Headgame

by Dan Bergevin

1

We live in an age where we have so much information about human potential. In spite of this, only a small percentage of people actually reach their potential and even a smaller percentage push the limits and do what was previously impossible.

Why is this? Many factors may be cited, from social problems to genetics and upbringing. Some even claim its a matter of attraction, and only by the power of positive thinking can anyone overachieve or just achieve in general.

I prefer to take the approach that potential is a matter of individual interpretation. Everyone can decide how much potential he or she has and what will be done with it. You don’t have to be a bubbling spring of overwhelming joy in order to discover what you’re truly capable of. You just have to know what to do, and how to do it.

While my position may be debatable, my primary concern isn’t to argue semantics or matters of opinion. I prefer to take a utilitarian approach, and introduce you to a field of science that can change your life forever. This is the science of sports psychology.

The interesting thing about sports psychology is how ubiquitous it is. Calling it “sports” psychology is actually a misnomer, although this is where most of its findings have originated from and are applied to. Sports psychology is, on a fundamental level, the science of human potential. And once you understand and apply it on even the most crude level, you will notice an immediate effect on your accomplishments, your perception of the world, and your perception of yourself.

Once you see your own potential as a headgame, you will discover exactly what you are capable of, and find ways to go beyond what is currently possible to achieve what you never imagined.

2

Control what you can

One of the most highly effective precepts of sports psychology is the idea that you must only concern yourself with that which you can personally control.

You can’t control the outcome, because there are always factors outside of your influence that are at work. You can’t control what others think or do, because no matter how influential you are there are always things you cannot influence or paths you simply cannot lead some people down. You can’t control whether a loud truck drives down the street while you’re trying to concentrate, or whether your boss suddenly changes your priorities in the middle of a project.

The vast majority of things in life simply aren’t controllable, or even adjustable. They simply are.

But you can control your thoughts and feelings about these things, and about yourself. You can control your breathing rate, your reaction to the things around you, and what you focus on.

The biggest performance problem I have seen, in both myself and others, is a lack of concentration on these things, and a lack of disregard for everything else.

Paradoxically, great results can only be created when the creator isn’t trying to create them. Great results come from total command of the things that can be controlled, and the results themselves aren’t on that list.

This makes perfect sense when you think about it. For if you control your reactions, then you’re always able to adapt to changing situations instead of getting frustrated or stuck in old patterns that no longer work. If you focus on a target, you will hit it many more times than if you focus on how many times you want to hit the target. Sure, you may want to hit the target every time, and you may be trying to beat your previous record, but focusing on that record will only distract you from what you’re actually doing.

3

Process, not results

This leads us directly to the next tenet of sports psychology - it is the process of performing, and not the result of the performance, that is key to success.

You have to be willing to continue performing at your peak even when you’re in the middle of a slump. You have to stop yourself from thinking things like “I need to hit this ball if I’m going to beat my previous score” or “if I screw this up I’ll be fired!” And the best way to prevent such lines of thinking is to never get in the results-based mindset in the first place.

What you do, right now, is completely within your control. And the process of moving from one moment to the next, whether racking up wins or losses or a mix of the two, is the only tool you have to improving these results.

A mistake is just as likely to lead to an excellent performance as it is to another mistake. The difference is in the psychology of the performer.

You’re not married to the past and you don’t have to let it determine your present if you don’t want to. So what you need to determine isn’t how well you’ve done up until now, but how focused you will be on performing superbly in the present moment. Doing so will require you to adapt a level of confidence that may seem unrealistic - which is all the more reason you need to adapt it.

4

Are you more concerned about what you’re doing or what others are thinking about what you’re doing?

Critics, advisers, and spectators aren’t the ones who win awards.

5

Confidence and success

Here’s a “chicken or the egg” question for you: how can you succeed if you’re not confident in your abilities, but how can you have confidence if you aren’t succeeding? A lot of people run into this mental snag, with defeat creating a loss of confidence and a loss of confidence increasing worry, loss of focus, and additional subsequent losses. Loss and lack of confidence perpetuate each other in an accelerating downward spiral.

So what can you do if you’re stuck in this self-reinforced doom loop? Recall from earlier that the key to excellent performance is an excellent process. Success is a result, it’s a snapshot in time where you stop and reflect, evaluating where you are compared to where you were. Confidence, on the other hand, is part of a process. It’s one of the tools you use to create success.

Sure, success can breed confidence, and often it does. But you have to be confident long before you have any results to show why. You have to be confident, period. Success isn’t the only thing that hinges on this, for if you’re not confident you won’t be likely to perform well enough to even make success an option.

6

The fine art of failure

How can someone fail repeatedly and get better every time? Simple: don’t assume that a failure means YOU are a failure.

The minute you take a failure to heart, your ability to learn from it and keep going will shut down.

This is the widest gap between those who excel and those who don’t - the ability to persist even in the midst of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But persistence isn’t just about continuing to move forward regardless of the odds. If you’re not adapting by learning what works and what doesn’t, then you can keep making the same mistakes over and over again. This is clearly not the best strategy, but is still better than not trying at all.

Those who excel weren’t born to excel - you can have awe-inspiring genetics and still be a complete basketcase. It’s all a matter of personal choice, and personal responsibility.

Accepting responsibility

If you cannot accept responsibility for your own actions, you cannot learn from them. And you’ll continually try to blame others for your mistakes, which again prevents learning but also gives you a bad reputation. When you expect everyone else to pick up the blame for your faults and mistakes, you’re not only a terrible performer but unlikely to be promoted or even made part of a team.

After all, if you’re going to make life miserable for everyone you work with, eventually no one will want to work with you. Your bad reputation will precede you, and then you’ll have far worse things to worry about than your bad performance.

