Somer sort. Let's get the round off right now. Let's work on the backflip. So we replicate what's going on inside the brain. Now let's work on the Somer sorts. Now, I want you to see yourself do the whole skill, and then I want you to feel yourself do the whole skill. You will make sure that what you're doing is reimbedding that missing part of that sequence in the brain. Does that make sense so far?
Cool.
So imagined consequence is all emotional. There's no reality to that. I've seen something. So therefore I'm scared. It's the imagination going, 1 second, if this could go wrong, how would it go wrong? And kids think about this all the time. What if it goes wrong? And especially when they get to that age bracket where it starts to become less emotional and more cognitive, when they start hitting their preteens and they start going, I could actually get hurt. Let me imagine how I could get hurt. So sorry. He was going to say, yeah, that's a really good observation. Humans are pack animals and what we do is two things happen as pack animals. We associate what the pack is doing. So if the packs moving and they're learning a skill, which would tend to do as a group, it's kind of I'll get dragged along with that. I'll go and I'll learn that skill not really understand it. So that is a really relevant thing. Making sure that everybody will learn at different stages. Everybody has different triggers. That's important to them. So making sure that your athlete understands it, asking the question. So maybe when you're learning a skill, tell me how you're doing this.
What are you seeing inside your head? How do you complete this skill? Now? If they can articulate it to you in broken athlete physiology, then it goes like, they've got this. They understand how the skill works. If they turn and say, I don't know, I just do it. That's one of those chevrons for you. So you were going to say a lot of skills.
This process. And if you second guess.
That'S right.
To get back to building that subconscious response where you can adjust.
Absolutely. Breaking the cycle is a good strategy. If they consistently come in the gym and they have the block, then you start going down this route and again, especially with girls, and they start hitting that puberty age group. If they come in and one day, I can't do this, you send them home, they come back next day and they do it. It was probably just a spike in emotion. Okay. And we don't talk about it for no secret. Just keep moving. If they come back the next day and they still consistently have those blocks, then you start looking at there's a break in the system here. It's not just a glitch. Does that make that understand? Okay, cool. So imagine emotionally, history of success, confidence, that's all confidence is, is history of success. When you've done something a number of times and you recall that, I can do this. I can remember last time I did this. I remember when we learned in this. And so you change in nerd world, we change the psychology of our brain and the physiology of our brain. We get more serotonin, less cortisol. Cortisol is our fight or flight mechanism of our brain.
Serotonin takes a plunge. Cortisol rises, we go into fight or flight. All we're thinking about now is we're in survival mode. We're not doing what we've done before. We're not thinking about all the times have been successful. Can I borrow you a young man, I was on the Wallabies camp recently and I got to do this with some of the biggest guys out in the streets. Okay, we'll step back a bit so I don't. All right. What I want to do, I need to have your shoulders width apart on your feet. There we go. And I want you to focus on your feet. Okay? Now, you know I'm going to do this right. So focus on your feet. Okay? So focus on your feet. Now look forward. What changed? Way easier. It was way easier. So I'm going to take a step forward. Focus on your feet. Same thing. So what I'm trying to think of what I'm trying to point out here, if you only focus on the now, doesn't matter what goes on, you will be vulnerable. Even if you know something's coming to knock you off your feet, you will be vulnerable if you look forward.
Like, this is where I'm going with this. This is what I'm doing, this skill for. You have perspective. You also have an opportunity to focus on history. It didn't work this time. Not a problem. But you remember last time when we did this? It really worked well. And you know what? We're doing this because it's going to be in your routine next week. That's brilliant. So you've got perspective on what you've achieved and where this is going. Yes. Athletes, because they predominantly focus on emotion. Again, I can't do it right now. It means I've never done it before and I can't ever do it again because they're fully focused in that moment. And as coaches, we kind of need to break that and take them out of that and go, it's okay. It's all good. You talked me through the time when you used to do it, when you were doing this skill last week, what was happening, what was you thinking about? What was the process inside your brain so you reconnect them to that time that it was working. They're not focusing on the now. They're not as highly motive. They're more systems driven.
