Full text of sports psychologist Dr. Sean Richardson’s talk: Mental Toughness: Think Differently about Your World at TEDxVictoria conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Sean Richardson – Sports psychologist
Good morning!
Last Tuesday I was sitting at Starbucks and I was drinking a soy decaf non-fat vegan latte. Yeah, I know, it’s a recent diet change.
I was procrastinating from doing some important work. A headline in The Globe Mail caught my attention. It said ‘Wait! Do nothing.’
And it was an article about how the medical system and it fuels our incessant demand for instant gratification when we’re sick, with what it terms ‘over treatment’ – unnecessary tests and prescriptions for minor ailments – all to create a sense that at least something is being done.
You know that feeling when you’ve had the flu, and you’re bogged down. The demand to do something can be almost overwhelming. It’s like a drug addict going through withdrawal and you know just anything to get some relief.
How many people have had a nasty flu in the last year? Yeah. Maybe there’s been something worse or maybe someone you care about is facing a deadly disease.
My father-in-law is dying of cancer and you know isn’t there anything that you would do just something to make a change and quickly.
But what if there is an intervention? What is if there isn’t a prescription that can make a difference? What if the doctors don’t know the answer?
Or, what if the answer they have could do more harm than good? Do you still go ahead with it, despite the negative consequences?
According to the article, there is a growing number of physicians and academics who are advocating the practice of nothing! Being patient. Trying to understand more before taking action.
In a way it’s kind of refusing to fuel that demand for instant gratification. Hippocrates, he pre-empted this 2500 years ago when he said:
‘To do nothing sometimes is a good remedy!’
– Hippocrates
However, being a PhD in Performance Psychology, I can tell you that doing nothing your brain is not going to like it. Uncertainty isn’t going to make it comfortable, especially where survival and health are concerned.
You see, at a neural level uncertainty and inaction are counter-instinctual. We are hard-wired to work out and respond to threats to our survival as quickly as possible.
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That hardwiring is in the limbic system in our brain. It’s home to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which releases adrenaline and noradrenaline, in response to a perceived threat. It prepares you for violent physical action. Most of us know this as ‘fight-or-flight’.
The toned down version of fight-or-flight is a strong anxiety, coupled with a compulsion to relieve the anxiety. And you know that’s a demand for instant gratification – remove the fear now.
The fight-or-flight is actually pretty useful. If I’m standing on a road and a car is hurling towards me at 100 miles an hour, fight-or-flight – violent, muscular action – good, very good.
Now don’t get me wrong. You know in the game of life or death, failure is not an option. Do whatever you can to survive right now, because in the next moment once you’re still alive, you can figure out how to deal with the side effects of your chosen course of action.
But the thing is an average day in North America, how many of us face a real threat to survival for which you really need fight or flight…? Aside from you know your annual get-together with the in-laws.
You know most of the time we only face threats to our ego. ‘Did you just say that I’m stupid?’
How many people have been up on a stage like this? How helpful is anxiety to public speaking? It begs the question: do we have the most evolved piece of neural technology to really deal with the challenges of the modern world we live in?
I believe that now we live in a world where we have outpaced the evolution of our brain, of a significant part of our brain, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is flawed, if not dysfunctional in facing and making decisions in most of modernized life.
Fortunately, nature or God or whatever you believe in has provided us with an upgrade. It’s the neocortex, and it has the capability to adapt and change, to override the limbic system when that’s not serving its user.
So how can you use your neocortex?
My advice is make a choice! And it’s to work with your feelings not against them, validate your emotions. They’re there for a reason.
Sometimes you need to survive. Instant gratification is good, when you’re dying in starvation. But this is not about being a slave to feelings. Like a bad investor to a short-term market change.
Listen to the strong emotions with discernment and decide ‘Is this about survival or about willpower?’ And take action accordingly.
So what does all this stuff about delay of gratification have to do with, what I usually talk about with is ‘mental toughness and high performance’. I work with professional athletes and business people.
I’ve just explained that to the brain, to the survival brain, failure is not an option. Yet what I’ve observed in my work is that accepting failure, being okay with not getting the result you want, right now, is one of the best, best success strategies. It’s very challenging and it’s going to take some mental toughness to respond effectively.
To paraphrase one of my favorite athlete statements of all time – Michael Jordan said,
‘In my career, I’ve missed over 9000 shots. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and I’ve missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed. I can accept failure. I just can’t accept not trying!’
Do you know how tough that is to do, to accept failure?
Think about it for a moment. How good are you accepting failure?
And how’s that going in your business, you know losing profits on your sports team? How about those Canucks? Oops! Don’t put that one online.
Your family, conflict, your health and fitness. You know the thing about failure is when you get ruled by it, it’ll tighten you up. You play it safe and you make decisions that limit you and keep you small and stop you from growing.
I worked with a professional Australian football team for five years. Our first year it was a win at all costs – gotta achieve the result – ‘Win-or-else!’ kind of attitude.
And the problem is in that first season we were losing most of the time. Halfway through the season, however, we changed our focus from results to actions. We said it’s not about whether we win or lose; it’s just what we do right! Let’s do it 100% with real effort. It worked!
In 2007, we were almost left on the ladder. In 2009 we went on to become the best defensive team in the history of the sport. Lost only two games all season.
But how can you create that effective response to failure?
Fortunately, science has published some really great research that helps us to apply what Michael Jordan figured out intuitively.
