Have you ever seen an advert on YouTube, and it says, 'The one thing you need to do is this.' And you found yourself clicking on it. The thumbnail says to you, 'Don't do this, do that.' And you're so intrigued that you'll click on it. This clickbait works. And it works for a reason. It works because human nature is to look for the quick fix. The solution. What do I need to do for me to get the outcome and the result I'm after? In the least amount of moves, trouble or friction. So human nature is always going to look for that quick fix. What's my process? What's my strategy? What do I need to do? And how do I get there as quick as possible?
What we're going to talk about today is how that flies in the face of high performance and how it probably costs you your performance.
Why do I want to talk about the silver bullet, the quick fix, the one thing that you need to do, and why that's so dangerous for high performance. I had an athlete contact me over the weekend. I was conducting a lecture, and there was a multitude of us specialists, each of us dealing with different aspects of performance, dietitians, physiologists, biomechanics, psychologists, you name it. We was all in a room together. And an athlete came up to me and said to me, I've been here all weekend and I'm really confused. And I'm confused because that person says, the one thing I need to do for my performance to be better is this. And then there's another expert turned around and said to me, no, you need to be doing this. This is the one thing you need to do, and everything's going to be fantastic for you. And I've had this all weekend. The reality is, particularly in high performance, there is no such thing as the silver bullet. The one thing. If it was the one thing, don't you think everyone would be doing it? One of the biggest challenges when you talk to anybody about high performance is they think high performance is about the result.
They think high performance is about winning. Now, anybody involved in high performance are probably highly competitive, too. So we like to win. We like to be the best. We like our process, our team, our individuals, and ourselves to be known as the best. But that's not high performance. That's part of our characteristics. But that's not high performance. High performance is about a process to get the outcome, not just the outcome. When you talk about high performance, don't think results. Think process. Think systems. Think collaboration. What makes high performance high performance is that every pillar that goes into making an athlete needs to be of that top tier standard. So that could be the physiology. And when we're talking about physiology, that could literally mean the fitness, it could be the strength, it could be the endurance, it could be the recovery. All of these things are relevant, but they all come under physical development. Physical development is the umbrella, but there's pillars to each of them. It could be technical. Now, it could be a technique It could be the technique on takeoff. It could be the technique for consistency, putting the routines together. It could be the technique of landings.
It could be the technique of creating rotation. Again, the umbrella is technique, but it comes down to a multitude of different things. And the same goes for mental performance. When we're talking about mental performance, then there's a mental framework. That's how do you perform? What makes you uniquely you? How do you get up and consistently perform that skill, that routine under pressure? There's cognitive capacity. That's decision making. How well do you handle the unpredictable, the things that don't work? How do you recover in that moment to do it better? All of these things can be relevant. But there's another component to this, too, which is emotional resilience. How emotionally resilient are you when things aren't the same or things are not going the right way? Are you emotionally resilient enough to go, let's take a step back, let's use that mental cognitive capacity that I have to come up with a different plan in the moment? Or do I know how to follow my mental framework when everything going around me has gone to pop? So under mental performance or performance psychology, which is the umbrella, there's a multitude of different pillars. So if I turn around and said to you, the only one thing that you need to do to be the best athlete in the world is to be consistent, then That's not true.
Consistency is a major pillar, I think one of the most important pillars. However, there are a multitude of other different things that you need to be very good at to maintain high performance status, to be able to perform in and around the best in the world. Same with physical, same with technical. Dietitians, recovery, S&C. There are multitudes of different pillars for each of these, and the mastery of all of those is where we aim to be. So we can't be perfect. What we can be is a certain standard across everything. Let's think of it in that pillar format, and let's just focus on performance psychology component. If you had a really high standard, say an eight out of 10 for your mental framework, your ability to follow your systems, your patterns, your processes, and your cognitive capacity was also an eight out of 10. Your ability to problem-solve, come up with strategies, and think in the moment and execute. But your emotional resilience was a six out of 10. Still, that's pretty good, right? You'd say average across the top of all of those. That's pretty cool. But the platform that you perform from is no longer stable.
It's no longer a stable flat platform. So when you go to execute, there's potential that your emotional dip could have you compromised in performance. Now, you extrapolate that out across the physical, the technical, the recovery, the psychological, and it can end up looking really unstable if certain areas are not all up to the same capacity. When this athlete was talking to me and I explained these pillar formats to them, and I said to them that when they were talking to the nutritionist, for argument's sake, and they said, your one thing you need to do is to focus on this, they might have been right in the capacity of all of the nutritional pillars they were talking about. Not to replace them what you're doing with that one thing, but to complement what you're doing with that next thing. We can look at all the different columns from our technical to our physical to our psychological, to our nutritional, to our health and wellbeing. All of these things have a component and a part to play as a whole in the development of you as an athlete. So when the athlete was listening to me and we unpacked it in this bigger picture format, we then reassessed all the pieces of data that the special wishlist had given them.
