History & Science
“Our motive is to better understand how we have arrived here today with a new reality of how thoughts and emotions affect performance.”
When you talk about mental skills, we are dealing directly with the chatter in your head. Talking with someone about this chatter can be qualified as a very rare conversation. It’s not something we used to talk about between two people, sharing this inner dialogue. Only recently, within the last few years have we understood the need to recognize and talk about the chatter. In the past, you were left to figure out on your own.
At some point in sports competition, we’ve all heard it’s a mental game. If your experience is like most, there is not much that follows in the way of “how to” or what that really means. At this point in history we are starting to figure some things out. Based on these new revealed truths we can now teach the mental game and begin to develop these critical thinking skills.
Our curiosity to study the mind and emotions date back to before the times of Jesus Christ; our understanding of these two, however, have just recently reached new depths due to advances in medical technology.
“The brain is the most complicated mass known to man; we have just recently come out of the stone-age in our ability to understand what goes on in the brain.”
National Geographic 2013 “The Brain”
It’s been said that in order for you to become who you are today, (2nd) and grasp all your potential for tomorrow (3rd), you must learn to understand where you’ve come from (1st). Notice the numbers and the order in which you are to seek out and understand your journey.
We can apply this same strategy to what we have recently discovered about your brain. With new advancing technology, we can see things like never before. In the last few years, we have confirmed so many working theories from history we can now build on these for the future. This book, its content, and all my efforts to teach and simplify the complex study of “thoughts” and “emotions” become timely in history as we embrace the new realities and move forward learning how to apply what we now know.
2.1 Timeline: Notable Milestones
We can reflect back before the birth of Jesus Christ and see mankind’s fascination with thoughts and emotions. There are many notable ‘highlights’ on the time line in history. The nugget here is to learn your history, to better understand how we have arrived here today. One significant milestone of interest can be found from a book written in the 1920’s titled, “Emotions of Normal People” written by William Moulton Marston. This book from Marston and its content laid the foundation for later studies conducted by universities and other research groups. In the mid 1970’s, our academic universities picked up on Marston’s work and began the study of personality styles.
Understanding different personality styles is another quality study you are recommended to complete. The science of personality traits has evolved with such accuracy it’s almost scary to complete a profile and learn how true the assessments can be. This study is an excellent resource to determine your unique, dynamic and organized set of personal traits and patterns of behavior. In short, you learn insights to your own strengths and weaknesses. If you graduate from these early lessons of understanding your own personality style, you then develop skills to better understand the personality styles of others, including the difficult ones.
We include personality style profiling in the “Mental & Emotional Training” program. The D.I.S.C. personality profile is just one of many that has the ability to identify common patterns of weakness; we can pinpoint specific development strategies using the five mental skills from this book, coupled with the summary from a personality profile. It is safe to say the five mental skills and learning the personality styles go hand and hand in your life-long development.
It was in the 1990’s, another twenty years later, Dr. Daniel Goleman wrote a book introducing a new theory called “Emotional Intelligence”. You can break down the two words and begin to get an idea of the basic principle. “Emotional” references emotions or feelings and “intelligence”, meaning smart. In short, how smart are you about your emotions.
One dominant message with “Emotional Intelligence” is the skill sets are learned behaviors. This is so critically important in your development. This science, proven and valid, suggests that you can learn behaviors that make you smarter, more intelligent about your emotions. If you are smarter, more intelligent about your emotions, you in turn make better decisions. When you add a little pressure from the game or in life, your ability to remain smart about your emotions can really benefit your performance.
A high level of emotional intelligence results in good decisions, learning, innovation, adaptability and so many other enabling qualities. Whereas, a low level of emotional intelligence has been proven to result in poor decision-making, hindered learning, lack of flexibility, a lack of adapting and a number of other disabling qualities.
