High Performance Thinking

What is high performance thinking?

It depends!

My mind didn’t wake up to the potential of attitude - and its importance - until I was about 35. Until then I had largely bumbled along. It had remained largely unconscious.

I have vague recollections of a moment in secondary school. Maybe I was temporarily troubled by something. Perhaps it was studying the war poets with our engaging English teacher, Mr Lacey. But whatever the trigger, in a particular moment of clarity and teenage anger, I asked myself “Why can’t people just be happy?” and for a while afterwards I decided I would be.

I studied for a degree in sports science including an element of sports psychology. I think its relevance raced over my head, rather than into it, which might have been more helpful.

Knowledge, Skills and Attitude

Roll forward 20 years to 1998 when I joined a small sales training team in a role that felt stretching in a good, if challenging, way. My manager wrote on a flip chart:

·      Knowledge

·      Skills

·      Attitude

He told me that we trained the first two but not the last. The implication was that we didn’t bother to train attitude because it was impossible, or at least too hard. My mind was still so narrow as to not even question this.

My next manager encouraged me to learn to use a psychometric tool. My increased self-awareness helped me understand how I think, how I prefer to process information and how I prefer to make decisions. There were seeds of curiosity.

Another three years passed and a series of sudden events led me to read Bob Rotella’s Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect and Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game Of Tennis. Both seminal works in their own way.

A few emails exchanged with an old Loughborough lecturer, Dave Bunker, led me to read Richard Cox’s Sports Psychology: Concepts and Applications. I read every word. I learned to understand stress as a process rather than an outcome. I lapped it up.

A rich time of learning

All this new knowledge felt so relevant. I started a breakfast club - called The Way You Think - for the largely youthful sales advisers I worked with.

I began informally acting as an amateur sports psychologist to an international sprinter I knew through work. I was astounded to learn he used 17 different strategies to get mentally ready for when the gun went off. He said at his level, in his opinion, 80% of success was in your head, only 15% was down to health and fitness and 5% natural ability. We learned together.

And of course I applied what I was learning to myself. I recognised, in hindsight, that my own resolve “to be a perfect student” at the start of my second year of my degree - having come within a gnat’s whisker of failing the first year - was an example of choosing your attitude.

I changed jobs and got to work with at least four or five proper, qualified, pucker sports psychologists who had each worked with elite level athletes and teams. I learned so much more from them.

During this time I learned terms like visualisation and self-talk. I started to see evidence of high performance thinking everywhere I looked: how people reframed situations, how they trained their mind like any other muscle, how nerves are normal when you are doing something important.

Back to school

I went and studied for a masters in Applied Sports Psychology. I learned about Goal Theory and the work of Bandura regarding confidence, Dweck regarding a Growth Mindset and Beck’s work in founding CBT. I watched the video counting the passes of the basketball players and learned about attentional focus. My colleague, Lou, introduced me to the idea of Thinking Errors.

I learned that your mind can be your greatest asset and well as your greatest enemy. I remembered lines I had read like Rotella’s “striving for perfection is essential, demanding perfection is deadly” and getting “the butterflies to fly in formation”. I learned about a ‘challenge mindset’ - the opposite of a threat mindset (fight, flight etc.). I learned that to consider thinking as helpful or unhelpful was more useful than positive or negative.

I read Marcus Buckingham’s Now Discover Your Strengths and the benefits of focusing on using strengths rather purely focusing on overcoming weaknesses. I read about Sophie Radcliffe running the 100k Race to the Stones “with my mind”, repeating the mantra “you are going to stop sometime, but not now”. A Russian lady I coached who moved with her employer to Boston told me about reading a notice that said “we haven’t come this far to only come this far”. I read Will It Make The Boat Go Faster and learned about the value of a critical review question. I heard Emma Wiggs quote “if not now, when?” as inspiration for seizing the day.

I read Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap which crystallised things like how emotions become feelings when the brain’s thinking gets involved. How accepting and labelling unhelpful thoughts helps to diffuse them.

I continue to learn. I might occasionally listen to an episode of the High Performance Podcast. I heard Johnny Wilkinson say “don’t be the best you can be but be all you can be”. I heard Sir Chris Hoy say “if you can truly say you’ve done everything you can possibly do then you can relax on the day. It’s a bit like studying for exams.”

And so, today

So today, I can’t remember everything I have learned!

But after all that learning, studying, observation and reflection and applied practice, where have I got to? I am - as Ray Mears said of himself - no expert but I have some expertise (though he is an expert in his field).

What would I say if you asked me “What is high performance thinking?”

My answer: It depends!

It’s knowing how it’s most helpful to think and thinking that.

But exactly what that is depends on what you are doing.