Or you might turn and say, right, what are we doing this for? Because you want to learn a back, somersault what comes after a back, somersault layouts, what comes after layout? We start to twist. So you make them move past that instant blockage they've got right there. Visualisation is again, exactly the same process we went through when it was actual consequence. And what if I had a racing car driver who he got this opportunity to go and race a very famous race, 24 hours race. And we were sitting in his office and I said to him, okay, we're good, we're ready. We've done all our preparation. He's gone, Dave. What if I can't do it? I said, yeah, okay, but what if you can. He's going, yeah, I know, but what if I can't handle that vehicle? I go, yeah, what if you do handle that vehicle? He goes, yeah, all right, okay. But what if I can't do the corner? I said, but what if you can get David really upsetting me. I said, Good. Because what if is really important if you constantly say, but what if it goes wrong? Our job as coaches.
But what if it goes right? But what if I can't do it? Well, what if you can do it? But what if I've never done it before? But what if you have done it before? We've got a history of success here. So we have to add that balance, because they're not thinking balance, they're thinking emotion. So our language becomes incredibly critical in how we manage this process with them. If we feed that emotional monster inside them, and I believe we've all got an emotional monster inside of us and it's a teenager, you feed it crap, you will get a delinquent, you feed it positive stuff, good stuff, healthy stuff. You get a much more rounded person to work with. That's our emotional monster on the inside. If you are constantly feeling negativity, that is all it thinks it can do. And that comes from us too.
How do you get the balance between what you were saying earlier and acknowledging that it's real?
It's true.
How do you get your balance between for them? This is true right now and being able to balance them off and go, give it if you can?
Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really good point, because we don't want to dismiss that fear for sure. And we'll come to that. There's a little section where we're to deal with that. That's okay. Yeah. So do we have any questions about the different types of fear that they will encounter and our strategies of coaching that allows us to move them past that? No. You are the quietest group I've ever had. So behaviour takes time. Our core responses or our core reactions to our world are formed by the time we're seven. So if you as a seven year old, that chucked yourself on the floor and chucked a tanty in the shops because Mum wouldn't buy you something, the reality is, as an adult, you do exactly the same thing in a bit more grown up version most of the time. If you were the kind of seven year old that took yourself off and went, oh, I want to retreat away from here. I'm going to hide as an adult, you'll hide it's just naturally. What we're learning, we learn that from our environment, so we can change that. However, we need to understand if there's a pattern, if when you are trying to work with an athlete and they Chuck a spat and they're really aggressive or really emotional, okay, let's just take a step back here.
That's probably their normal Behavioural pattern. They're just scared. So let me try and break that. Let me try and change the way that they process. If they stand there and go, okay, you understand it? We get that a lot. They'll just agree because they think that's the right thing to do to coaches. Yes, whatever you say. I'll agree with that. Yes. Let's put it in place. I don't know. They're mentally checked out. They're the ones that would have gone and taken themselves out of the equation when they were younger. These are two primal ways to deal with fear. This is an exercise. The sound of it. This is an exercise I teach them. It's funny. This is an exercise I teach athletes and I advise everybody to invest in these. Okay, so we've got a Wallaby, we've got a racing car driver, and we've got an Irish dancer, all different age brackets. And the reason I put those three up there is because they are across like Dane's, 30 years old. Jake, at that point was 20 years old. Amelia, I think at that point was about 1413. So these exercises you're going to do with your kids should be done every single day.
Because what it does is we're going to teach them to bounce a ball like this. Just get into a process of bouncing the ball. Several things are happening here. Different colour balls. Right eye feeds the left hand side of the brain. Left eye feeds the right hand side of the brain. We are now stimulating the left and right hemispheres of our brain. So if nothing else, when you go home today, you'll be smarter. If you do this, my job is done. We want to make sure that we're catching the ball this way. When people juggle, they do this because it's essentially easier to reflex action rather than a conscious cognitive action. So we get him into a habit, then we get him into a pattern. Now, who here likes music? Most people like music. What is it about music? We like it's a rhythm. Sorry? It's a rhythm. What's the first rhythm you ever heard? Your mum's heartbeat. Which is why when you were sick as a kid, you're going to lay your mum's chest. It's calming. So first process is getting into a rhythm. It's calming. You will shift the cortisol out of the brain and start to increase the serotonin.
