Like many others, lockdown has been a time of learning and reflection for me. During the initial weeks my days were characterised by different webinars, books, workshops and podcasts on anything to do with coaching, self-development or high performance. I found myself waiting for specific days of the week to come, knowing that the next webinar or podcast was about to be released. What wisdom might it bring? Early on in lockdown I was introduced to Ryan Holiday’s book “The Obstacle is The Way”. In the book Holiday uses the ancient philosophy of stoicism as a framework to overcome adversity. The main principle of this approach is in recognising that that you are in control of positive or negative emotions and that something is only good or bad if you perceive it to be. In the book Holiday re tells a story of an American astronaut who is able to prevent an almost certain catastrophe by regulating his emotion and keeping calm during a highly dangerous situation. The way he did this was by using logic and objectivity to evaluate the impact of his decisions on the probability of preventing disaster. The astronaut was able to detach emotion from his decision making, removing fear from his thought process to make a series of lightning fast, correct decisions to prevent the rocket from crashing. This story made me think and reflect on the decision-making process in sport and how elite sports performers control their emotions during periods of heightened arousal. How were some able to think with such clarity when others crumbled?
I am not ashamed to admit that I have spent the vast majority of my adult life blissfully unaware of the impact of emotion on my decision making and the choices I have made. Like most people, I am guilty of instigating arguments when perhaps an argumentative response wasn’t the most logical and rational way to reach a desirable outcome. I have reacted poorly and irrationally to situations which has affected my ability to think clearly. On the contrary, my decision making has also been influenced by emotions of love, affection and admiration for family, friends and colleagues to do or say things that I might not have done had I been aware that emotion was the dominating force in my decisions I now find myself asking the question of why? Why have I made so many decisions during my life which on reflection I would now consider as being irrational and not informed by objective thinking? Would my life be different had I been able to recognise the impact emotion was having on my decision making? Would I be more successful? Would I have better relationships? Would I be happier? And finally, I find myself asking myself about how my performance as an athlete or coach might have been different had I been aware earlier in my life that It might be possible to regulate mine and players emotional impulses both on and off the pitch.
To understand why emotion seemed to dominate human decision making I had to find out more about the history of human emotional evolution. In David Goleman’s book “emotional regulation – Why it can matter more than IQ” he explains how during the early phases of human existence homo sapiens relied on a primitive decision-making framework due to their simple lifestyle. Human survival depended solely on the ability to eat and avoid being eaten and the emotional response of fight or flight influenced our response to the many different threats to our existence. This instinct is triggered by the limbic part of the brain which was the first part of the brain to be developed during human evolution. This is the part of the brain that Professor Steven Peters refers to as “The Chimp” in his award winning book “The Chimp Paradox” and is the part of our brain which is responsible for emotion among other involuntary functions. As human life has become more complex, humans have had to become more rational to form relationships, interact with others and make sense of the ever-changing and increasingly more complicated world around them. As a result of the gradual shift in environment over time the brain evolved and the thinking part of the brain developed, allowing humans to thrive in a more fast-moving complex world. This extremely simple account of how the brain has evolved goes some way to explain why emotion so often overpowers rationality. Too put it simply, emotion was there long before thought and remains the dominant response in human decision making despite modern day life demanding more rational thinking than “fight or flight”.
I then started to think about how emotion influences performers and how it manifests itself in elite performance. It is obvious that the majority of elite performers require sufficient emotional arousal to reach levels of high performance and draw on a wide range of emotions throughout their performance. Watching Andy Murray move through a spectrum of emotions during each match at Wimbledon has become a summer tradition in tennis fan’s living rooms across the country! Elite performers from all sports appear to draw on positive and negative emotions visibly when watching them perform. Some appear to thrive on anger or frustration to spur them on whilst others use positive emotions such as trust or joy in playing to harness confidence. Elite games players high in trust and self-confidence can make games look easy by executing correct decision after correct decision, time and time again during performance. Same can be said for throwers, who appear to draw on anger to help them unleash mighty throws during Olympic or World Championship finals. From the outside it appears that heightened arousal levels or emotion and elite performance are synonymous and critical for world beating performances. But is this ability to harness, utilise or regulate emotion innate or is this a trained quality developed over a sustained period of time?
