Skills

Skills? Sounds like a terribly physical trait to talk about when we’re in the Mind Games section now doesn’t it! Well working on your skill level is what is going to be discussed in this edition of Mind Games for one MAJOR reason; your level of proficiency at your given discipline/sport is what gives you the confidence to quieten your mind and trust your ability to get the job done.

Let’s look at elite sport as the example. Golfers are always on the driving range, not necessarily to improve their swing but to do reps. Tennis players during tournament time are really only just playing certain shots in training, perfecting technique. The kicker in rugby spends time every training session practicing the same set shots. Why do they do this you may ask, they are already extremely good at them, they’re not going to get better? True but they aren’t doing it to get better they are doing it to keep their confidence levels so high at that skill that they KNOW it will work when it matters. Thus, on the whole, training for them is not totally about finding new shots for the arsenal but becoming so proficient at their current arsenal that they know they will work when the nerves hit. Training is reps, very much along the line of the philosophy of Zen in the Art of Archery.

As a beach volleyballer I can cite this with what I’ve seen (and experienced) from our current tour. I had my best result ever on the National circuit in Round One this year where we placed third. In the pre season preceding the tour all my training was on reps and fitness, not game play at all. This is the first time I tried that approach. When it came to actually playing it was amazing how much I trusted the shots I needed to implement when it came to doing them. There wasn’t the normal doubt that had previously preceded them. There were still nerves, and there always will be. But the underlying confidence I had in my own skill level got me through those nerves as I knew all I had to do was hit the ball like I had thousands of times at training. Sure enough it worked.

Again from experience it is definitely apparent that your skill level deteriorates as you let nerves/pressure take a hold of you. The only other real reason for this to happen is fatigue (thus the fitness training). That is why you always play so well against teams that you perceive to be of a lower standard; they can’t apply the pressure needed to make you make mistakes. Yet as soon as you play a team of equal or higher perceived skill your own game generally can drop if you don’t believe your skill level is good enough. I witnessed this in the Beach Volleyball World Tour at the highest level. Some teams played worse as the tournament went on; why, because in their own mind the stakes grew, and as such they let the nerves/pressure take over and then stopped performing the skills as fluently as they had before.

We’ve talked about different mental approaches to go into the battlefield in previous articles to help combat these things but, at the end of the day, the thing you need to do the most is the hard work, those hours and hours of reps! If you know you’re the best through practical application rather than by trying to mind warp yourself then you will not break down easily when it come to crunch time. Why? Because the sub conscious will know what to do rather than the conscious trying to trick it into believing it knows what to do.

So the message from this article is simple. No matter what the discipline you are training for is, there is no substitute for doing reps. Do not believe you have ever mastered something, you haven’t. Do not believe there is a fast way to achieving something, there isn’t. You might get some short-term success but eventually the doubt will creep in. That is where you need to believe in your skill set. You see it all the time in elite sport, one hit wonders per se. The people that are at the top though for long periods of time (Vijay Singh for example) are the ones that go out and have the discipline to rep. Your path to enlightenment in your sport is always a slow process, the sooner you accept that, the sooner you will be walking it! Doing the work creates the trust in your ability, which fosters the confidence to be the best. That confidence is what leads to The Zone and the longer you’re in it the further you’ll go.