So first let’s look at the delay of gratification. The capacity to delay gratification is one of the best predictors of success in life. They do this great research with kids, where they bring a kid into the lab and they show him a bowl with his favorite candy in it.
And they say, ‘You know, we’re going to leave and you can eat the candy, if you want to when we leave. But if you don’t we’re going to come back and give you a much bigger bowl of candy!’
And then they walk out of the room and they stand and look through the two-way mirror. They flick on the camera, they flick on the stopwatch, and they wait to see how long it takes the kid to crack.
It turns out that the kids who can delay the longest they go on to have the most success in high school. That capacity to delay gratification is a better predictor of success in life than intelligence, than hours spent studying in school attendance record.
Why? Well it’s two-fold.
First of all they don’t get hung up on a result. If they fail a test persist. Because they see the bigger goal.
And then second of all, well when it’s schoolwork vs. play, prioritize schoolwork. Instant gratification put it aside.
We have to learn to tune out to the compulsion. Instant gratification, it’s way, way easier; delay of gratification is tough, mentally tough.
So my suggestion for this one is keep your eye on the big picture. It’s hard to do because when there’s no immediate reward for your patience, your hard work, your effort, you have to be satisfied for a long time, just with knowing that your effort on its own is something to celebrate.
You know if you’re a leader of people, get them to focus on their actions, not on the results. I’m not saying that that results don’t matter – they do, they do to me. I love winning, I love sport.
But you can be results-driven and action-focused.
So it’s great to understand the concept of delay of gratification. But you might find you can’t just flick a switch because something’s already been programmed into the system.
It’s the implicit belief that your capabilities are more or less fixed from birth. You know have you ever thought, ‘I wish I had, I was stronger; I was smarter; I was faster; I was more patient! Had different genetics.’
When you’re in that mindset you know that your capability is predetermined and limited, your survival brain is going to say, ‘If I don’t think I’m going to succeed, I’m not going to put any effort in!’
Not very successful.
The good news is that Carol Dweck, a Professor from Stanford (a lot of people have heard of these days) has demonstrated over the last 25 years that,
‘Success in persisting the facing of failure is less about natural ability, and more about a can-do attitude!’
She called it a ‘Growth mindset’, which is the belief that effort is what creates success, that results are a measure of current competency, which is really a changeable behavioral thing. And that failure is really an opportunity to grow.
And that’s in contrast to what she calls ‘Fixed Mindset’ – the belief that success is a result of stable traits, and results themselves are unchangeable. And they show on a measure of immutable ability and that failure is likely an indicator to give up.
And her research also started with kids. She would give kids puzzles – four puzzles, three of them unsolvable and then lets them get frustrated for a while. You kind of get the feeling that psychology research and cruelty to children?
So the kids get frustrated, then you give them a break, and then you come back and you say, ‘Well, you can play again with some puzzles, choose from the previous four.’
The kids who believed that the previous results were determined by effort, they actually go on and choose one of the unsolved puzzles, to keep going with it.
The kids, who believed that their previous results were determined by ability, choose the one that they’d already solved. A sort of helpless, kind of complacent; perhaps you know need to feed a fragile ego.
So if you believe that effort is the key, you’re going to see failure as a challenge. If you believe that ability is the key, you’re going to give up, when you fail.
My way of interpreting the growth mindset for high performance is to say fail going 100%. Be okay with failure, as long as you do everything you can to succeed.
You get excited by this stuff? I do, I do, because it puts me in the driver’s seat. I get to choose I can get better. You don’t need to, though.
You could learn to master your emotions, you could change your mindset, if you want to. But it’s not easy. And this is where mental toughness comes in.
You know you’re going to have to evolve rapidly. You’re going to have to make the decisions that are harder to make and act on them.
Let’s all pause for a moment.
What would be possible if humans could learn to delay gratification, effectively?
To accept failure with equanimity. The same time as seeing themselves and others as people with extraordinary potential. A brilliance within just waiting to be activated by effort and persistence.
Could this not build healthier families, if children could grow up understanding not judging their emotional lives?
If they were encouraged by their loved ones to accept the compulsive feelings are totally normal. They don’t have to satisfy that need for instant gratification.
If they learn that the personal characteristics and focused on those ones that that they were in control of like the quality of their effort and the persistence mindset. They might just grow up with an unshakable confidence simply in who they are, not what happens, no matter what happens around them.
Might not this help ward off future recession?
If the big bankers hunkering after that immediate gratification of massive bonuses from handing out multitudes of high-risk mortgages, to equally impulsive investors… What if they were able to see the impact of their actions and see that they could still have succeeded maybe more slowly but with a sustainable future?
With a growth mindset, a little bit more self-esteem, we may have averted the subprime mortgage crisis.
Might this not be the secret to world peace? If oppressed people could see beyond their current limbic demands for the removal of pain and suffering, past the insecurities born out of difficult lives… So they fostered genuine self-worth amidst their traumatic worlds!
Maybe the psychopathic dictators would not be so effective at manipulating them with the fears and the promise of pain relief from going to war against equally fearful people.
Am I stretching this a bit? I hope so.
So I’ve shared three key mindsets and I will close with them.
Work with your feelings, not against them
Keep your eye on the big picture, and
Fail going 100%
And most of all, get tough because mental toughness will give you power in the face of anything that life throws at you!