And we put them into context with, okay, so that piece of data from the S&C comparatively to the other things that you do in your strength and conditioning protocol, Will that make a difference? And he's gone, Yeah. Now, when I measure them against everything else, it makes sense. It makes sense that there's not one silver bullet, there's not one thing to do. Let's go back a second to those thumbnails that you see on social media, that click bait. The reason it works is because it is absolutely stellar marketing. It feeds our fears. It feeds our FOMO, fear of missing out. It feeds what's the quickest way for me to get the thing that's most important to me. From a marketing perspective, that's why we're vulnerable to it. That's why sometimes we can over-emphasize looking for that one thing. But it's definitely going to leave us short somewhere else. Have you ever heard that saying, Robin Peter to pay Paul? It's an old English saying. And it means if I take from you to fill a gap over here, what often happens is the gap just moves from over there to you. And that's nowhere more relevant than in high performance.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes, is only going to create a gap somewhere else that you're then going to have to reallocate your focus to? Those of you who have listened to me before know I talk about focal currency. Where are you investing your focus? If your focus is being invested in one area, the likelihood is you're neglecting somewhere else. And if you're neglecting somewhere else in high performance, then you will be vulnerable. You will find that will make you destabilised. So when we're thinking about that one thing, that one skill, that one technique, that one focus, it's not really a realistic holistic option in high performance. What's a more healthier focus is for you to think about, how do I get every single component to the same standard, the same optimisation. So when you're thinking about your recovery, think holistically. What is the best version of a holistic recovery plan? When you're thinking about technical, what's the best technical approach to my performance across every different capacity? And when you're thinking about performance psychology, think about your mental frameworking. Think about your cognitive capacity to problem-solve, to deal with things, to come up with things.
And even think about your mental and emotional resilience. This athlete referenced a very famous swimmer who made the statement that if you're not competing, then you're settling. And I don't necessarily agree with that. Structure, approach, strategy, mental frameworking to build consistency, I think is the platform to perform from. Because when you do need to dig a bit deeper, when you do need to go that extra mile to get that result, to compete, to push the boundaries, you're doing it from a really stable, reliable, and replicable platform. Stepping outside The norm should be just stepping outside of what you trust, what you can rely on. Because then you're going to get the outcomes that you're looking for. You're going to be able to reach a little bit further, push a bit harder because you've got that confidence and that self-belief that your base is stable. So I believe that you've got to have that dogged approach. You've got to be highly competitive. You've got to be able to go above and beyond what your normal is. But you've also got to trust that. And the way you trust that is to do it from a stable, reliable platform, your pillars.
We went back into training, and I asked this athlete to reevaluate the information that they'd received from the specialists. And look at it through the philtre of refining what they already did rather than replacing what they had been doing. At the end of the training session, we sat and we debriefed, and I said to them, Where are they now compared to when they started that training session? And across all different areas, they'd either seen an improvement or had a better mental approach to what to do to improve it. So that's a pretty good win. That's a pretty good collection of all of that data to give them the outcome that they were after. Now, will that solve all that athlete's problems? Probably not. Does that mean that every single piece of information that those specialists gave them was the best piece of information for that athlete at that time? Probably not. Because in order for that to work, there's a few things that has to happen first. The athlete needs to know each of those pillars, each of those lanes that they're working in, and how to optimise each of those, what those ratings are for each of those.
So again, if we look at the psychology, what is their mental frameworking out of 10. Is that sitting at an 8/10? Excellent. What do they need to do to make that a nine? If they're looking at that cognitive capacity, that decision making, problem solving, and that's an 8/10, what do they need to do? What do they need to focus on to make that a nine? And if their mental stability and resilience is a six, how do they bring that up? What's the information that they need to make that better? Then they can ask very, very specific targeted questions of those specialists. Hey, my mental frameworking, Dave, is an 8/10. What I need to do to make that 9/10 is build more consistency in that. How do I do that? And my responses are going to be way more targeted and best spoke for that athlete. It is a collaboration. And if we go one step deeper to that, you want to have the coaches, the assistant coaches, the strength and conditioning coaches, the dietitians, the psychologists, the doctors, the recovery specialists. Everybody sitting in a room with that athlete collaborating.
That is the best return on the focus of all of those specialists. And that athlete. There are a number of really high performing programmes that do that, and we see the best results for the athlete most consistently and most timely. So whose responsibility is there. Ultimately, it lies with the athlete. The better the athlete knows where they are, where they're going, and what they need to do to get there, and the questions they need to ask, the better that athlete is going to the information that they need to be able to progress. There also needs to be, if I'm honest, a little less ego in the specialist, including the coaches. Because every single specialist and coach, and I put them in the same category, needs each other for the athlete to be successful. It doesn't matter It doesn't matter how mentally strong they are. If they're not physically capable, they can't do it. It doesn't matter how physically strong and capable they are. But if technically they don't know what they're doing, they can't do it. If they can't perform under pressure, then they can't do it. So the reality is a high performing athlete and a high performing programme is the ultimate collaboration with our egos.
When we have an environment like that, we have a strong, replicable, and stable environment where a whole bunch of athletes are going to come out of that. So it will be a high performance stable. Hope you got a lot from this off the cuff podcast. It's a really important filter to look at performance through. I'm really passionate about performance psychology. Always have been. And I think it is a critical component to people's success, be that sporting, be that coaching, or be that corporate, ultimately aware that I need other areas to be just as reliable as I make my athletes or my clients in order for it to work. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game. Train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle.