What we do then is right. We're going to go back to the backflip. You tell me, how do you do a backflip? Well, I do a hurdle and then I make my left leg go forward, I take a big lunge and then my hands go down. You're engaging the brain because you're catching this way. The prefunded cortex is busy. The boss is busy. So you go, yeah, you're saying this, it must be true. So you can start to bypass that block, that overthinking. This is a great skill set because it's something completely unusual. It's out of the gym in a context. It's not a skill, it's not a gym skill, it's something you can go, okay, look, start applying this, get them into this. And because they're gymnasts, they have no natural coordination and I know that because I was a gymnast, it took me a really long time to do this. So you get into a point where you go, okay. And you start talking through the process. So Jake, the racing car driver, we create a track map. Every time he goes and races on that track map can be over 200 things that he has to think about.
Every lap he travels, about 200 and 5300 kilometres an hour. He can't think about those. So we walk through this, he'll go, okay, yeah, this is what I do. Corner number one, this is my breaking point, this is my braking pressure. This is where my hands need to be. This way, I need to be on the track, because what it's doing is saying, Well, Dave, you're saying this to me, so therefore it must be true. I'm busy catching. Don't make me have to think about this. Don't make me stop. I'm busy. This is the boss. So you start to believe, get them in your gym and start walking them through that skill. If they consistently fall over at how they do that skill at the same point, you now know where to focus. You now know if they go round off, oh, I don't run my feet, so therefore I don't know how to back flip.
Cool.
That's the point that you overemphasise the mechanics of how you make this skill work. So they've just given you an insight into their brain because apparently you can't open them up anymore. This will give you an insight into their brain. So we understand why we have them, we understand what's going on inside our brain, and that's all fear based. The second category is gauges. And this is where this becomes really relevant. I ask you at the start to remember this. So if your gaze is 100% emotional, does this feel right when you become a teenager and you've now got logic starting to play a part in that bit of cognitive behaviour going on where they turn and go, Let me think about that. Is that dangerous to me, the way that I use this as an analogy, if I'm holding onto this ball, my hand is telling me that day that's a ball that's roughly this kind of size, that's familiar to me. I know what that is. Then I go and sit on my hand for five minutes and I get pins and needles and I hold it. Will it feel the same? No.
Is it still the same thing? 100%. So if they're used to gauging or feel, then all of a sudden their feelings are different. That creates doubts. So we're used to as children, especially in gymnastics, when we start so young and we go through the whole process. The vast majority of the way that we believe we can do these skills is how does that feel to me? Then all of a sudden we add into that a little nuance. They start going through puberty. No longer is it only about how they feel or even if those feelings will be completely different. Those of you who got teenage daughters as I do, really different. So if your gauges have always been emotion then you'll start to create doubt. This is why when people phone me up and they'll say they were doing this skill really well, they've been doing it for years, all of a sudden she came in the other day, can't do it. First question I'll ask them is okay, cool, how old is she now? This is not a blanket coverage, it's not always the reason, however it's often the trigger and I might say, oh, she's eleven, she's twelve.
Is she going through puberty? Well, yeah, she's starting to change a little bit.
Cool.
What's happening is her gauges are different. The things that she felt before, she no longer feels the same. Yes, I've never grown, but yes, absolutely two things happen now. One of them is that absolutely they've grown. So therefore in order for them to grow, the chemistry in their body has changed but also their centre of gravity has moved, their mechanics has changed. So what used to think when they would start to some sort of fragment saying here's my centre of gravity, now it's up here, not for me, but now it's up here somewhere. It's shifted. Your gauges are different. You've now got apples and oranges rather than there's two apples. I know exactly what they are, I've done this for the last five years, I know what the skill is and all of a sudden there's a variable, that variable kicks in and the brain goes, is that going to hurt me? Let me create doubt comes from subconscious back to the boss in the office, he goes let me find something that's dangerous here for you. So absolutely growth spurts. When you go back after Christmas because they had a long period off, they've been eating really well or probably not as well but they've been eating lots, they will come back and lot of them have growth.
