Whenever he saw fellow competitors staring for a long time at a results sheet at an event we were at, a training partner of mine would mutter ‘keep staring, they’ll change soon’.

Of course, no matter how long you stare at your results they won’t change, but nonetheless, I liked his humor because it kept reminding me that if I continued to work on what I could control the results would take care of themselves.

I took this to the extent that I’d never bother to look at a results sheet for the first few days of a competition. I had a pretty good idea of how I went each day and not ‘caring’ about the initial scores helped me to focus on the process and my own performance rather than think about the outcome in a few days time.

The challenge comes in maintaining the process-orientated focus while you’re in the middle of an event. One way to do this is, before the start and even during the event, to remind myself of a few key technique or tactical areas I know I need to work on. I do this by reviewing a half-page list of things I wanted to work on - gathered from errors made and refined over previous months.

So:
Don’t put the cart before the horse.
Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.
Focus on the process and the outcome will take care of itself.

You can get some conflicting advice with regards to how high you should set your goals. Going into my first World Championship I set a target for myself of finishing in the top 30, based on how well I finished at some regional competitions.

I ended up finishing 23rd at that Worlds and was pleased with that result as it also meant I would get a little Government funding which would help me to campaign for the next Worlds.

Later, I told that goal to our head coach at the time and he replied, somewhat gruffly, “that I needed to set my goals higher”. It was true, I did, so I set my standards higher.

After a few more years of solid training I was winning big events against the best of them, but still, I found reasons to critise my performance. And therein lies my point - to get really good at sport you have to sacrifice, expect a lot, push yourself hard and never be satisfied:
I read once that the great tennis player Ivan Lendl once celebrated a Major win with a 70km bike ride the next day.

However, after a while the ‘fun’ of this commitment and self-deprivation can wear out. And then, should you have a bad result, the fun of the sport really wears out.

So, seeing that you can’t be sure that success will keep coming your way, I took the advice to celebrate my victories - taking time to reflect on the work done to date, what that meant personally and being proud of accomplishment.

So I suggest to set your goals with imagination and passion, and while you’re doing that, have a few “stretch” goals that excite you so much that the thought of achieving them gives you butterflies. When you achieve them reward yourself!

A few weeks ago an athlete friend asked me to put together a gym program for her. She’s an Olympic rower and I don’t know a lot about strength training for rowing but I can fake it a bit. So I put a program together that I thought would target the essential things. And she loves it.

My intention isn’t to talk myself up, but to point out how good things are sometimes when they are laid out for you.

I know very well how to write a good gym program for myself and most experienced athletes could also easily develop a well-credentialed program for their sport. However, as I’ve felt myself, she was keener to follow a program that was written for her.

Using someone else’s system often intuitively feels better than using a self-created program. It’s the same sort of reason behind all the diet fads - a quick search of ‘diet systems’ reveals heaps of paid-for Google ads for Jenny Craig to Weight Watchers to NutriSystem. Sure, some people need a lot of help with this sort of thing. But a good program laid out for us means we don’t have to think about it. And if the source of the program is well-credentialed we are reassured by the positive direction that can provide.

If you’d like a fully rounded Sports Psychology program let me suggest The Way of the Champion series by Jerry Lynch.

Being happy and healthy is a good way to start any training session or competition. But most athletes know that circumstances are such that it’s not always easy to be this way.

What I find interesting are the things that work in the background, specifically, the back of your mind, that influence your overall mood and readiness for doing your sport well.

I was working with a Sports Psychologist some years back and of course the sub-text of our talks was to improve my performance. However, funnily enough, not once did we actually talk about any specifics of me playing my sport. Instead it was everything else to do with being me - what experiences I had growing up, what my parents were like, what relationships I had now and what my core beliefs and values are now.

With her help, I explored what had gone into making the person I was. She helped me resolve a few things and what that did for my training and competing was to open my mind up to my true motivations for excelling at sport. Our discussions served to take away some things that I had classed as semi-permanent distractions and gave more clarity.

The upshot was that when I’d turn up for a training session or competition I was ready because the back of my mind was on the same ground as the front.

I went for a little run this afternoon which took me past the club and the waters I spent literally thousands of hours training on. It made me think about what I thought about at the start of a training session - and a lot of the time that was how my body felt and how ready I was for the session.

I’d do a quick scan inside my body and some days I’d really feel like an athlete and the skills would come so easily. On other days I might have been fatigued from other training and things just didn’t feel right. At those times, it became important to do what I’d call a feel warm-up. This would involve going back to the basics and opening my mind up to the full set of sensations inside and outside my body. I’d feel the boat and my body as intensely as possible and after a few minutes I’d start to get the sensations I was looking for.

I got the idea from Ric Charlesworth, Aussie hockey coach (gold in ‘96 and ‘00 Olympics). He gave his players a focused hitting drill at the start of training sessions to check on their (you guessed it) focus.

Players got in pairs and started hitting the ball firmly back and forth to each other over a small distance. Ric could tell how focused they were by how close to the other player’s feet the ball ended up. The players would then move further apart, still aiming the ball between the other player’s feet.

It’s a relatively boring and simple exercise for elite hockey players. But its purpose isn’t to practice hitting, it’s to warm up the mind for hockey and encourage the perfect execution of skills.

And if practice starts perfectly it can be easier to maintain that focus throughout.

When you go about learning a new skill, the first step is just to get a concept in your mind of what it is all about. You may have already done this by seeing experienced players on tv or by a coach’s demonstration.

The next step is to have a go yourself, because no amount of watching or thinking about it will help you learn a skill in the first place.

This first stage is very interesting. Say you’re learning archery, initially you’d just pull back the bow strong without an arrow in place to get a feel for the strength and motion needed. Next, you’d put an arrow in place, pull back the bow string, and try to line up the arrow with the target.

Let’s say you let fly and somehow the arrow hits the bullseye (this actually happened to me when I was 8!). Of course you (and I) got lucky.

The key indicator of someone’s proficiency in a skill is not the outcome of the performance per se but their ability to accurately repeat the action. To get to this stage, hundreds or even thousands of repetitions are needed to burn the movement pattern in the mind.

To be an exceptional athlete, you must also learn when and how to adjust your performance slightly and correctly for the conditions (eg, wind). In some sports this can take years, especially if your learning of the skill included learning a glitch.

For example, once young tennis players have the basics of a serve learnt they should immediately start getting used to serving fast. This is because your muscles’ memory for skills is speed-specific. That is, proficiency at a very slow-speed serve does not translate well to a high speed serve. So kids should whack the ball over the net and once the whacking is going well, emphasis should be placed on accuracy.

For more take a look at Visualization Skills (MP3), Skill Acquisition in Sport: Research, Theory and Practice (book) and/or Acquisition and Performance of Sports Skills (book).

Watching the final of the Olympic Basketball competition last week reminded me of the importance of thinking the right things before executing a skill.

Whenever someone lined up for a free throw you could see they had a moment to consider the shot, specifically to cue up in their mind and body the movement pattern that they needed to execute the skill.

It’s a matter of searching within yourself for the movement pattern you’ve learnt in training and/or bringing up the sensation of the beginning of the movement or even doing some visualization of the (successful) outcome. You may need to adapt the movement to the conditions, if necessary, and then let the ‘muscles’ memory’ take over and let it happen.

To make this all work well, the cueing up of the skill should happen in extensively in training.

For more on this topic, have a look at the excellent products over at Sports Mind Skills - Free Throw Champ and Basketball Intelligym.