This is such a significant milestone in breaking down the walls and actually talking about how thoughts and emotions go hand in hand with your performance. For the first time in history, science has begun to validate the important role both thoughts and emotions play in your day-to-day decision-making. Since these learned behaviors improve decision-making, we can now develop instructional guides and lesson plans to teach mental and emotional skill development. They may be considered soft-skills when compared to more “technical skills” required for a specific job or task. However, the soft-skill sets are now proven to play as big of a roll, if not bigger, than the technical skills. For so long, the idea of mental and emotional conversations has been categorized as motivational or a warm fuzzy pep rally. Now, there are identifiable mental and emotional skill sets that we must learn, practice and teach.
Dr. Goleman’s work has since expanded and many others have now taken the concept of “Emotional Intelligence” and begun to explore all the possibilities. Our academic models from kindergarten through High School and our universities are now including courses supporting the ideas of Emotional Intelligence. Here is where you receive encouragement to go and talk with your counselor about Emotional Intelligence courses; go find a good book on the subject and learn these valuable new behaviors.
As it pertains to new technology, Neuroscience is the field of study revealing these groundbreaking ideas about thoughts and emotions. Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system. An “inter-disciplinary” approach combining psychology, biology, physiology and so many other disciplines it’s like a melting pot of all the knowledge and what we have learned up to this time in history.
Here is where we take the traditional sports psychology models and tweak with new factual insights about how the mind and body work together.
When we take the combined knowledge of science and couple it with advancing medical technology we can see things in your brain like never before. For the first time in history, we can study the nervous system. We can see your brain think. We can now study a brain with desire. We can monitor and learn how your brain interacts with another brain during a normal conversation. This new and exciting field of study is a game-changer and it’s called Neuroscience.
It’s important to understand the relationship between these two because they compliment one another so well. Emotional Intelligence deals directly with you understanding your thoughts and feelings where as Neuroscience is helping us learn and understand the “emotional” brain and what experts in the field call, “emotional brain states”.
In 2009 the Journal of Science and Sports Medicine introduced an article titled, “Validity of the Emotional Intelligence Scale for Use in Sports”. This was the first notable research on Emotional Intelligence in athletic competition. The research introduced the idea that certain emotions enable better performance whereas other emotions disable and lead to poor performance. A second article released in 2010 highlighted more research offering new findings that emotional states are important for peak performance.
Now, jump to 2011 in ESPN Magazine. The article, “I Think, Therefore, I Choke”. A wonderful read with what may be the first mainstream article on how thoughts and emotions can either help you succeed or cause you to fail. The article goes into the “anatomy of a choke”. It’s another look at how thoughts and emotions affect your game.
Why am I spending time on this history? It is important to understand the recent changes in how we look at your brain; it’s happening in your lifetime. It pertains to how we used to think and how we think now. It’s a brand new ballgame.
“The old thinking, and this really goes back to the ‘60s and ‘70s was that, you know, right brain good, left brain bad. Actually, that is very, very outdated. The new-sophisticated thinking is first when it comes to left versus right you mean left front, left middle, left rear. And when it comes to creativity it’s not just left ‘or’ right, it’s up ‘or’ down. It’s the whole brain. And here it’s important to understand the structural difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.”
The Latest Findings On The Brain
What he is basically saying is your brain is very complex. So complex we’ve only started to scratch the surface on what we are learning about your emotional brain-states. What you must learn to understand is the way we used to think about the brains role in your performance has changed. We now know that if you can learn to increase your awareness to your thoughts, then learn to regulate your thoughts you can empower yourself to do amazing things.
Dr. Goleman goes on to say,
“Self-awareness and self-regulation, these are the basis for self-mastery of all kinds. These are the abilities that make someone, for example, an outstanding individual performer and a star on their own. It has to do with awareness of our internal states, accessing those states and mastery of those states.”
If you are a top performer, you have learned how to regulate emotional states. By regulating your chatter, you in turn regulate the body’s emotional response to the situation or task at hand. My interest is in you understanding these ideas so well you learn to summon these talents on demand. Your knowledge and understanding of these skills can now be taught and it is part of your responsibility to develop your mental strength and conditioning.