But you've grown over the holidays. Gauge difference. This is a prime time where they kind of go, I can't do that skewer anymore. There's always a nerd reason how we deal with gauge changes. So if they've grown or they're going through puberty is exactly the same way that we dealt with the emotional part of the fear. So we start to look at history. Ok, how did we used to do this? What did you used to think about? How can you take that into the now remember, we don't want to look at our feet, we want to look forward, we want to make sure the visualisation we want to make sure that pattern is re embedded into their brain. So they're thinking about pattern, not feels. We don't want to make it feel the same. We want to make it do the same. Consistency will never happen through feel and the what ifs. What the brain does, then it fixes those broken links in the brain. Essentially, what we've got here is a misbalance between our emotions and our mechanics in our brain. That's essentially what's going on. Now. I've just spent an hour telling you there's lots of different things that goes on to make this occur.
The reality is this is ultimately what's going on. There's a mismatch between how I do it and how that makes me feel. So I'm going to give you five tips as coaches that every coach should be really aware of and focus on. And then I'll give you some time to ask as many questions as you want. So the first thing is, we talked about this at start. Do not dismiss the reality of this inside their mind. This is critical. If nothing else you remember, please do not dismiss this inside their mind, because if you don't believe them, then they will not come to you for help. They will not see you as part of their solution. They will see you as part of their problem. It doesn't matter how much you're doing it for the right reasons inside their mind. You've just now gone. What you're seeing, you're feeling, you're experiencing isn't real. It's like going to a kid and saying, can you just put your hands over your ears, please? There's no centre, okay? You've just gone to them and said, there's no centre. And they went, you're serious? Thank you. Does that make sense?
Yeah. What we do is coaches go, you'll be all right, you'll be fine. It's not as big problems as you thought it was. It's nothing. Everybody goes through this. All of a sudden, they're going, but not like me. You don't understand. You don't get what's going on inside my head, inside my body. We want, as a coach, is not dismissive, we want to recognise it. We want to turn around and say, then, okay, let me work out what's the causation here. Is it a fear? Is it an actual fear or is it a fear of potential? So imagined fear? Or is there something else that's going on a physiological shift in that athlete? Be it growth or be it chemically, they're going through puberty. The other thing that makes the other question I'll ask is, how's life at home? How's life at school? Because if we start increasing the emotion, something's going on at home, mom and dad are not getting on or my mom Daddy got on really well. Whatever's going on, if there's some kind of change, they'll start to go from this is ticking along really nicely to something different or back in the front office, if they're changing, they're having issues at school.
Again, another indicator, they'll start to doubt. And the thing about the subconscious, it can't compartmentalise one doubt means everybody out like a Union.
I have that this week. A little girl, she's seven, she's totally fine. I said, Go do round off back cancer. She said a million times and she just stopped after back answering and breakdown. I said, what's wrong? And suddenly I said, that's not her. I said, what's going on? What's wrong? She burst into tears. Mom and dad had a fight before I came.
Absolutely.
She's done it many times. That's not what she was worried about at all. Mom and dad had a fight before she left.
Absolutely. Primal behaviour, increase in emotion. Something must be wrong. The brain goes, Let me find something that's wrong, something that's dangerous. That's an awesome description of what we're talking about here, man. It's warm in here, isn't it?
Yeah.
So we have firm objective and their why. So why are you doing this? And again, this is the question. I was saying, what do you want out of your sport? Where do you want to go? What we're trying to do is increase the value of what they're doing over the fear of what's holding them back. If we can get the value of what they're doing way more important to them than the fear, the brain will actually switch it off and go, yeah, it's all right. I want that more because we all do that. If someone says to you, okay, I'm on a diet, but you really want this cake, you'll go yesterday. So we try and do the same thing with our brain as long as we know there's no physical. And I should have said this at the start to you, if the fear is real because they can't do the skill, don't try and get them past it. And I made that assumption that none of you would have done that because you're good coaches. So if they physically are not capable of doing the skill, my assumption was they all can do the skill.
However, if they physically cannot do the skill, it doesn't matter how good this is or how good I am. You're going to end up with an injured athlete. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. And that comes back down to what the group's doing and especially with young kids. So 1 second, especially young kids, when the whole group's going forward and they're all learning a skill and maybe you're struggling with something, you will that whole value thing, I don't want to be left out. Where pack animals. If the packs move in, I'm going to move with it. And all of a sudden they'll try something they're maybe not capable of.
