Speaking of Psychology - Understanding the minds of champions (SOP48)

Episode Date: June 20, 2017

Mental preparation can affect performance, whether you're preparing for a big test at school or competing at the Olympics. In this episode, Steve Portenga, PhD, talks about the psychology behind performing at your best and how to help overachievers handle stress. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yogi Barra once said 90% of the game is half mental. His quote was more philosophical than accurate, but sport and performance psychologists exist because succeeding at an elite level is not just about athletics. Now, chances are you aren't an Olympian or a professional athlete, but how many times has someone told you to just focus before a big presentation at work, or maybe a big test at school? In this episode, we speak with a psychologist about how the best. best of the best mentally prepare to perform and how psychology is helping them. I'm Audrey Hamilton,

and this is speaking of psychology. Steve Pretanga is a founder of a sport and performance psychology consulting firm called I Performance Consultants. He has consulted with Olympic athletes on the USA track and field team and is now taking his expertise beyond sports as a member of the American Psychological Association's Coalition for Psychology of High Performance. Welcome, Dr. Portanga. Welcome. Thanks for. I think a lot of people have misconceptions about what sports psychologists do. So you are one. So can you tell us more about your work? I'm particularly interested in your work with the USA Track and Field Team. What kind of mental preparation is required to perform at that highest level of sports? I had the distinct pleasure of working with the team in London in 2012 at the last Olympics and thought

that I was incredibly prepared to get into that environment, had a number of mentors that were there. and the environment of living in the village and being at Olympics is absolutely unparalleled. The pressure is absolutely amazing. It would be the equivalent of having everyone in the Super Bowl, all of those teams living together throughout the duration, all of the teams in the NCAA tournament living together. You have over 10,000 athletes in a very small environment. Everyone is required to wear their national team gear, colors, logos all over the place.

And so there's constant reminder that this is, something different. A big deal, right? Absolutely. Be fascinating to see the amount of money that the City of London spent for signage. The Olympic rings were everywhere throughout the city. I mean, you could not miss at all what was going on. And so the pressure there is really intense, really unique, nonstop. And so to be able to have the athletes and the team and the staff be prepared for that environment was my main job.

Was it challenging to get athletes to focus in that kind of an environment? Absolutely. It's really an interesting process where for some sports it's pretty easy to try and have this belief that nothing is different. The 100 meters is 100 meters, whether you're in sixth grade or in the Olympic finals. And yet the energy in that Olympic stadium is absolutely unreal. even being in the stands, you can feel your hair stand on edge. I mean, it's absolutely electric. So you have to be over-prepared to be able to handle that.

There's so many different distractions that come up in the process of getting there, but to really be able to execute, you have to take advantage of that energy and know very specifically, very deliberately, what you're going to do with it, how you're going to channel it. Is most of the preparation happening before they even get to London, or is it happening while they're in the Olympic Village or wherever they are during the games? Both. Whenever you're talking about any kind of performance, there's a tremendous amount of preparation

that has to go into that, to be able to rely on a sense of automaticity. And the more you have that learned, the easier it is to be able to perform in those environments. Being in Denver, I have a fathead of Peyton Manning up on the wall for the high school kids that I work with this quote that says pressure is what you feel when you don't know what the hell you're doing. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. And that applies mentally as much as it does physically. And if we have time to prepare athletes to get to that point, fantastic, one of the interesting things with track and field, though, is we don't have a national team until the plane leaves for whatever national trip we're going on. So in the interim, the athletes are all over

the country with different coaches. Many of them are at university. competing for those teams with those coaches. And so to try and have consistent contact and interaction and work with them up until we get to the point of team travel is incredibly difficult. And there's always a lot of athletes that are, they'll do fantastic until they get to an international team trip, and especially the Olympics. And something unique will happen there. They start putting too much pressure on themselves. They start to have a little chink in their armor that they've never experienced with before. And so being on site to handle that as it comes up is really important as well.

How much do, and you're touching on this a little bit, but I want to keep going a little bit further. I mean, how much do athletes' mental state affect their performance, even at the peak of their careers? I mean, they've been doing this pretty much, I'm sure, at some point, their whole life, right, or more than half their life. Absolutely. It's very interesting. There's a lot of sport psychologists that will go out there and try and put a number on the percentage of whatever sport is mental. And I find that a very interesting approach because I don't know anyone who's gone to the Olympics with a master's or a PhD in sports psychology and gotten a medal. And if the mental side was truly that important, you would see a lot of that representation there.