Show me a top performer in your game, somebody you love to watch. This athlete, like you, has a “mental fingerprint” in the brain for every task performed. In theory, we can teach you how to study your ‘fingerprint’ by looking at the thoughts and emotions when executing a task. The idea is for you to learn to map the emotional states that lead you to extraordinary performance. Once you can understand these ideas and learn to map your mental fingerprint, you then capture it, study it, call it up on demand and with skill development duplicate it on often. And it all starts with the chatter in your head.
2.2.1 Guiding Principle: Two brains
Here is a simple idea for a complicated topic. Let’s pretend for a minute that you have two brains, a thinking brain and a feeling brain (not really, this is just an example). The feeling brain can take over the thinking brain.
It’s very similar to a master-slave relationship; the feeling brain being the master, the thinking brain being the slave. When this happens, we call this an emotional highjack. Remember these words, emotional highjack. We will cover more on this later. This becomes important because when the feeling brain takes over the thinking brain, it takes mental skills to recover. The stronger the skill set, the quicker the recovery. The weaker the skill set, the slower recovery.
In other words, if your chatter continues to be negative, you literally stay in an emotional highjack. Your emotional states are causing all kinds of negative and distracting feelings. Your body releases dopamine, adrenaline, cortisol and several other stress hormones into your body. The root cause is your chatter, often referred to as attitude. The constant negative, toxic chatter runs rampant directly affecting your emotional states that in turn dump stress hormones into your system. Not good.
Understanding your thoughts and emotions can be complicated; all the more reason to get started on mastering these mental skills right now. My ability to put words together and simplify is only the beginning. Once you know and understand the process, you must then go to work on the inside, applying new disciplines to grow and strengthen your mental muscle.
This book and the attempts to make these topics simple are my talents put into action. I can take these complicated truths and ideas, break them down for you and make them user friendly so you can begin to apply these ideas into your day-to-day chatter. If there is one thing that you can learn to develop and pay closer attention to is the chatter in your own head.
This is your development goal. Step one, become more aware of your inner dialogue. This is your first step. As you become more aware, you begin to regulate the chatter, step two. It’s that simple, you can do this.
The ancient scriptures talk about taking that chatter captive and renewing it often. When you consider all that is at stake, your future, your dreams and your desires. And you recognize how real and relevant the threat of failure really is, your new goal is to take captive and renew your chatter 86,400 seconds of every day.
2.2.2 Guiding Principle: It’s complicated
The mind is complicated. Thoughts are complicated. Thoughts pop up in your head sometimes and only God knows from where they come. You can be sitting in class or in a meeting; someone or something distracts you. Too much, too little, too loud, you know all the distractions. All of the sudden, your mind takes off like a racehorse. Random thoughts pop up and not one of them belong in your head. Unexpected emotions and feelings will follow. You must learn to develop new skills to regulate thoughts and in turn regulating emotions so they do not distract you; accept this is difficult and requires your daily discipline.
As a basic truth, your chatter continues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is equal to 1440 minutes; it’s the same day and same amount of time just broken down in more detail. Your brain works faster than that and so does your chatter. In the same twenty-four hour day you must develop your awareness to the chatter at the seconds level, 86,400 seconds of every day. You must develop the mental skills to become more aware and pay closer attention second by second.
There is no shutting off the chatter, only awareness and regulation. You have thoughts, which is mental. You have feelings, which is emotional. You have action, which is physical. In this book, you will learn how the chatter impacts them all. You really cannot talk about one without referencing the other two. Again, these conversations about your inner dialogue are new and when introduced for the first time can be a little complicated. This is where my gift, my strength, my service comes into play. My role is to take these complicated truths and introduce simple ideas enabling these truths to be user-friendly so that you can take action, right here, right now, today.
2.2.3 Guiding Principle: T.E.A.
Here is a quick reference to remind your self often, T.E.A.:
Thoughts = Emotions = Action
This book is dedicated to understanding the “T”, your thoughts (thinking). What you must learn to understand and accept is whatever thoughts you allow will determine your emotions, in turn driving your actions. Your feelings and emotional state ultimately determine how you handle yourself on and off the field and all areas of life.