Even though she's what are you doing? It just broke down, started crying. I was like, all right, just chill for five. I'll come back, came back. I was like, all right, what if we get the minitram there instead of the Bolt. That's easy. You can jump higher. Okay, cool.
Of the sun. So you made the statement and not jumping the gun. Build a comeback strategy with a great job. Were you looking over my shoulder? Were you looking over my shoulder? So I'll just go back to number three for a second, which is reaffirm the objective and their reason why. What we're trying to do is create a logical reason why they want to get over it. So you might turn in and say, I understand you're scared of the vault. I appreciate that and I understand why with whatever the causation is, what do we need to do to get you past that? Because if you want to do all of these, then vote is going to be an important part. If you don't want to sugarcoat this to the point where they're going to go, it's white picket fences and we don't have to do what we don't want to do. The thing is, we've got to teach them that there's some kind of resilience in how they do what they do. So they've got to see a greater value in than you do. So their reason why to do it needs to be bigger than their internal reason why they shouldn't do it.
Okay? And this is not about you becoming a salesman. We don't want kids going, I don't believe this, but they do. So therefore, I'm going to do it for them. Because coaches have a huge amount of impact and influence over every athlete. Whether you realise the influence you have or not, it's massive. The amount of times I get to speak to an athlete and they'll say, yeah, Mum, they don't understand. But my coach and you hear this Halo come over the coach's head, and that's an awesome gift that you have for that athlete. However, with that comes responsibility, as you know. So if you're trying to convince them, yeah, you can do this. When you're back of your mind, you're thinking, I'm not quite sure, please don't, please don't oversell it. So building a comeback strategy with the athlete, and I've underlined that with, because they need to be part of the solution. So I often say, coaching, we have an opportunity to do either to them, for them or with them. If you do it to them or for them, they have no ownership over it. We have to do it with them. So even though you might know as a coach and even when I do what I do for a living, I come in and I go right here, I can fix this athletes problem quite easily.
I will sit down and say, what do we need to do? What's our first step? So we use inclusive, collective language. Okay, cool. Then what do we do? So we move along with them. And often I hear coaches say, all right, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to stand there and then the kid goes, oh, my God, they're cranky at me. And then they kind of go, yes. And then all of a sudden you got an increase in emotion about that whole moment, not about the skill anymore. You've just now got an increase in emotion about your involvement in that. Okay, so what do we need to do? Is it part of that process that we do this part together that's really critical, especially when we're thinking about emotively processing little beings as logical as an adult. You might try to go, Come on. Alright, put his socks up. So when I'm working with, like, Dane, the 30 year old, I don't have these kind of softy, softy conversations. I'm hoping he's moved past that part yet when I'm working with much younger athletes. Yes, I do, very much. So now, this is an important thing for all of us to understand, whether the skill is an issue or the skill is not an issue.
Emotion comes at the end of a skill, not at the beginning. What I mean by that is, how many times have you guys gone? Right? Do you feel ready? And the athlete goes, yes, I do. And they'll do. The skill fantastic. How many times have also gone, Are you ready? And kids going, no, I don't feel ready because emotions rising. If we wait to feel a certain way, the likelihood is you'll never, ever feel like this moment again in time, because you've got more data. So even if you got out of bed this morning, out the same bed, you go out yesterday morning, you will feel different. It's just human nature, it's just a data collection process. So if you say to a kid, do you feel the same as you did yesterday? Then if you do, you're ready, they're going to go, I don't feel like I did yesterday. I was tired yesterday or I'm tired today. So therefore you just create a doubt. So the language you want to use when we talk about emotives, like this is. All right, are you ready? What do you need to do? I need to do this.
Isn't it cool when they did that? How did that feel? Does that feel good? So we put the emotion at the end so it becomes a celebratory emotion, not a judgmental emotion. So our language as coaches needs to shift a little bit, because as gymnasts, we felt when we became coaches, our language stayed as gymnasts, does that feel right? Do we feel ready? We need to speak to them in a way that gives us the best outcome we possibly can. Right? Are you ready? What do you need to do? All right, this is what I need to do. Then celebrate it, increase that serotonin, lower that cortisol they will feel good about that. My job is to make an addicts. And the addict I'm trying to make them is serotonin addicts. They kind of go, yeah, I want to feel good again.
