Understanding the Sporting Terrain

There are two sides to gaining mastery in sport – one is in the technical skills of the game, and the other is gaining mastery of ourselves.

Although I do coach the technical side of certain sports, it is in the mastery of the self, I believe, where we don’t coach enough and where we don’t coach early. Now if you add into that equation the fact that understanding ourselves plays a huge part in our lives in general, then you can understand why I believe society is “missing the boat” in many, many ways both in sport and beyond.

 

Mapping the Terrain

There is a terrain in sport, a vast area that - in most perceptions - lies between poles at the extremities; poles that we might refer to as zones.
In sports performance many athletes and players are drawn towards either one of the “zones”. These we have come to know as being either “Comfort” or “The”.

As with everything defined by the definite article – “The Zone” is the zenith, the pinnacle, the Holy Grail almost, of the performing state. And probably because of that mythical or seemingly unattainable status as a state, by design players tend to settle for ‘second best’ and go for comfort.

 

Comfort

“In the comfort zone I can be myself, and feel no pressure,” is something I often hear – and yet these self-same people will happily tell you they like a challenge, which is quite contradictory! These are the “I want to have my cake and eat it” players when it really boils down to it. And, both in reality and metaphorically, we find that when cake is boiled it is rarely edible. Le Proof of this particular morsel of patisserie is unrewarding and forgettable!

So why is the Comfort Zone so debilitating?

To the left of the shaded area of optimum performance is an area of low motivation and stimulation – an area of not much pleasure from competition. It is – essentially – the Comfort Zone. The game is too easy, the challenge is well down the scale – so how do you feel? Is the level of satisfaction of beating a weak opponent higher than compared to winning a tight match with someone of equal or greater ability or potential?

We all need some level of stress going on in competition for our performance to blossom – but we certainly don’t need the stress to be beyond and to the right of the shaded area. This is the place where our game falls apart and our ability to perform totally collapses. Here there isn’t even a cake to eat, let alone boil!

The Purpose of Practice

So the Comfort Zone is only for those seeking second best at best! And it is why I like players to become familiar with working outside it in practice. Practice should be for two things only – (a) grooving and conditioning already learned actions and (b) pushing back the boundaries of experience and learning new actions beyond the Comfort Zone. Doing this in practice provides a safety net for all the work in progress – and gives us a chance to take all our learnings from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

Practising outside the Comfort Zone reveals much about a player’s emotional intelligence and their consequent ability to perform under pressure in the cauldron of competition. If the amount of self-applied pressure (judgements, expectations, opinions etc) is too much for a player in practice, then their ‘bath of emotional tolerance’ is already filling up. If they are aware of this from previous performances, where they were catapulted into the over-stressed right hand side of the optimum shaded area, then they might seek to maintain being in their Comfort Zone in competition. This way they will play “well within themselves” and none of the bad stuff will emerge. Or to put it another way, they won’t add the pressure of competition to their already well-filled “bath of emotional tolerance” – thus avoiding it all spilling over!

So – how we operate mentally in practice gives us a whole raft of clues as to how we are going to deal with ourselves in performance. If it isn’t working for us, then we need to help ourselves by changing how we view the purpose – for us – of practice. We need to peel back the layers of “I” opinions, judgements and expectations.

To the twin questions “What do I want from this practice” and “How will I know I’ve got it”, we need to be adaptable. We need to perhaps view our practice as follows:
“If the purpose of my practice is not to discover more about myself, then it should only be to groove and condition a technical part of my game. How I execute the latter part of this planned purpose is, in itself, another opportunity to discover more about myself.”

 

Maintaining Equilibrium

Of course the graphic I have used above as an illustration applies to what generally happens for players on a day-to-day performance basis.

So what happens for us when our performance lies in the shaded area?
Well, in general, I would describe it as this:-
Our performance is executed and played out within a balance of conscious awarenesses and unconscious competences. Our skill sets lie within the latter, our tactical thinking and decision making lies within the former and our emotional wellbeing, in particular, lies around the pivotal point. In this regard it can be seen that the equilibrium of our emotional wellbeing is key to the quality of the entire functioning of our performance. And when we are ‘on an even keel’, we sail through the match!

We may come under pressure during the match, and if we want to keep performing at our best then we need to maintain that equilibrium. Too much pressure and either our skill sets break down or our tactics and decisions go awry. If we totter and wobble – in emotional terms – then the breakdown wobbles between skills and decisions, reflecting the extent of the emotional wobbling.
Take a look at any of your performances where things went out of kilter and I can guarantee that the above scenario was played out for you.

And here’s the thing – It all felt and seemed as if it was played out outside of you, or before your very eyes.

And the clue to what makes that pressure so real lies inside of you.
It lies within how you react to events. Before that, it lies within how your beliefs help filter, judge and interpret events.
The filtering, judging and interpreting are all part of a thought process – a process of giving things a second, third, fourth or more thought.
Thought grows like cell division until eventually we are focussing more on the thoughts than on the real stuff that’s going on on the outside – i.e. the action, the match.

Pressure, the very thing we know that adds to levels of stress in performance, is entirely made and perpetuated by ... ourselves!

Wobbles on the highest stage

UEFA Champions League Final 2005 – Liverpool losing 3-0 to AC Milan at half time. What followed, in an extraordinary passage of play lasting some six minutes, was that the score went to 3-3. In the minds of the AC Milan players there was a change of equilibrium when the score went to 3-1. Their individual and collective thinking reacted to noticing that change of equilibrium and the ‘wobble’ started. When the score went to 3-2 the wobble had become so noticeable for AC Milan players that they saw little else – on the outside. Meanwhile for them, on the inside, there was chaos and confusion.

There’s an interesting parallel between what happens when our computer locks up, and what the AC Milan players should have done next to stop the inevitable march to 3-3.
When our computer ‘hangs’ – when the software locks up – we follow a very simple rule of thumb. Switch Off. Then re-boot – hit the reset button. Most of the time with computers that does the trick, and, although we – in the guise of the AC Milan players – are not computers, we actually have the mental capacity to switch off. We can disengage with the very process that is driving this breakdown of equilibrium – if we so choose.

Our choosing comes from the understanding that it is OUR game that we (as AC Milan players) are throwing out of kilter – and not what THEIR game (as Liverpool players) is doing to us.

For their part in this drama, Liverpool just kept playing their game - no more, no less – and in doing that they maintained their own equilibrium. Let’s say they had tried to accelerate matters, by TRYING harder to score and thus equalise at 3-3. The mere act of trying harder would have upset their emotional equilibrium, causing a breakdown of skills or tactics and decision making, or a mixture of both. Trying harder doesn’t make it happen. Maintaining equilibrium gives it EVERY chance of happening – the rest is down to what the opposition do in every ensuing moment.

Of course what AC Milan players did in every ensuing moment up to conceding the goal that made the score 3-3 was to oblige their opponents by maintaining their loss of equilibrium!

Interestingly, in the remainder of normal time – and the period of extra time – the equilibrium of BOTH sides wobbled which meant that no more goals were scored.
However, when it came to the penalty shoot-out, there was yet another change in the relative levels of emotional equilibrium – since the contest had now come down to the 1 against 1 scenario of penalty taker versus goalkeeper.

And there’s another inevitability in these kind of “You-Me-Here-Now” cases, and it is this:-
When there are wobbles around, the goalkeeper is always in the ascendancy.

The Zone

Well, many people, including myself, have written about The Zone, and what the experience of being in it is like. And of course, because of that almost mindless state of just doing, it is where there is no emotion – just equilibrium. An equilibrium held firmly in place at an unconscious level.

Our skills are all on show – even those we weren’t consciously sure that we had installed yet as skills! This just goes to show that skills acquisition is a very fast process and is only held in conscious competence by our thinking, our opinions, our judgements and our beliefs.

Our decision making and tactics are seemingly without question because, on the face of it, there is no thinking taking place – only doing.

So where is The Zone?

Well this is rather like what happened for Alice ** when she sat pondering what was on the other side of a mirror’s reflection. She discovered, as we know, an alternative world – a world of the amazing, a world where the familiar becomes extraordinarily unfamiliar, a world that, on reflection, can be compared to being in a dream.

So, wouldn’t we always want to go there if we could? Wouldn’t we always want to perform to the ultimate level of our real abilities – well beyond the actual level we think of our perceived abilities?

Well, amidst these rhetorical questions lies a number of very personal factors. These are factors about our view or map of the world – a map drawn for us by our knowledge, our beliefs and experiences.

Some of us live our lives very much ‘in our heads’. When we do, there is a disengagement with the rest of ourselves in such a way that we lose a sense of our mind-body connections. They will still be going on, but at a conscious level there is little or no acknowledgement of them. If an amazing performance happens to us then we will seek out the logical explanation of what we did and leave it at that. The Zone, for us, is some weird and spooky thing that seems to happen to others. We do what we do, we’re in (conscious) control and nothing like that is going to freak us out – if we can help it!
“When I don’t play so well then it’ll be because of this reason or that excuse – not because of something I did or didn’t think of and certainly nothing whatever to do with my beliefs and my map of the world. I have no wish to play my sport as some kind of headless chicken – my head is my control centre and I need it.”

However, if we do want to go there – to The Zone – on a regular basis, then what is our next step? Like Alice, we need to find out where is the mirror of our contemplation!

Well, I like to think that the mirror of contemplation is the shaded area on the graphic I used earlier. What lies behind this is – for each and every one of us – our own unique and particular Zone. If we try and go there without understanding what the shaded area is all about, then we’ll just bang our heads and break the glass.

Digital Tales

I’ve had many dislocated fingers in my life and, in recent times, I’ve avoided visits to A&E departments in hospitals by putting them back in place myself. OK they slip out and back in rather easily – but the point is all about replicating the event that caused the dislocation, while at the same time re-pivoting the equilibrium in the knuckle joint. So what is the comparison, the metaphor, I’m looking to use as an illustration here?
As I described it earlier, The Zone contains no emotional equilibrium, just a perfect equilibrium where skills and decisions can just flow throughout the performance. If I want to step into The Zone then the only barrier to my going through the mirror, like Alice did, is to discard – in the very moment of stepping – all emotion. Similarly, if I want to manipulate and relocate my knuckle, then it requires zero emotion in the moment.

Some years back I visited my local A&E with, yes you’ve guessed, a dislocated finger! I was not yet adept at self relocation and even some 5 hours after the injury, none of the medicos had succeeded in putting things right. In fact, so rigorous were the young houseman’s attempts that the A&E sister warned him of permanently damaging my hand if he were to continue! At the time there was a doctor, a refugee from the war in Croatia, working at the hospital as a cleaner. (He was unable to then practice as a doctor in the NHS.) They sent for him as they had an idea that he might solve this injurious conundrum for both them and me.

He spoke very good English in a relaxing yet engaging soft voice. He took hold of my hand and asked me to look at him and just pay attention to what he was saying. Moments later and without my really noticing any manipulation whatsoever, he showed me that my finger was back in place and that all would now be well.

I learnt much that day, although it would be some years before I was to learn how much!

Conclusion

There are many ways we can get better at our game – whatever that game may be – or even better at the game of life. However, it starts with our map of the world, and in particular, our sporting world.

We need to understand the part that practice plays relative to our mastery of technique and self. We also need to understand the part that practice plays in our performance. Once we have reached the level of understanding of how those two pillars of our sporting relationship work to serve us, then we are ready to make the quantum leap.

Yes, players can work on their technique alone and make many advancing steps to becoming more accomplished – only for it all to collapse like a boiled cake when they enter the cauldron of competitive performance.

And always – like driving on the wrong side of the road around blind corners – we will eventually meet up with ourselves. This encounter inevitably begs the question – “What Now?”

At some moment, in competitive sport, we will always meet ourselves, in some different guise. So wouldn’t it be good to know – ahead of the game – that WE are the one who has the understanding of the two zones and the nature of the terrain that lies in between; that WE are the one who knows about the other side of the mirror; and, above all, that WE are the one who has not just mastery of technique, but also the mastery of ourselves.

 

** Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass ~ Lewis Carroll