COACHS TRAINING TIP OF THE WEEK: MENTAL TOUGHNESS TOOLBOX: RESPONDING TO PROBLEMS 6/3/2014 Michael Phelps after winning the 200 fly at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. (Small)BY ALAN GOLDBERG//COMPETITIVEDGE.COM There are a lot of things that can happen to you as a swimmer, both in practice and at meets that can potentially knock you off balance emotionally, undermine your self-confidence and sabotage your race performance: You can have a teammate who picks on you or who constantly beats you and then rubs it in your face. You can have a bad day or two where youre unable to make the intervals at practice and cant seem to get yourself to go fast. You can develop a nagging injury that limits your training and sets you back in relation to the competition. You can come down with a sickness that keeps you out of the pool for 3 months. You can get DQed or lose an important race that you were supposed to win. You can fail to qualify for that really important meet while most of your friends are already going. Your goggles can leak during your best event and leave you nearly blind. Your coach can get angry with you. The list goes on and on. Did you know that how you approach these kinds of “problems” both in and out of the pool can determine the level of success that you ultimately achieve? Let me illustrate: Bob Bowman, Michael Phelpss coach, wanted to teach his then-young swimmer that a lot of upsetting things can happen to you over the course of your career, and during a meet or race that can send your confidence and performance spiraling downward. How you handle these mishaps, either before or during your event can make or break your race performance. So Bowman would sometimes purposely step on Michaels goggles without him knowing about it before a race to insure that they would leak, and Phelps had to figure out how to maintain his composure under pressure when these things suddenly happened. As a result, Michael got really good at effectively handling these unforeseen, oftentimes upsetting events. His approach was that you can look at these unexpected upsets as a “disaster,” and an excuse to get emotional and not do well, or you can look at them as a “challenge,” and figure out ways of rising above them so that they actually make you a stronger, mentally tougher swimmer. And thats exactly what Phelps got incredibly good at! He would practice racing with his goggles leaking and figured out different strategies of coping with this so that if it ever happened in a big race, he would know exactly how to handle it. Its common knowledge what happened to Phelps in 2008, during his 200 fly at the Beijing Olympics: Michael was going for his record-setting eight gold medals when his goggles started leaking shortly after the start. By the final 50, Michael literally couldnt see anything! Phelps responded by staying calm and doing what he had repeatedly practiced. He simply counted his strokes on the way to winning yet another gold medal! This key ingredient in a champions headset that you can learn to develop is very basic: The problem is NEVER the problem. The problem is ALWAYS how you REACT to the problem. There are so many potentially upsetting things that happen to you in practice or before and during a meet that you have absolutely no direct control over. When you focus on these “uncontrollables,” youll get nervous, lose your confidence and under- perform! However, with practice, you can train yourself to control your reactions to these problems so that, like Phelps, you begin to view them as a performance-enhancing challenge, instead of as a disaster. So the next time something unexpected and seemingly “bad” happens to you and you start to get emotional, you want to ask yourself, “How can I use this situation to get myself stronger and mentally tougher as a swimmer?” You want to get curious in this way whenever upsetting things happen to you, and then practice working on effectively managing them. This attitude is a key component in the headset of a true champion!
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 18:56:56 +0000
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