by Kerr, James
‘Most people have the will to win,’ says basketball coach Bobby Knight, ‘few have the will to prepare to win.’ Yet, like physical fitness, mental toughness is the result of a long-term conditioning programme.
‘It’s crazy,’ Gilbert Enoka tells Real Estate Business magazine, ‘because if you want to build up strength, you go to the gym and you work three times a week on your core strength. It just seems that if you want to develop your ability to concentrate and focus and be flexible in what you do from a mental perspective, wouldn’t you apply the same approach?’
‘If you think of physical conditioning, technical understanding and tactical appreciation as forming three legs,’ Wayne Smith tells writer Gregor Paul, ‘the stool isn’t balanced unless you have psychological strength as well.’
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Gazing’s training approach, in its simplest form, says Brosnahan, involves a ‘skill ladder’, which begins by building technique and increasing intensity, then introduces real pressure. An everyday example might be in preparation for a speech: first we read through the text, maybe practise in front of the mirror until we’ve got the words and the flow right; then we might invite a few people to watch us rehearse – upping the intensity – and then finally, we might introduce real, emotional pressure; a video camera perhaps, a hostile heckler in the room, a bet on the number of times we hesitate, an unrealistic time limit . . .
In this way our brains acclimatize to the pressure. We develop clarity, more accurate, automatic execution and situational awareness.
The idea, however, is not to do too much too soon. A surfeit of pressure applied prematurely will leave us foundering, disoriented and modelling the very emotions we’re training to avoid. Just as with cooking a live frog, slowly does it. Let the frog gradually get used to the steadily increasing temperature so that it doesn’t jump out.
By the time it realizes ‘it’s hot in here’, it’s too late.
So, we focus on the technique, increase the intensity, and then add pressure. Before we finish, we reduce the intensity and focus once again on the technique, as if we’re cooling down at the gym. Repeat. And keep repeating until it’s automatic.
The technique becomes powerfully embedded and we leave the process with a feeling of control. The point is to give our mental performance what Neuro Linguistic Programming calls ‘unconscious competence’, and what the All Blacks call ‘clarity’.
Henry says, ‘When Smithy talks about intensity and accuracy, we’re talking about a process of clarity – playing with intensity and accuracy, as opposed to “shit, we’ve got to win this game. Look at the scoreboard, it’s bloody 8-8, we’re in the shit here!”. And then you freeze and choke, overcompensate, don’t trust your mates, all that stuff.’
‘It’s about striking the balance between being lucid but being motivated,’ says Andrew Mehrtens. ‘There comes a point where you can become too hyped up and you lose your lucidity and ability to read a situation and make a good decision.’
The word automatic is from the Greek, Automatus, and means ‘self-thinking’. It’s not far from the idea of thinking for yourself – the idea of autonomy and self-responsibility implied by the phrase ‘Better People Make Better All Blacks’. By training with intensity, we make our performance more automatic, better able to stay on task. If we can control our attention – avoid the Red and stay in the Blue – we can focus on controlling the things we can control, without worrying about the things we can’t.
We can stay in the moment.
We can lead with clarity.
Train to Win
Mastery in anything – a sport, a skill, a craft, business – is achieved by practice. Practice is enhanced by intensity. Research has shown that both our body and our brains respond positively to a diet of accelerated, intense learning, which leads to dramatic improvements and competitive advantage. The All Blacks embrace the power of intensity to ‘train to win’ – working with randomized scenarios and unexpected challenges in order to recalibrate the players’ tolerance for high-pressure situations.
The aim is to enable greater clarity and accuracy under stressful circumstances – and to enhance the ability to bring attention back to the present and the task at hand. Smart leaders utilize intensity to challenge themselves and their teams, and to increase competence and capability. Just as core body exercises are vital for physical conditioning, so core psychological training is essential to develop mental toughness and resilience.
Train to Win
Practise under pressure.
—— Tangata akona ki te kāinga, tūngia ki te marae, tau ana.
A person who is taught at home will stand with confidence in the community.
IX
PRESSURE
—— Te tīmatanga o te mātauranga ko te wahangū, te wāhanga tuarua ko te whakarongo.
The first stage of learning is silence, the second stage is listening.
KEEP A BLUE HEAD
Control your attention
New Zealand vs. France, Cardiff, 6 October 2007
The game went the All Blacks’ way at first. At half time, the French were trailing 13-3. Then it all went wrong.
By the final whistle Les Bleus had the lead: 20-18.
It was over, the All Blacks defeated in the quarter-final, their World Cup ended.
‘The feeling in the sheds was like no-man’s land,’ Anton Oliver said. ‘Sort of desolate, decayed, the smell of – I don’t want to dramatize it – but death, you know.’
The pressure had been too much.
The All Blacks had choked.
Again.
‘One minute decides the outcome of a battle,’ Suvorov wrote, ‘one hour the outcome of a campaign, one day the fate of empires.’
The armchair critics said the All Blacks had only to regroup, drive up field and kick for goal. Instead, in the final minutes, they went for the try. It was the wrong option, poor decision-making under pressure, confusion instead of clarity, a lack of leadership.
