In a few weeks, millions of us will be glued to our TV sets, watching the best athletes in the world ski, skate and slide their way into Olympic history in Turin, Italy.
We will certainly be dazzled, as always, by the sheer physical skill of these folks who have pushed their bodies so hard for so many hours a day, year after year.
But just as important as physical training, say those who study elite athletes, is the mental training that goes into a peak performance. If two athletes are equally fit, the edge often goes to the one with the better emotional skills — not a do-or-die focus on winning, but a set of habits that all of us can learn, including positive “self talk,” maintaining an energy level that is neither too excited nor too relaxed and, perhaps most important, a Buddhist-like ability to focus totally on the moment at hand, on this particular breath, stroke, turn.
So useful are these techniques that sport psychologists say their coaching is increasingly being sought by surgeons, trial lawyers, musicians, public speakers, business people and others who need to perform at their best in high stress situations. Partly because of this increasing demand, the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology, the major professional organization in the field, has grown from a few hundred 20 years ago to 1,300 today, said the group’s president, Craig Wrisberg, a sport psychology professor and mental training consultant at the University of Tennessee.
Nowhere has the teaching of mental skills become a finer art than at West Point, where Nate Zinsser, director of the performance enhancement program, runs a sophisticated lab that is the envy of sports teams around the country. He’s building better athletes (Army must beat Navy) and also better soldiers, who have imagined every possible thing that might go wrong with a military operation. “You don’t want to experience anything for the first time in combat.”
Among other things, Zinsser has what he described as “very cool” ergonomically designed chairs in which cadets sit and, through biofeedback techniques like monitoring heart rate, learn to relax and ignore potential distractions — such as crowd noise — piped in through speakers.
“The process of training and learning to compete competently is a much more valuable lifetime lesson than simply the accomplishment of having won something on a given day,” said Zinsser. The key, for Olympic athletes as well as weekend warriors, is to learn to juggle two contrasting disciplines. “You have to be almost an obsessive-compulsive workaholic to get yourself ready to be good. But then you have to be this relaxed, Buddha-like Zen master, which allows all the stuff you have been training to come out.”
In other words, you train your body, especially your nervous system, so that you can automatically do your best on every step, jump, start or landing. Then you get your mind and its anxious chatter out of the way, go on “autopilot” and let your body “fly itself,” said Jim Bauman, a sport psychologist for the US Olympic Committee who has been working this year with the men’s alpine ski team.
Naturally, you can’t will yourself into the zone. But you can set the stage for it, in an athletic event, public speaking or any potentially stressful performance. Here’s how: