The psychological strain of sport, and how to overcome it

We’re going to take a closer look at the mental attributes that athletes need to perform at their absolute best. In recent years, greater emphasis has been placed on sports psychology among professional athletes but, in the mind of our next guest at least, it’s still a relatively underappreciated field. Jim Taylor is the author of Train Your Mind for Athletic Success and he has worked with some of the top teams in US sport…

Jim - Everybody will say that the mind is as or more important than the physical and technical aspects of a sport. Yet if you look at how much time and money they devote to it, it's a very small amount if nothing. Unfortunately, athletes are not approaching mental training the same way they do physical training. Too often people come to me when they already have a challenge, they already have a problem, but that's like going to a conditioning coach after you've got an injury. I try to convey to the athletes I work with in all my writing and speaking that the mind is made up of muscles and that, just like physical muscles, mental muscles can be weak, they can be strong and they can be injured. But they need to be trained just like physical muscles.

James - Why do you think that we are so far behind in this domain? Is it because it's harder to measure the psychological benefit you're endowing? Is there good evidence that mental training really works?

Jim - There are two issues here. First of all, just the stigma of psychology. That's why I call it mental training because when people think of psychology they think of mental illness and lying on a couch and getting shrunk and all those kind of things. There's sort of a cultural bias against it. Then, James, going to your next point, the point you made about the fact that you can't measure it: if you think about conditioning or technical work, you go into the gym, you see how much weight you can put on the bar, you see how high you can jump, how fast you can run, you can see it, you can feel it, you can touch it. Whereas the mental side, it's like grabbing onto fog and because it's not tangible, you can't see confidence, you can't see motivation directly, you can't measure it. A lot of my work is making the intangible tangible, and the fact is there is a large body of evidence that various types of mental training works.

James - What techniques do you work on?

Jim - First, I do an assessment and just like conditioning coaches do physical assessments, I do a mental assessment where I have a list of what I consider to be all the major areas that impact athletic performance and I see where their strengths and weaknesses are. It might be maybe they're not as motivated as they can be despite being at a high level. Maybe they lack confidence to fully commit themselves when it really counts. Perhaps they get too anxious pre-competitively; difficulties focusing, dealing with strong emotions. Then, just through consistent training, mental training, getting these areas to become stronger, whether it's goal setting, positive self-talk, emotional regulation, physical regulation, visualisation.

James - One of the most interesting things I find about sport is when someone does break onto the scene and you'll hear commentators say they've got this freedom or they're playing with no fear and in a sense that's their psychological advantage: that they don't come to it having suffered setbacks as much.

Jim - Absolutely. When you have a young athlete who comes onto the world stage, they have nothing to lose because nobody expects anything of them. But expectations are one of the most important areas that I work with athletes, and this is what I'm doing with these Olympians I'm working with heading into Paris: it's okay to have goals. Several of them have the opportunity to medal. I encourage them not to deny that fact because you can't. The media's going to be covering them, talking to them about the possibility of medals. But for me there's a big difference between expectations, which creates pressure, and goals, which is something people want to strive for. It's a very different psychological, emotional and physiological reaction. What direction do you go when you're threatened by something? You run away. When you're challenged by something, what direction do you go? You go toward the challenge.

James - We've heard about the extreme conditions that are likely to be in place for the upcoming Olympics, the heat being the most obvious. That will no doubt have an impact on how athletes feel physically, but how do higher or maybe in some cases extreme lower temperatures affect the mind and how athletes approach their event?

Jim - Well, here's the interesting thing about this, and I just literally finished an article about this talking about adversity, difficult and challenging external conditions like heat, cold, wind. The fact is that these extreme conditions, they're not the issue. I'm a high level age group triathlete. I've never been in a triathlon where there was only a headwind on me or it was only hot for me. Everybody has the same conditions, so it's not the conditions that matter, it's how athletes respond to them. It's really the attitudes that athletes have: 'Okay, yeah, it's going to be hot, but it's hot for everybody. How do I deal with it?'