Mental Skill 01: Communication

Lesson Summary: Mental Skill of Communication (Part 1)

This lesson introduces the mental skill of communication, which is the ability to use the right words and the right mental pictures to support performance in the moment. Rather than focusing on communication with others, the lesson emphasizes self-talk and how athletes communicate with themselves internally. The way we think, the words we use, and the mental images we create can either support or hinder performance. 

The lesson explains that effective communication helps keep the thinking brain (“good boss”) in control, allowing for better decision-making, problem-solving, and performance. It also explores how the feeling brain (“bad boss”) can hijack performance through emotions such as anxiety, causing athletes to lose focus and “choke” under pressure. Developing awareness of internal chatter is the first step toward improving self-regulation and achieving peak performance. 

By the end of this lesson, learners should be able to:

1. Define the mental skill of communication as using the right words and mental pictures. 
2. Distinguish between external communication and internal self-talk. 
3. Explain the role of words and mental pictures in athletic performance. 
4. Identify the difference between the thinking brain (“good boss”) and the feeling brain (“bad boss”). 
5. Recognize how performance anxiety and negative self-talk can affect performance. 
6. Understand the importance of awareness as the first step toward self-regulation and improved performance.

All right, PT on the wall here. I’ve got some different illustrations we’re going to use. Different guiding principles to help us better understand the mental skill of communication. Now the definition, the ability to use the right words and the right mental pictures. Everything we do is on demand and in the moment. Athletics, we have to be able to summon our talent at will. This is all a part of it. Now the ability, remember when you see ability Think skill, right? Skill, proficient, deficient. It all has a reflection on the ability. Those are behaviorbased that’s what we’re learning.

So there’s a behavior here. There are things that you’re doing with the mental skill of communication. Now, let’s talk about the guiding principles here. A couple of quickies. Number one, outside versus inside. Number two, chatter. You’ve got to reinforce our understanding here that chatter is nothing more than words and mental pictures. Number three, negative bias by design. We’re going to learn about the negative nows. But a guiding principle is we understand the mental skill of communication, the communication will be negative. Number four, conditioning. There’s an understanding here for elite athletes that we’ve got a recorder that’s capturing all the time. So conditioning comes into play when we consider the way you talk to yourself. Number five, bloodstream. You got to nourish and you got to fight once you get a basic understanding what that means when it comes to the mental skill of communication. Number six, the fish type promise what takes place over time it’s the law of the process. Okay when we talk about the communication, normally when you think of communicating, you think of someone on the outside, right? Your coach, your teammate, your parent, your friend, you’re communicating with someone. That’s not this.

Class. That’s not this course. When you talk about the mental skill of communication, we’re talking about the. Way you talk to yourself. And yes, if you haven’t heard it lately, the way you talk to yourself is a big deal. It’s such a big deal. We get down into the microseconds, the milliseconds. We get down into the way your brain processes. And there’s a lot of science on this with words and mental pictures. I mean, if I was to ask you to describe your best performance, you would rewind your game tape. You’d go out into the mental files and you’d use words and pictures to talk to me about your best mental performance.

If I was to ask you to visualize a great play, you would use words and mental pictures to describe what you’re going to visualize. Words and mental pictures, very, very important. The way in which you communicate to yourself is this first skill set using the right words and the right words mental pictures everything we teach has to do first and foremost in the window of the now right here this task what words and what mental pictures do I need to support my current task again whatever task. That is now you can already imagine how fast we have to move it if your game moves fast again what you’re going to hear in our science is athletics is all about decisionmaking millisecond to millisecond Decision making millisecond to millisecond. Now athletes have caught on to how important the brain is to their performance on the field. So how does the brain improve the game? Almost all of sports is dynamic and requires millisecond to millisecond decision making. And if you miss it by a small percentage, you miss the putt. You’re a tenth of a second too slow. Your shot falls off the rim. That’s that little differentiation between super world class and good.