In sports and other performance settings, it's physical. If you do not have the ability to get from point A to point B within a certain time, that mental piece is completely irrelevant. Except that the mental is a huge part of this planning and this preparation and developing the physical ability. the skills, the understanding of strategy that go into it. And it's really important to be able to get that out and deliver that consistently. And if you aren't going to be able to perform at your best, to be able to minimize how far off you are. And that is a huge part of it.

And that's where every athlete will go through different things in their career, that idea of pressure will change throughout their career. You go through different responsibilities within a team. You know, you're just one of the people on the bench, all of a sudden you're starter, now you're the team captain, now you're the person expected to carry the team. You're going to your first Olympics, and it would be great to get to the finals. If you get a medal, it's wonderful.

Then somewhere in your career, you're going to your third Olympics, and if you don't get a medal, it's a failure. Oh, and actually, if you don't get a gold medal, you know, it'll be a bit of a failure. And so as your career changes, the expectations that are put on you or that you put on yourself change. A lot of your work now is focused on bringing out the best in children, whether it's in the classroom or sports. You're on APA's Coalition for Psychology of High Performance.

Can you explain what this group is doing? Psychologists are studying what makes some kids more successful in what they have found. I think the first part to answer that question is to kind of delve into the psychology of high performance a little bit to begin with. And for me, it goes back to that process of planning and preparing for an event. We're going to be judged, evaluated, held to a standard, which could be others or on your own, and then being able to get out and deliver what you've put in. And so there's a process of really understanding that performance context to make sure you're really focused on the right things.

And there's some truth to the idea that great performance happened when you're not thinking, except that even when we're asleep, we're dreaming, our brains are always working. So it never really is the case that we're not thinking. We're thinking in a very qualitatively different way, and so you put that together into a plan to be able to do that. And yet I know no athlete that can really stick to that. that consistently. We're going to get distracted by something in performance, and usually the things that distract us most are things that are related to threat. It might be threat physically if you're

competing in the brain. It might be threat to outcome in terms of the competition, the officials. And lots of times, the biggest threat to the thing that distracts us most is something that's a threat to our sense of self-worth and identity. And especially as you see athletes put more of their identity on things that they're doing and more expectations on themselves, they end up putting more pressure on themselves. They're their own worst enemies. Absolutely. And it happens in a very positive way initially, but sometimes we can just get unbalanced in our lives. And certainly within the world of track and field, there are athletes who judge themselves against others based on how they perform. If you run faster than me,

you're a better person than me. And it would be easy for someone with a psychology training to come in and say, you know, that's just not true. You should see yourself differently, except in that environment, there are plenty of people who do judge others based on that. And the athletes see that. They know that. And so it's hard not to internalize that. And so from there, I think that general approach to managing pressure is something that kids, particularly today, face all over the place, pressure to get into college, not just college, the right college, pressure to do well on testing, pressure to do well in all of the things that go in their lives, whether it's interviews for college, interviews for jobs. And so I think helping them learn how to manage that is a wonderful

skill set, a wonderful mindset for them to develop. And I think my role is to take their interest in sport and use that as an opportunity to have discussions that they probably wouldn't engage in otherwise. And it's amazing how a lot of people in sports psychology have focused on interventions and not sort of this underlying psychological examination of what's going on to lead to pressure. And then there's a number of other areas that really have been exploring the psychology of high performance, but because we've normally thought of that with respect to sport, and they didn't work with athletes, you know, we just haven't made that connection that it really is more than just sport. It's performance settings across the board.

And so this coalition is our initial attempt to really try and get different divisions, different people together, trying to talk about the things that are going, on in our area. And ultimately, our big project that we're working towards is to really clarify a psychological understanding of what needs to happen in performance settings and then work off of that to create a developmental model. So as kids are developing, you can have teachers in an academic studying, parents, coaches, understand here is some mental skills, mental characteristics that kids at this age level should learn, can learn, or in some cases are just not ready to learn yet. And if we can create that kind of heuristic and checklist for people, I think it

will really help bring an appreciation to this part of talented kids development. And I think that's our ultimate goal is to really help performance at the very highest range of what we as people are capable, and at the same time helping every person increase their performance, even if that maximum potential is, you know, just average. I think some of us have this idea that we're born mentally tough, too. or that we just need to focus and we'll succeed. But I think what you're saying is that's not always the case. There are other factors coming into play here when it comes to high performance. What sort of advice do you give to kids and their parents to help them face the pressures they face and still be successful?