Okay.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Very much so. I've just spent a whole week with one of our national teams, and all of them, literally every single one of them, are at least a foot taller than I am. And we had this conversation with them and their coaches about the language they're using. And it was such a poor culture of language. A lot of the issues that they were experiencing came from poor language, not from skill, not from skill deficit or physicality. It came from poor language. So therefore, we increased emotion, increased doubts. Does that make sense? Short answer is no, I can't, because you know exactly who I'm talking about. And there's a confidential agreement, however, I'll give you just generally. Generally, yeah. So that whole do you feel ready? How do you feel today, guys? Are we feeling good, all of those kind of things, or when you had those issues before? An athlete is having an issue, say, well, how did you feel before? Did you feel that you could do it? Then you're comparing two emotions. So therefore, they're looking for an emotional language patterns. We want to make sure that it's all positively driven.
So there was a study that came out probably about seven or eight years ago, and it looked at the growth patterns of success. And one of the cool things about my job, I get to make up words if we think about and I don't have this slide in front of me. If we think about going from A to B, we like to think it's a dead straight line. We're going to learn a skill, never done it before, we're going to complete it. This is our trajectory. The reality is that never happens. We have good sessions, bad sessions, good attempts, not so good attempts. So we have this roller coaster if we focus on this is my word. The down bumper is all the down parts. What our brain says, I know you wanted to get here, but I don't want you to feel bad. So let's lower your expectation. So all of a sudden they're not thinking, I'm going to do this great skill. They're kind of thinking, I just want to do the skill, I just want to get it done. And then you start focusing on if it wasn't good and language patterns for coaches, they'll go, yeah, but you need to stretch more or you need to take a bigger stride in or you need to make your hand placements different.
So we're always focusing on the negative, and then they go, instead of being up here, it's now down here, let me just lower it a little bit more for you. It makes you feel a bit better. So you start to underachieve purely and simply by the language patterns we choose to use. The flip side of that is if you focus on the things that you're doing right now, I'll explain the analogy to all this in a moment. What the brain does go well, you want to do a layout? What if we could do doubles? What if we could do half in, half out? All of a sudden you start to increase expectation, which drives momentum, because ultimately that's what we want to create is momentum. Skills leading. Skills are leading to skills. So our language becomes really critical when we think about that. I want you to quickly think about, because I know the next one is coming in in about ten minutes. I want you to think about when you were at school and you did your last exam or one of your exams at school and you got the results for what was the first thing you looked for when you got that result back?
Yeah, the score. How good am I? So you instantly judged yourself. Okay, what's the second thing you looked for? Yes. Comments or the red marks, the things you didn't get right. So if you did an exam and you got 95% and you've gone 95%, he got 98, she got 99 and that's a freak. And then you kind of go, I'm not up there yet. Then you start to look at the things that you got wrong. All of that 95% you got right, your brain goes, that's not important to me. It's not important to you. You never even mentioned it and it ditches it. So you no longer have replicability. You only focus on the broken bits and they become highly emotive. So I always say to every single athlete, everything that you do as you walk back in line, you should be saying to yourself, what worked? What didn't work? What do I do differently? So what worked? You change the serotonin, you start to think about the things that worked. You can replicate those. So we get that history of success, we get confidence what didn't work, because we got to recognise what didn't work.
Now, how do you fix that? What do you need to do different? Now, I know I used the language for us, but they've got to take ownership of that part of the process. Okay, I did that skill. This part worked really well. But you know what? I didn't stick my land in this time. I'm going to focus on that. So you get progress. So our language is really critical. So when we think about using emotive languages, they must be at the end of the process, not at the start. I'm going to finish on this talk. This is a study that came out back in 2016 and it looked at the top 1% of elite athletes around the world, like your world, your Federer's, your David Beckham, those kind of people show my era. Now, what they're trying to work out is how do we create successful athletes? What is that missing link? Why does 99% of the population competitive population not have it? So they looked at is it basically talent are the top 1%, the most talented athletes in net pool. What they worked out is less than 10% of that 1%. So 0.9% of that top 1% were the most talented.