At a basic level, it’s about handeye coordination and practice, Of course you need an intact body, you need physiology that works. In basketball, it helps to be tall. In racing horses, it helps to be small. But every of those athletes has a brain that has to be synchronized with their athletic activity. But beyond practice and having the right body type, the brain plays another vital role sports. Performance anxiety is the largest culprit of poor athletic performance, and the successful athlete has complete control over that. What we found is the brain can either help you succeed in this athletic activity or it can help you fail. Now we’re looking on the inside and making new decisions, and we’re using words and mental pictures. Okay, so our first outtake here, our first guide principles, inside versus outside. This is how you communicate to yourself. In fact, one of our emotional intelligence skills has to do with selfrespect that whole skill set is measured by the way you behave and the way you talk to yourself.

What words and mental pictures do you use when you’re talking to yourself is a reflection of that selfrespect skill. So we’re going to talk more about that, right? Right now, let’s stay focused on mental skill of communication. We’re talking about the words that you use, the mental pictures you use to yourself are a big deal. Now, listen, what we’re going to eventually set up for you is a science. What you got to understand is neurology now is opening up the brain. We’re seeing it like never before. So to keep things simple for our learning objectives, we’re going to talk about the brain in two different ways, the thinking brain and the feeling brain, right?

The TEA model, you remember this, you’re going to look at this a lot, the thinking brain and the feeling brain. You have to separate those, right? All those books on mental toughness right here, they only work if we can connect them somehow to the emotional brain because that’s really what the mental and the emotional skills are helping us to do. You’re going to learn more is about the hijack. Performance anxiety is the number one cause for the choke with athletes. So anxiety is an emotion. So again, we’re learning how to be smart using skills about all of this. Our first mental skill. Of communication has a lot to do with the good boss and the bad boss. So the good boss the thinking brain and the bad boss is the bad brain so again what you’ve got here is a couple of different things you got the thinking boss and the feeling boss you got the feeling side of your brain and the thinking side and that’s again how we’re going to teach this okay so what i want you to understand is. When your good boss is in control when your good boss when your thinking brain which is your prefrontal cortex we don’t have to get it up behind you It’s right behind your forehead here.

It’s your thinking brain. When your thinking brain is in charge you are better at decision making, especially at the athletic millisecond to millisecond. You are able to solve problems. You are more flexible in your response. You’re able to overcome conflict faster. When your thinking brain, is in charge, your emotional brain, which is what we call a human factor, your emotional brain or feeling brain, here’s the crazy part, your feeling brain can hijack. You can hijack. We’re going to learn more about that that’s why it’s so important that we focus on the words and the mental pictures and again from the perspective of our guiding principles you understand it’s not about what you’re saying to somebody else it’s about what you’re saying to your inside and the whole idea is to keep the good boss your thinking brain in charge knowing. That your feeling brain your bad boss can hijack you, can get you in a way and it impacts your performance and it’s basically what we call the choke.

Now, here’s what’s crazy about the bad boss. We always want to be in the now. When it comes to you being an elite performer and your athletic endeavors, it’s all about bringing your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions to the now. That’s where we understand high performance exists. What’ll happen is, your mind, your words and your pictures might trigger to something in the past or may trigger to something in the future right so these are different windows now we have another lesson called the windows of self but what i want you to recognize here is the brain your chatter your words and your mental pictures need to be on. That immediate task if your thoughts waver and your bad boss hijacks your learning gets distracted your ability to adapt to change gets hindered your ability to innovate goes away Those resources based on brain function are not available to you when you let the emotional brain.

What we’re calling the feeling brain Or the bad boss in control so you’ve got to learn to get words and mental pictures to get the good boss back in charge so the entire basis of the mental skill of communication is in your ability to use the right words and the right mental pictures for your task in. That moment if the tasks change again the brain processes we’re going to learn more about how fast your brain actually processes actually how much is going on in that head of yours it’s between five and sixteen thoughts a second so the brain again that’s why we talk about Elite athletes really being able to have an internal level of selfawareness number one. And then selfregulation which is where we’re trying to get you to. It all starts with awareness. I can’t get you to regulate your words and their mental pictures until we can actually understand awareness to the words and their mental pictures.

So awareness is our first objective here as we continue to develop new skills for you to get you to the next level of performance.