7

Put your baggage where it belongs before you perform.

8

Being cool

Coolness matters. But I’m not talking about the kind of cool you get from having a fashionable haircut and pair of shoes. This is the kind of cool that determines how well you perform when everything seems wrong and everyone seems out to get you.

When most people are placed in high-pressure situations, they are likely to react in ways that decrease their performance level and increase the odds of a bad outcome. One of these reactions is a continuous negative thought loop, where mistakes and irritations are replayed over and over again in the mind. This amplifies the emotional impact of something that is beyond personal control, and can lead you to lash out at others over things that you shouldn’t be concerned with in the first place.

Other self-defeating reactions to pressure include a loss of control over breathing, clouded judgment, impulsive actions, overreactions, and general loss of ability to control the few things that actually can be controlled.

On the other hand, when you’re cool, you can stay focused and centered even when bad things are happening all around you. You can make the choice to not let someone anger you, even when that person is intentionally trying to do so. You can make the choice to keep your confidence high even when you’re not performing so well. You can make the choice to do your best even when you’re sick, tired, or simply not motivated.

And when you make these kinds of choices, it becomes very easy to let the uncontrollable stuff slide out of view, and your mind slip straight into the zone.

9

Finding the zone

“The zone” is a common term that is often overused and misunderstood. It refers to the mindset where you are intently focused on what you are doing, right now. The zone applies to sports, business, art, martial arts, driving a car, raking leaves, and any other activity you can imagine.

But many people think you have to be focused on a goal in order to get into the zone. They think you have to focus on milestones that provide evidence you are moving in the right direction. They think you have to focus on how well you are doing so you can make adjustments as you go along. They are not only wrong on all three counts, but are describing the exact opposite of the real zone.

When you are focused on a desired outcome, you are most definitely not in the zone. Likewise when you are trying to measure progress and evaluate your performance in the middle of trying to perform. You’re distracted, plain and simple. For how can you complete the task at hand if it’s not even in the top three things you’re thinking about? If you’re thinking about anything other than the specific action you are performing, your head is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

10

So where does your head need to be? On the target at hand. When you are reading this sentence, you are targeting the words and their meaning. If you are thinking about how much you want to understand the sentence, how far into this book you have read, or how far you have to go to finish it, then the meaning of the sentence won’t stick. Even if you’re reading it, you’re not understanding it, because your mind is somewhere else.

The zone involves total involvement in the present moment. If you’re walking and your focus is on each step - where you place your foot, how you position it to change direction or move around an obstacle, where your balance lies, your breathing rate, and what your eyes are looking at, then you’re in the zone. You could walk ten miles like this without ever really noticing, because time has been suspended. You’re not thinking about what you have to buy at the store or about what you’re going to do when you get home. You’re just walking.

This is essential for any endeavor. If you’re throwing a ball, your target is what you are looking at, where your feet are pointed, how you cock your arm to release the throw you have chosen and the timing of your release. If you’re selling an insurance policy, your target is the flow of the conversation, what the prospect is concerned about, the prospect’s communication style and what you will say to direct the conversation accordingly.

If you instead think about how badly you need a good throw, or how much you need this sale, then you’re out of the zone, off the track, and in the weeds.

11

When, and what, to evaluate

So if you’re in your zone, how are you ever going to know how good you’re doing and what you need to adjust in order to improve your performance? The short answer is this: you don’t. But when your performance is over, you will certainly want to pause, even if just for a short breath, and reflect.

Evaluation can either be done to improve performance or to reach miserable, self-defeating conclusions. I know I certainly prefer the former. If you feel the same, then here’s how you can avoid the latter.

First, don’t become an evaluation junkie. If you’re committed to living life to the fullest and pushing your own limits then you’ll need to be in performance mode a disproportionately larger amount of time than in evaluation mode.

Second, select specific times to evaluate yourself. If you’re repeating a sequence of actions, like writing chapters of a book or making a series of sales calls, you can choose to evaluate your performance between each action. So when a sales call ends, for example, you can evaluate how well you established rapport with the prospect, whether you were rushing the pitch or flowing with the prospect, and whether you achieved the desired result (scheduling a demo or securing an order).

On the other hand, you can evaluate your performance on a standard basis, like 15 minutes per evening or for an hour every Saturday night. The longer the time between evaluations, the more important it is for you to keep a log of your performances. If you’re a painter, you might keep a journal that tracks how many paintings you made in the last month, provides a small photo of each one, and also details information such as what the selling price was and what gallery or dealer purchased or sold it. You can then evaluate what types of paintings are selling well, what dealers and galleries are most interested and which ones make repeat purchases.

Finally, only evaluate factors that contribute to your ability to improve performance. To hell with all the factors that only lead you to the conclusion that you’re terrible or that you’re not as good as Billy, Sue, or Paul. But if, as part of your evaluation, you note that Sue has a trick up her sleeve that she uses to improve her performance, then that’s something different entirely, because it is actually useful.

12

What sports psychology really shows us is that the untapped potential in all of us lies in our ability to control ourselves, not in our ability to control our surroundings.

We can make bigger leaps in progress by simply cutting out all the obstructions we put in our own way.

And we can do this without piling on more training time or hours at the office.

If we simply flip the right switches at the right time, we can perform at our highest levels when it’s time to perform, and evaluate the right criteria when it’s time to reflect.

And we can even learn to leave some switches in the OFF position at all times, like the negative emotional reactions that seem to sprout up like weeds at the most inconvenient of moments.

It is only by achieving the highest level of self-control can we ever hope to achieve the positive results that will set us apart from others and teach us what we are really capable of.

So if you want big gains, stop trying to win.

Just be the best you can, in this very moment, and you’ll already be there.

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Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Bergevin

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