It cost them the world.
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‘Pressure is expectation, scrutiny and consequence,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘Under pressure, your attention is either diverted or on track. If you’re diverted, you have a negative emotional response and unhelpful behaviour. That means you’re stuck. That means you’re overwhelmed.’
On the other hand, if your attention is on track you have situational awareness and you execute accurately. You are clear, you adapt and you overcome.
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The All Blacks weren’t the first sportsmen to choke, of course.
Greg Norman famously fell apart in the 1986 Masters, relinquishing a six-hole lead going into the final day.
In 1951 the Brooklyn Dodgers were up thirteen games in late August when they allowed the New York Giants to catch up at the end of the season. The Giants famously won the final playoff with a ninth innings three-runner hit by Bobby Thompson.
It was the ‘Shot Heard Round the World’.
Meanwhile, the England Football team has won only 17 per cent of their penalty shootouts – compared to Germany’s 83 per cent. Football, says former England striker Gary Lineker, is ‘a game played for 90 minutes and at the end Germany win.’
Clearly, in any game played with the body, it’s the head that counts.
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‘I think most non-elite sportsmen can relate to the fact that, when it is a life changing moment, that’s when you’re most likely to fluff your lines,’ says Matthew Syed, author of Bounce, tells Channel 4 News. ‘A life defining job interview, you’re about to talk to the woman of your dreams . . . and it happened to me. Suddenly I was unable to execute the skills I’d built up over a lifetime.’
Bad decisions are not made through a lack of skill or innate judgement: they are made because of an inability to handle pressure at the pivotal moment.
Syed was competing at table tennis at the Sydney Olympics when he found he could barely hit the ball. ‘Instead of just doing it, using the subconscious part of
the brain, which is a very efficient deliverer of a complex task, [people who choke] exert conscious control, and it disrupts the smooth working of the subconscious.’
RED HEAD Tight, inhibited, results-oriented, anxious, aggressive, over-compensating, desperate.
BLUE HEAD Loose, expressive, in the moment, calm, clear, accurate, on task.
It’s what tennis coach Nick Bollettieri calls the ‘centipede effect’. If a centipede had to think about moving all its legs in the right order, it would freeze, the task too complex and daunting. The same is true of humans.
Red is what Suvorov called ‘the Dark’. It is that fixated negative content loop of self-judgement, rigidity, aggression, shut down and panic. Blue is what he called ‘the Light’ – a deep calmness in which you are on task, in the zone, on your game, in control and in flow. It applies to the military; it applies to sport; it applies to business.
In the heat of battle, the difference between the inhibitions of the Red and the freedom of Blue is the manner in which we control our attention.
It works like this: where we direct our mind is where our thoughts will take us; our thoughts create an emotion; the emotion defines our behaviour; our behaviour defines our performance. So, simply, if we can control our attention, and therefore our thoughts, we can manage our emotions and enhance our performance.
Which is easier said than done.
Typical pressure zones are times of great ‘heat’;
° where something is at stake;
° where trauma of previous experience is triggered;
° where there is conflict, aggression, dispute, dissent;
° where there is a deadline, a ticking clock, urgency;
° where there is high stimulus and distraction.
In these kinds of situations – an impossible deadline at work, for instance, or the final seconds of the knockout stages of a Rugby World Cup – how do we control our attention? How do we stay present? Remain resourceful? Keep on task?
How do we avoid the Red and stay in the Blue?
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‘State changing,’ says Wayne Smith, ‘is really critical.’ Graham Henry saw it as one of the key factors in his team’s eventual triumph. ‘Having skills to go from red to blue, or maintain the blue, was pretty important in the scheme of things,’ he says.
‘I think,’ says Gilbert Enoka, ‘that anyone in our arena who looks at performance and looks at improvement . . . it’s all about a state shift . . . and ensuring that you can get your head into a good place.’
For Richie McCaw it’s about avoiding what he describes in The Real McCaw as ‘fight, flight or freeze’. You want to avoid, he says, the ‘bad experience pictures from the past or fear of future consequences’. In the language of Neuro-linguistic Programming, his ‘preferred representational system’ – that is, the way he processes and retains information – is predominantly visual. Throughout The Real McCaw he consistently uses visual descriptors to describe his symptoms of stress: ‘exercising the strongest will in the world to keep the bad pictures at bay’; ‘They’re seeing better than me’.
In recognizing his triggers – bad pictures – and controlling his attention – keeping the bad pictures at bay – he is able to stay in the present, remain clear, accurate and on task.
For other people the triggers might be more auditory. Think of the reaction of an Iraq veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to a car backfiring. For others it will more kinaesthetic – the feeling of walking into a crowded room; a certain smell such as Marcel Proust’s Madeleine cakes. In fact, though we all have our preferred representational system, we also have all the embedded auditory, visual and kinaesthetic triggers. The trick is to recognize when they are firing in our brains and when the effect is negative.
