six skills to build mental toughness! part ii Posted on July 10, 2013 by paul This month and next I am sharing the second article from the founder of the ECR360, In Part One of this two-part article I described the first three skills of at least six that provide an inside view of how the mind of a champion works. Whether you’re an Olympic athlete, a business leader, or someone facing a life-defining moment, it’s mental and emotional skills such as Self-Confidence, Self-Reliance and Achievement Drive that enable you to produce your best performance, remain self-motivated to attain your highest goals, and perform under pressure. In this article I describe three additional skills that elite athletes cultivate to build mental toughness. These three skills enable you to take emotional control in response to frustration and disappointment and stay mentally alert and focused to deal with distractions and stress. Collectively these six skills are components of emotional intelligence (EI) and they are the building blocks that make up the mind of a champion. To measure your own leadership capital or find out more about developing leadership in your organisation contact Paul@hyperiongrowth 4. Optimism – Sustaining the Commitment to Succeed In more than two decades of research in psychology what is the single strongest predictor of success? Optimism. Not ‘the glass is half full’ kind of optimism, but optimism as a strategy; a way of dealing with difficulties, sensing opportunities and generally maintaining a positive mood. Elite athletes and high-performing individuals look for opportunities even in the face of adversity and maintain an overall positive attitude and high expectations of what they can achieve despite the challenges involved. Think of Optimism as a constructive response to stress. It doesn’t mean that, no matter what happens, you are happy and cheerful all the time. Stress is inevitable — but the only thing over which you have any control is how you respond to these stressful events. This is not just ‘whistling in the dark’. The roots of this experience go much deeper than just attitude or personality. Neuropsychology has taught us that our view of the world is shaped by what we pay attention to. Over time we have learned to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. Our view of the world and our emotional responses to it become a well-formed map. It’s a construction of our own making, and with careful attention it can be continually redrawn. The trick is to learn to pay attention by responding to life in a constructive way wherever possible rather than simply reacting out of habit. Every thought, action or attitude will either strengthen your mind or weaken it. Ask yourself, is what I’m paying attention to strengthening me or weakening me? When your mind is calm and clear, you will be more creative and alert. You will also be more likely to see alternative ways to solve problems, and keep moving towards accomplishing your goals. Coaching Strategy – Look for the Benefit, Seek the Lesson, Focus on the Task From a psychological pint of view, elite athletes and optimistic people are characterised by three attitudes. First, wherever possible they look for the benefit in situations, especially when they experience setbacks. No matter what happens, they are committed to finding answers and possess a confident expectation of success. Second, optimists seek the valuable lesson in every problem or difficulty. Instead of focusing all energy on ‘mistakes’ or the game point or deal just lost, the optimist thinks about what to do differently the next time around. Third, optimistic people focus on the task to be accomplished rather than on negative emotions such as disappointment or fear. When you experience a disappointment of any kind, your natural reaction is to feel stunned emotionally. You feel as though you have had the wind taken out of you. You feel hurt, let down, disappointed, and discouraged. No matter what happened, and no matter how disappointed you are, if you are immediately able to say, ‘Every experience has value if I view it as an opportunity for growth and self-mastery,’ this statement will assist you to exert control over your emotions and thereby build the mind of a champion. Of course, this can sound a bit trite, especially when life presents some serious disappointments. But, according to Viktor Frankel, Holocaust survivor and author of the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, “The great human freedom is the freedom to choose one’s attitude.” To cultivate the mind of a champion you must develop the habit of paying more attention to the big picture and communicate realistic confidence in being able to obtain the prize. To measure your own leadership capital or find out more about developing leadership in your organisation contact Paul@hyperiongrowth 5. Resilience – Mental Toughness A fifth and closely related skill in building the mind of a champion involves developing resilience – the ability to cope effectively with major setbacks and disappointments. In sport as in life, a strong will to succeed and the ability to bounce back from performance setbacks is a critical survival skill. Renowned sports psychologist, Jim Loehr refers to resilience as ‘mental toughness’ and insists that it is a learned capacity to produce a unique emotional response in competition. Producing the right emotional response during competition is an emotional skill involving the courage to apply and re-apply emotional energy in the face of persistent challenge such as: tanking – giving up on the inside – anger and negativism, as well as choking – performing poorly because of fear. To measure your own leadership capital or find out more about developing leadership in your organisation contact Paul@hyperiongrowth Coaching Strategy – Failure – the Opportunity To Begin Again Ok, so when things don’t work out and go ‘pear-shaped’, you’re a grown-up and not about to rock in the