It is easy to reflect on the obvious examples from elite sport. But what about smaller, micro examples that happen within matches or tournaments from amateur sport which affect decision making? Immediately I think of examples when athletes have been overwhelmed by emotion which has led to irrational decisions. Why do aggrieved hockey players continue to react angrily to bad umpiring decisions? If they were to think objectively around this, they would arrive at the conclusion that there is limited chance of the decisions being overturned and that there is a risk of a temporary suspension based on previous experience. Objectively, the correct decision is to accept, forget and focus on the next phase of the game however this is often not the choice players make. Why is this? Is it ego? Is it lack of clarity due to over arousal? Or is it a conscious decision?
What about the golfer who is so angry at a previous poor shot that they are unable to execute the next delicate chip or putt required to save par. If this player was able to think objectively, they would know that their previous bad shot has no bearing on their ability to perform the next shot. Why is it then that so many amateur players are unable to regulate their anger or disappointment to give them clarity during their preparation for their next shot? What if we as coaches could prepare these players better to recognise when emotion is influencing their performance negatively and help them to make better, rational, objective decisions during performance?
It is unquestionable that performers at the top of their game have an ability to utilise emotion positively and are able to regulate their arousal levels during performance. What I am interested in is the acquisition of this trait. Is this innate or is this a learnt trait acquired over time through a combination of training and competitive experience? I accept that emotional control is influenced by a wide variety of factors such as personality and culture, however my experience in coaching tells me that there are things a coach can do in their environment design to help make athletes more aware of how their emotions influence their actions, decisions and interactions. I believe it is possible to do this by incorporating some of the following strategies into a training programme.
- Ask players how they were feeling during specific moments of the game as well as what they were thinking. The ability to create an emotional framework which players can draw on during reflection will help them to establish when emotion took over and their decision making wasn’t informed by objectivity or logic.
- Create scenarios or situations during training which evoke certain emotions. For example, it might be possible to umpire a player poorly or excessively loosely to simulate feelings of frustration or joy and happiness. This then provides a starting point for reflection during feedback sessions or breaks in play to challenge players on how they were feeling.
- Practise regulating emotion. Just like any complex technical skill requires practise; so does emotional regulation. Experiment with different levels of stretch through constraints and individual challenges to make players uncomfortable. Without putting our athletes in situations where emotion is influencing our decisions we cannot expect them to make correct decisions when they experience emotional pressure in competitive situations.
- Reward positive emotional regulation during training through praise. When a player doesn’t react to a poorly timed tackle or is able to execute a highly technical skill during a period of obvious stress ensure to let the athlete know that you were impressed by how they handled the situation. This provides a positive experience for athletes to draw on during competition and another opportunity for reflection during the debrief.
- Another strategy could be the use of cue phrases, in training and formal competition, to remind the athlete about the task in hand rather than the sense of emotion during competition. For example, a hockey player might say “get low” to themselves repeatedly during a defensive phase to distract their mind away from their emotion and back to the technical requirements for the scenario. This helps to decouple emotion from the decision making process and provide clarity in the moment. These phrases should be developed during training and practised so that the athlete has a positive experience of using this strategy.
- Understand how your players use emotion. Every player in your squad or coaching set up comes from a different cultural context with different expectations on how emotion is displayed and therefore all have different emotional thresholds. Look for different signs in your athletes for when they need you to intervene and record them. Learn them and know your players as well as you can. Different athletes will require different interventions, and this definitely isn’t a one size fits all solution!
From my observations on emotion it is clear that emotion affects us all and that emotion is needed to obtain high performance. It is also clear that high performers are able to harness or utilise their emotion better than less skilled performers to retain focused in highly pressurised situations. As coaches we have a responsibility to provide opportunities for our players to develop their ability to utilise a wide range of emotions to ensure clarity in their decision making. The more prepared our athletes are, the more likely they are to make good decisions when it really matters.
How emotion is displayed is dependent on the culture of individual environments and varies greatly dependant on the emphasis placed on emotion by coaches. The challenge for us is to be cultural architects of environments where emotion is channelled positively, and players are aware of the impact of their actions. This way we will prepare our athletes for life beyond our environments and will equip them with skills to flourish in a logical, rational and objective way.
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