What is the first step to cultivate a mindset of excellence?
*Disclaimer: The article found below is a translation from an article I’ve written in the Polish-American newspaper Bialy Orzel 24. Find it HERE.*
Often times we hear about situations where individuals were mentally tough. Their psychological capacity was working for them, not against them. They seem to succeed more often, perform well more consistently. Some people may think that this is due to talent, genetics, having the right coach or developmental influence, but why do we often overlook the mind? Iga Swiatek said it herself in an interview with the Women’s Tennis Association, “I just believe that mental toughness is probably the most important thing in tennis.” She’s at the top of the world stage when it comes to tennis, and she has been extremely outspoken about the mental training she has used and continues to use in her professional development. Her sport psychologist’s Daria Abramowicz travels with her to every competition.
So, what is sport psychology? It’s the pursuit of training your mind to perform optimally for you in your given discipline. When you are performing, your mind should be your asset, not your enemy. It is being mentally tough, focused on what is most important, having the ability to problem solve under pressure, regulate your emotions, not be influenced by the crowd in the stands or who is watching, and the ability to bounce back from a mistake. Sport psychology also includes the importance of rest and recovery.
It's worth recognizing that we all perform to a certain capacity in our daily lives, regardless of our profession. Whether it’s yourself or your kids, I bet you would love to be better at what you do and see your kids succeed at the sport or art they perform in. This is where I believe sport psychology comes into play.
There are four components of optimal performance in sport, physical, technical, tactical, and mental. Within the mental component, where I focus my work, there are essential components to the practice of mental training. These are things you can begin working on or support your child in to strengthen their mental component of performance. The first one is the ability to implement relaxation techniques, particularly when the performer begins to enter realms of their discipline that put more pressure on them to do well. In individual sports, whether it’s before a serve in tennis, a putt in golf, before jumping into the pool during a swim meet, before the gates open for a downhill skiing time trial, or prior to the curtains opening and music starting; having the ability to slow your heart-rate down and grounding yourself in that moment can give you the ability to perform at your best in the tournament or in front of the judges. Having that self-awareness to drop into the present moment so you can concentrate on what matters for you to perform at your best and not get distracted. That is also something self-relaxation techniques can assist you in. This simply begins with the awareness of your breathing, resting your attention on how your breathing feels in your body puts you in the present moment. This is one of the most important skills to have as a high performer and what sets apart the world class from everyone else.
*Disclaimer: The article found above is a translation from an article I’ve written in the Polish-American newspaper Bialy Orzel 24. Find it HERE.*
Reflections
As I was preparing to write the article that you have read above, I tried to figure out how I can best define what sport psychology is and what I believe is the most important mental skill to learn as a performer moving towards excellence. I firmly believe the most important skill is having a sense of self-awareness. Although I termed it ‘self-awareness’ in the article, and that is how I would call it when working with a performer, the scientific literature uses various other language. I believe this is where many individuals get confused. I must admit I was a bit confused when I began researching and scouring the literature to learn more about it. However, I have found a term that describes the study of self-awareness for me very well. It comes from the study of contemplative sciences.
Contemplative science is the interdisciplinary study of metacognitive self-regulatory capacity of the mind and experiential modes of existential awareness, both modulated by motivation and intention around contextual factors of contemplative practices (i.e., breathing, compassion, HRV, meditation). The definition in the previous sentence I provided you with is from Dusana Dorjee’s article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology.
the reason why I have decided to rest on contemplative science is because when you read the literature around self-regulation, self-awareness, and metacognition, a lot of times the language used rely on either mindfulness, breathing, meditation, or something along the lines of present moment nonjudgemental awareness. Now, as I review psychology research, particularly sport, performance, and exercise psychology work, I no longer get confused with the various terms that align with the practice of self-awareness or present-mindedness (i.e., mindfulness, breath-work, meditation) because they all speak to Dorjee’s (2016) work around defining what all these terms have in common, which is contemplative sciences.
I believe it is time to incorporate this idea in the sport and performance psychology (SPP) literature. It is well known that the SPP field adopts various work and theories from the general psychology field, and in order to organize some of the self-awareness practices that have been preached across performance contexts, we can organize that work into the sub-domain of contemplative science.