So they had always been the best, always through their career, which meant there was over 90% of another cause. So they looked at, is it financial? Is it geographical? Is it physiological? Are some people just more naturally gifted? And it is part and part of that. However, the biggest part was what made the most successful athletes on this planet was a system and tenacity finding a plan that works for them, not a generic one, and sticking to it. So when I have an athlete say to me, yeah, but they're more talented than me, I drag this out every single time. Okay? So you're playing to the smallest denominator, play to the biggest one on your lap, work out what works for you and stick to it. I sent you at the start. There's a link. If you go to that link, all the slides we've talked about today will be there. I'll go straight from here to the airport. I'm flying off to Melbourne on again, but I'll upload the audio from this so you can relison to it in the future. There's also a link in there that says, I've got an online training programme for athletes and coaches and there's a free module to that.
We can go and assess how that athlete is currently performing. That's free to you guys. You can just link into that. The only thing I ask you, do you have to sign in with a legitimate email? Because a lot of this stuff is my IP, obviously. So I want to make sure it stays with you guys. Okay. All right, so we've covered a lot of stuff in an hour and a half. Comments, questions, death threats. If there's something that you experience, you want me to have some kind of say in? Absolutely, yeah, very much so. Just to put that into context, I worked with a coach who said to me, Every single one of my gym nests, this is a male coach. Every single one of my gymnasts had a problem with rings and I thought, well, is it technical? He goes, no, we've had different coaches in through the whole time. There's always with the rings. And it came down to his attitude to rings. He had an issue as an athlete. He had had an accident as an athlete. So his terminology around rings is way different to any other operators. So, yeah, our languages, coaches, our feelings, our emotions, our connectivity to a skill we impart, that every bit of information we give.
Like, I'm really passionate about this stuff. I could talk about this for days under wet cement. So I'm really passionate. Everything I talk about comes a bit of emotion. If I was scared about something, it would come with a bit of emotion. So as coaches, we got to be very conscious of what are we giving information? Are we giving judgement, are we giving fear? Does that answer your question? Yeah.
Just to put that in context, I've been running my own business for the last 15 years, and I've been doing this for the last 18 years. And every single year I have this part of my brain that says I have to get in front of more coaches because they are the catalyst of where this comes from. Yet it's a huge resistance to change and a huge amount of coaching. Again, this national team, I've been working with the coaches. Terrence said to me, you can't tell me how to coach. I'm not trying to tell you how to coach. I'm trying to give you some skill set and some tools. So I 100% believe and this should be something that's populated through your clubs. It should go to every level of coaching. So as coaches and I put myself in that same category, we have a huge amount of accountability to what happens to our athletes. Huge amount.
I've got a gym where she knows how to do them when there's no medical or anything like that. That was so good. And I try and understand that to be the thing. I don't think it is. I talk to my security coach, she goes, that's not it. How do you teach back if you coach? Which is fine, but I don't really know how to get her past that to kind of respect a bit more and be like, oh, your feedback is good. Maybe I will try that rather than just shutting it down for sure.
There's a couple of things in that. Everything I've talked about today is for athletes who want to get past a block they're built in, yet they've got this mental block. We will come across people who just don't want to do it, and they will look for every excuse under the sun to not have to do it. I've come across people and their parents and the coaches have said to me, we want this fixed. I've sat with the athlete, and they really don't want it fixed. So I've come back. You know what? I think it's time they moved on. I found something else less challenging. Sometimes that is a very uncomfortable but very necessary conversation. Same with coaches. Sometimes coaches will push things for their own agenda rather than the right thing for the athlete, and it has to always go back, well, why are we doing this? So remember, we talked about their why it's the same for coaches as it is for athletes. Why are you doing this? What is your buy in? What's your ultimate outcome? Right. Because everything that we want is an emotion. I want to be taller. I want to be richer.
All those kinds of things are highly emotive. Then you kind of say, what do I need to do? To make that happen. They're action driven. They're causation. So this is what I'm doing to get what I want.
Pretty much her in the group, and she was so blended up, all of a sudden, I win the effort with her. Yeah, I'm going to get it. And I told her, do you know why?