corner with a shot of Jack – are you? But equally you also want to avoid acting as if nothing happened either. Despite the exaggerated upbeat rhetoric you sometimes hear from elite track athletes, all elite athletes understand that failure is an inevitable part of their journey to success and so they embrace it. In fact, if athletes teach us anything, they teach us to respect failure. And remember, it was a patent clerk who overcame failure on his college entrance exam and changed our perception of the universe. His name was Albert Einstein. A nearly half-deaf man with no more than three weeks formal education overcame his disability and invented motion pictures and the electric light bulb. His name was Thomas Edison. A couple of struggling bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright inaugurated the era of manned flight. Ok, that’s all very motivating, but we must be careful here to distinguish between two kinds of failure – the bad kind that springs from laziness or carelessness and the good kind that suggests you were pushing yourself, not content to play it safe, determined to do something with your life and your talent. If you’re going to build resilience then you’ll need to fail now and then – think of it as practice. So to build the mind of a champion, decide to let go of mistakes quickly if things do not go to plan. Look at setbacks as stepping-stones for future achievement and refuse to see them as dead-ends. They are an inevitable part of competition in sport and in life – use them as learning experiences and recommit yourself to applying what you’ve learnt. Taken together, optimism and resilience in the face of adversity are the greatest long-term predictors of success. 6. Focus – Clarity of Mind A friend of mine has a mantra that he takes perverse joy in reciting to me each time he senses that I’ve taken on too much – “energy follows focus.” Of course, he’s right, and champion athletes know how to direct their energy and maintain a single-minded focus on their performance during competition. By contrast, most of us who have to juggle the demands of family, a job and financial pressure find it much more difficult to remain on task. These daily demands create enormous physical and emotional stress on our lives and intrude on our ability to concentrate on achieving our vision. And yet, developing the ability to direct your attention and sustain a focus on the challenge in front of you without being distracted by past failures or future anxieties is a real key to success. Coaching Strategy – Mindfulness and Emotional Balance The ability to focus attention is best cultivated through the practice of ‘mindfulness’. Although an ancient practice found in Eastern philosophies, mindfulness has recently become a hot topic in modern psychology. ‘Mindfulness’ can be described in a variety of different ways, but one of the key components is the ability to sustain attention on different aspects of your experience. Think of it like a gym work out for the mind. Rather than spending useless mental and emotional energy allowing your mind to drift and become preoccupied with worry about things that went on in your past or anxiety about what might be coming up in your future, cultivating the ability to live purposefully in the present moment. By constantly remembering to bring your attention to what’s happening around you in the present moment strengthens you mind. Scientific studies over the last decade documenting the benefits of mindfulness have been nothing short of startling. But, perhaps the most important benefit of the ability to focus is an increase in emotional balance and the development of a peaceful mind. Two Tips For Cultivating Mindfulness Pay attention to what is going on in your body. This means relaxing your muscles and deliberately paying attention to the sensations throughout your body. As you do this, your heart rate drops, and your mind settles. Once your breathing has slowed, your body is more relaxed, your mind is calmer and you are ready to return to your responsibilities with a more peaceful and focused mind. Next, pay deliberate attention to your breath, that is, not trying to change the rhythm, simply observing it. This is the very simplest form of settling your mind. This is something that you can do anytime, you can do this waiting in line at an airport, or waiting at a stop light in your car, you can do it sitting listening to a presentation. The most important thing is to do this regularly, every day. You are actually starting to change rhythms in your nervous system so consistent practice over time is the key. This ancient technique is startling for it’s power to settle and focus the mind. Of all the techniques for reducing stress, increasing relaxation and maintaining control, paying attention to your breath and slowing your breathing is by far the most effective. Mindfulness is the gateway to developing a more peaceful mind realising your potential. Conclusion The physical tactics and techniques for becoming a champion athlete is demanding but relative to the mental and emotional components is the simple part – pushing the pedals, running the track, and swimming the laps. The really challenging part that separates champions from the rest is more than genetics or a strong work ethic. It is the mental toughness that results from developing emotional intelligence. This is also true for those of us who aspire to high levels of achievement in our personal and professional lives. To measure your own leadership capital or find out more about developing leadership in your organisation contact Paul@hyperiongrowth The opinions and translation of information are by Dr Martin Newman of Roche Martin, it is through Roche Martin ECR 360 tool that we deliver Leadership training. Contact details Paul Fieldhouse M: 07545251095 E: Paul@hyperiongrowth
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 10:04:49 +0000
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