I think a big thing is trying to find a sense of balance and perspective in where sport and performance fits in their lives. It usually starts conversations with kids and trying to get parents involved in that. have worked with a number of athletes that because they are known as the golfer in high school, and that's where they're at, anytime something isn't perfect in golf, it's just scary and threatening, and at some point it's a lot easier to leave golf than to continue to live with that. I think having them try and get a good sense of what's really important in performance, so they really know what to focus on. It's amazing to me in London, at the games, talking to athletes that were,

on journalists' lists of metal contenders didn't really have a very specific deliberate plan of what they should focus on while they were competing. If they came to the right thing, they were going to end up on the podium, and unfortunately for some of them, they were thinking about the wrong thing and didn't even get out of the first round.

And so even at that level, they don't really have that clarified. It's really easy to say focus and pay attention, and I actually think a lot of athletes are really good at it. They're just really good at focusing on the wrong things. And I think some of the things that we need to focus on to learn and develop and practice are different from what we need to do. And that's where understanding motor learning, motor control comes into play to be able to put that together. So those

are the two big things that I start off with. And then we get into this process of really understanding those distractions. And I think a part of that comes back to an appreciation of psychophysiology, that in performance settings and there's a tremendous amount of emotion, there's a huge reaction in the body that comes with that emotion. And I think most psychologists conceptually get that. and most people understand the mind-body connection, but I don't think we really fully understand the interconnection and the pathways from heart and lungs in particular that go up not just to control centers,

but to parts of the brain that are involved in responding to the environment, deciding valence what's important, what's not in the environment, so we can make decisions, we can analyze it, we can decide how we want to respond and then execute that. And if you have too much emotion and the wrong things going on in the body, it's going to interfere with that process. And so I think there's some people that focus on the idea of toughness of sort of ignoring emotion. And it's great, it's wonderful.

It doesn't affect them, except that there's still things going on internally in the brain. So they might not feel that emotion, and yet it still has an impact on their performance. And what happens a lot of times is they're able to perform well, but it comes at a tremendous cost in terms of energy and it's exhausting and it's unsustainable. It's not fun anymore. I think at some point it becomes just a burden as opposed to, you know, causing elation, I guess, at the end of the day. I've worked with many athletes that are incredibly mentally tough and yet they use that in a way where they're beating their head against the wall. You know, they're able to take more pain. They're able to suffer more than others. And so it's, I'm not sure it's the right concept for what we're ideally looking for. Switching gears a little bit, there are so many resources now at our fingertips, you know, in our phones and online.

How much is technology playing a role in the application of performance psychology? I know it's something that you've really been doing. I think we're just starting to see the advent of that and the integration of that. When you're talking about wearable devices, when you're looking at the integration of sport analytics in sports, looking mostly at statistics to begin with, but now as we can look at all of these devices that give us so much data, I think it's inevitable. In addition that most of the athletes growing up that are going to be professional athletes are wedded to technology. I think there's a part of technology that eventually is going to have to come out in necessity because that's what kids know. But I think it allows us to do so much more.

We can collect different kind of data. We can look at what they're doing. we can reach them at times that don't involve our office. I'm working on a project trying to get access to kids through online teaching, it will be a subset of what sports psychology can really do and it won't replace people, but for someone to have an economical access to this in their own home, instead of having to pay a lot of money to go talk to a stranger and the stigma that that might bring up, you know, sounds like a wonderful door opener.

I have no doubt that we're going to have a lot of people who, put the cart before the horse, so to speak, that there's definitely going to be some things out there that are going to promise more than they can deliver. All right. Well, Dr. Patanga, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure. It's been my pleasure, Audrey. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on the topics we discussed, or if you would like to hear more episodes, please go to our website at speakingof psychology.org. With the American Psychological Association, Speaking of Psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.