Absolutely. So humans are pack animals and we can play that game very well. And there's a little bit of social pressure is just as relevant as anything else we do as coaches, again, with very cautious process with that. Any other questions? Comments? At least one death rate? Yes. That's just as relevant. Absolutely. That's just as relevant. Yeah, absolutely. So that's no different. That's a gauge. So if our gauge in our brain is. And again, I teach teams not to listen to commentators because they'll tell you stats. You'll say, oh, they've never won at this venue, or every time they come here, they capitulate or whatever it is. So you create an option inside their brain. They're not saying that's what's happening. They may talk about themselves. They may say, every time we come here, wow, it's big. It's overwhelming. Whatever it is, they're creating an option out. I had an ice skater who was competing in Where was she now? I think it was Switzerland somewhere like that. And it was two in the morning. The phone call rang and she goes, Dave, I can't go in. And I've gone, why? She goes, oh, my God, it's the biggest venue I've ever been to in my life.
It's so big. It's so huge. Okay, cool. She's a nice Gator. And I said to her, Is it cold in there? Yeah, of course it's cold. What colour is the ice? She says, David's white. Okay, so there's a boundary around it. I said, she says, yes, of course there's a boundary around it. I'll let you go off the ice. She was getting quite cranky with me. So cool. So all of those things are constants in your world. So therefore, what's different? It's just a bit bigger. Let's focus on the things that are the same, not the things that are different. They do exactly the same thing with gymnasts when they go to a big venue and they'll go, It's all different. I said, okay, it's been the same length. Of course it would be the same length. Same width. Of course it is. So what's actually different? You tell me, 99.9, they say to me, the floor is a different colour. Does that affect your performance? Well, no. So looking for similarities and familiarity is really important. So every time you go to a venue, you take them to say, Right, guys, tell me, what's the same?
Because naturally they're looking for things that are different because they're normally the things that will hurt you. So they'll go to that fear, that emotionally driven fear. But what's the same? Are the bars still the same shape? Are the bars still the same diameter? Is the volt still the same? Is the table same? It might be a different brand, but does it do the same thing? And the amount of athletes that go, yeah, it's the same. I've done this. There's one other thing, and I know we've got to move on, but there's one other thing that's really important. We need to take 10% of every competition and put it into training so you can take the trained version of the athlete into competition. We tend to train different to how we compete, how the language is different. Right? Game day. Let's step it up. Let's do something different. Let's put it all together now. No, let's do what you've always done. And one thing that really upsets every athlete I talk to, and I do this on purpose. I'll say to them, the most simple thing that you do is compete, because all you're doing is what you've already learned.
The hardest thing you do is be a student, because you push boundaries, you try new things, you make mistakes. That's the hard part. If you train a skill, 10% of every single training session should be right now. I've just learned that skill. Let me compete. It might only be that one skill, and you might just say to them, I want you to show me what you've learned today. Put it as the competitor, show me that skill. You will make them ultimately very comfortable with doing that skill under pressure that starts in the minute they learn the skill. It should never feel like competition is different to training.
Students said to me one year, Sharon, I don't want to disappoint you online to do a good performance.
I don't want to let you down. How do I handle that?
Yeah, absolutely. You know what makes me really happy? When you think about yourself, when you are happy with yourself, that's what makes me happy. So you can use that if you're 100% behind yourself and you really believe in yourself, you know what? That's the best gift you can give me. So we talk about internal versus external referencing. You want to make sure that internally reference first. What do I need to do? How do I perform? Am I doing the right thing? Hey, coach, are you happy? You should never be. Hey, Coach, are you happy? If you're happy, then I'm happy. Wrong way around. All right, we've covered a lot of information. Like I said, I could talk for a week under wet cement. So I hope you've got a lot from this. I hope you can see some real relevance to your training, your issues. You've counted in your gym. If you want to ask me any more questions, I know where you need to get out of here. Please come and see me. I'm happy to have a chat with you. Okay. Thanks very much.
Thanks for listening. I hope you found it useful. The principles used in this podcast were developed through the Smartmind Institute the number one resource hub to learn the cutting edge techniques and mental skills used by worldclass athletes and coaches. See podium finish every time.
You can't be serious, man. You cannot be serious.