We need to recognize the ‘Red Flags’, the ‘Warning Sirens’, our ‘Sixth Sense’. Then we have to manage our reactions.
‘The brain essentially has three parts – instinct, thinking and emotion,’ Enoka told Gregor Paul at The New Zealand Herald . ‘Invariably under pressure it is the thinking that shuts down and that means you are relying on emotion and instinct and can no longer pick up the cues and information to make good decisions.’
He says, ‘If you become disconnected then you can focus on outcome and not task and the ability to make good decisions is compromised.’
The Real McCaw describes the work that Ceri Evans did with the players to help them reconnect. Like meditation, it begins with the breath: ‘Breathing slowly and deliberately . . . shift your attention to something external – the ground or your feet, or the ball at hand, or even alternating big toes, or the grandstand . . . use deep breaths and key words to get out of your own head, find an external focus, get yourself “back in the present”, regain your situational awareness.’
These actions are Anchors (see Chapter VII), and they have a particular function. They are designed to bring the players into the moment, into clarity, into the blue. It is easy to see how this technique is applicable to a pressurized business environment.
Essentially, it works like this.
First, we put ourself in a resourceful state: calm, positive, clear. Then we ‘anchor’ that state through a specific, replicable physical action – something out of the ordinary, like scrunching up our toes, stamping our foot, staring into the distance, throwing water over our face. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat – until it’s automatic.
Then, when we recognize the symptoms of pressure – when our focus closes down, our vision narrows, our heart rate lifts, our anxiety increases, our self-consciousness rises – we can use the anchor to reboot. And return to our centre. Like a doctor using paddles on a cardiac arrest, the ‘jolt of recognition’ reactivates our more resourceful state and returns us to the moment.
It is, literally, ‘re-cognition’: thinking again. Undiverted, we’re free to assess, adjust and act; to become realigned with our task and the best way to complete it.
To act rather than react.
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‘What do pilots do when they’re crashing?’ Gazing’s Bede Brosnahan asks before answering his own question. ‘They look at the manual.’
He’s joking, he says, but it is a good way to anchor the Gazing Performance System’s methodology. Gazing, he explains, develop ‘maps’ for their clients – simple schematics that clarify the issues and provide an easily recalled point of reference in pressure situations.
‘Maps force clarity,’ he says. ‘You can’t put bullshit on a map.’
In high-performing domains, he says, people have the same maps, the same common language. This common language – whether a schematic, words, phrases or mantras – delivers clarity. ‘If you have a direction you want to go in, if you can describe it, succinctly and clearly, that’s your starting point,’ he says.
Mantras are the way in which we can tell our story to ourselves; they are tools for effective thinking, a mental roadmap in times of pressure.
The map is not the terrain – but it sure helps when you get a little lost.
And maps exist on many levels – visual mnemonics of the sort that Gazing uses, physical triggers of the kind that McCaw explains, and words or mantras designed to bring you into the moment.
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‘I can still remember them,’ says Anton Oliver, recalling the playing mantra the All Blacks used in his day. ‘TQB, top-quality ball. OTG, over the gain line. KBA, keep the ball alive. And LQB, lightening quick ball. You get these four things going, we’re fine . . . That gave us the template to figure out the game.’
Originally, the mantra was a word, phrase or sound with the power to transform. Vedic in origin, the most famous example is ‘Om’ – the meditative mantra that brings the adept into the moment. Its purpose hasn’t changed: mantras are literally an ‘instrument for thinking’, a practical tool for returning to the moment.
Pilots, for instance, have a mantra to help them deal with a deluge of flight data that assails them during a crisis:
—— Aviate.
Navigate.
Communicate.
That is, first focus on flying the plane; second, fly the plane in the right direction; third, tell people where you’re flying the plane. It’s a simple, practical process that has saved lives. Its simplicity enables pilots to orient themselves and take the right steps in the right order; providing big-picture perspective and clearly defined steps.
Meanwhile, paramedics and ski patrollers have a mantra for first-aid situations.
—— Assess.
Adjust.
Act.
That is, assess the situation; adjust your approach to suit the situation; act accordingly. Again, the process creates clarity and certainty, without losing urgency.
The thing many mantras share is the Rule of Three; that is, they are three words or phrases that work together in a stepwise process to bring about change.
The Rule of Three is the way humans tell stories; with a beginning, a middle and an end. You’ll see it in drama with the three-act play, in jokes with ‘an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman’, and in an orator’s rhetoric: Adolf Hitler’s ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’, for instance, or the desire for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, or the Māori proverb, Titiro, whakarongo, kōrero (Look, listen, then speak).
By harnessing this three-point structure, mantras create a strong linguistic chain of events; they take you from chaos, through clarity and into action.
Automatically.
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Controlling our attention – through anchoring, maps and mantras – is about bringing ourselves back into the present. Rather than ‘what ifs’, we are then able to deal with the ‘what is’.
Rather than, ‘What if we run out of resources?’ we can ask, ‘What is the best way to use our resources?’
Rather than, ‘What if I don’t win the contract?’ we can ask, ‘What can I do to win the contract?’