Read the next excerpt from Jayne Storey’s forthcoming book, The Athlete’s Ascent. Chapter Two; Overcoming Performance Anxiety
Here are a few of the praise quotes coming in for The Athlete’s Ascent.
“When I read this book, I wanted to get started right away. Jayne’s Performance Practice teaches you the fundamentals of creating flow to enhance the quality of your sporting movements. The book is structured in such a way that it provides you with the right keys and choices to perform your best under pressure. The why and how is explained very clearly, which further invites you to practice her methods well. I highly recommend it for every player who takes their golf and sports performance seriously. This work is special, and for most athletes, it’s the missing key to achieving the best results!” – Patsy van Baarle-van Rompaey, PGA Advanced Professional, Master Performance Coach, Elite horse rider (Belgian title, early 80’s), Belgian National elite surfer (1990 -2001)
“To achieve high performance and enter ‘the zone’ or ‘flow-state’, the ability to control the biochemistry, and inhabit the present moment, are the biggest challenges facing athletes, as they require a level of attention that goes beyond the traditional mental game. Jayne’s extensive work in this area is unique. In her latest book, she not only explains for our better understanding how the brain-body chemistry affects movement in sport, but she offers a solid practice based on many years of her own personal experience. Once adhered to, her methods will bring you the ‘Gold’, but you need to dive in, and do the training in order to find out for yourself! – Andy Knibbs, Tennis Coach and Inner Game Global Facilitator
“To perform at our highest level, we need a more holistic approach. The Athlete’s Ascent is a refreshing journey that will help readers get out of their own way when they face the most intense pressure. Jayne does a wonderful job exploring concepts that have helped humans perform for thousands of years. If you want to take your game to the next level, this book should be part of your toolkit.” -Jon Sherman, author of The Four Foundations of Golf
~ Begin excerpt ~
Chapter Two: Overcoming Performance Anxiety
In a recent survey of my client and readers, I asked for feedback on the question ‘What does pressure feel like?’ Here are some of the anonymised responses:
‘Knowing how good a player I am, and then not performing at that level in a tournament, sparks off memories of hurt and letting myself down, which makes me upset and can turn into anger, anxiety and then a collapse.’
‘I have yet to succeed when performing short shots around the green in competitive golf as well as I can when playing on my own. The presence of other players seems to affect my ability and my confidence.’
‘I often get a nervous tingling in my gut in competitive situations and, tending to err towards the negative, it honestly feels more like anxiety than excitement.’
‘When I’m under pressure my preparation gets too quick.’
‘I can’t help visualising a negative outcome, which leads me to become very self-conscious.’
‘I notice my body tightens, my swing feels weird, and I no longer trust myself.’
‘My pressure begins in my stomach. It is in knots, feeling uneasy. My breathing starts to shallow, the tension in my upper body starts to increase and I become very inward-looking to the point that I am completely unaware of my surroundings and the people I am playing with.’
‘I become very focused on trying not to do something wrong. There is a loss of freedom in my movements and I can freeze over the ball with way too many thoughts in my head.’
‘Generally, I just overthink and lose my commitment to making the shot.’
‘For me, pressure stems from a fear of failure, and I believe that fear sends a message to my mind and body that I’m under attack. My heart rate goes up, my breathing is housed in the upper chest, and I can feel some numbing in my hands.’
‘In practice, I can hit some great shots but when I’m in the game I find myself thinking, trying, worrying, remembering and generally feeling uptight, and I can’t produce anywhere near the quality of shot-making that I know I’m capable of.’
‘When the pressure’s on, my mind tends to race ahead, and I can overlook simple tasks and end up making poor decisions.’
Interesting, isn’t it, that this feedback is all strikingly similar even though we’ve heard from golfers, tennis, billiard, hockey and badminton players at both the club and elite level?
The experience or feeling of pressure falls into three main categories:
- Nerves, stress and anxiety.
- Mental interference.
- An inability to move the body freely.
At first glance these issues all seem to stem from negative thoughts, images and mental projections about what’s going to happen, or rather what could happen, in the future, whether that’s your opening tee shot in a competition two weeks hence or the penalty shoot-out about to take place with you as one of the team members chosen to score.
As we’ll soon see, this is simply the mind’s reaction to a change in the biochemistry, which in turn is affected by a change in the breathing and a subsequent widening of the mind–body disconnection.
My experience of being in the moment
Some time ago I had an interesting experience which reaffirmed to me, even after decades of training, that the only way to prepare for a moment of pressure is to be in the moment you’re in now.
With a myriad of mindfulness apps and YouTube videos telling us all about presence and being in the moment, we are mistakenly led to believe that awakening to this state is as easy as ordering a pizza delivery on our phone.
Once you unplug, however, from the mainstream drivel and get serious about this work, you’ll see that it requires a consistent effort and a genuine struggle with yourself to strengthen the attention which is usually squandered on external, and often meaningless, distractions. It is only by repetitive daily training (known in the Eastern world as Abhyasa) that we can come anywhere close to what’s required.
My experience was this.
As you may know, I’ve been practising Tai Chi for over three decades and alongside this I’ve been doing regular daily Zen meditation and am considered by many to be the creator of one of the world’s leading methodologies for helping athletes perform under pressure.
Many times, and over many years, I have trained on my own but I’ve also had the guidance of some very experienced teachers who have enabled me more than once to notice the stark difference between thinking and being.
Some of my students have also had to learn this subtle but crucial lesson. Thinking about your breathing in a pressure situation is of no help at all and only adds to the clutter in the mind. If you meditate regularly, for instance by sitting quietly and following the breath each day for 20 minutes, when you’re in a tournament and feeling anxious, you’re more able to slow down and deepen the breathing such that it calms the biochemistry, quietens the Worry Brain and allows your movement to flow.
One evening I received a phone call asking if I would present a short Tai Chi demonstration and lesson to a group in London the next day, as part of a formal day of meditation practice.
I knew this wasn’t a request I could politely refuse and I also knew plans on such days can change according to the engagement of the participants and that I could be called upon to start the session when I was the least prepared.
When I put the phone down, I spent quite some time fretting about not being late, as it was going to be an early start, and thinking about how I was going to introduce the session, which moves from the Tai Chi form I was going to show the group, how long I was going to spend on each move, what I was going to say about the benefits and the martial applications, how I was going to wrap up the session and so on.
The trouble with being considered an expert – as many of my PGA teaching pro students will attest to – is that it piles pressure on top of pressure. In the situation I was going to face the next day, I knew that even my decades of experience were nothing in comparison to the formidable presence of older, wiser teachers.
It seemed there was no way I could adequately prepare to demonstrate and share my understanding of Tai Chi in such circumstances, although in all other situations I’m more than confident about my knowledge and abilities.
What came to me that evening was that the only way I could ready myself for what had been asked of me was to remember my practice; instead of thinking about it as a future event, taking place sometime the following day, to try and be right there where I was at that moment, sitting on the sofa, in my body and in my breathing, rather than letting my mind take over and imagining all sorts of possible scenarios and outcomes.
You’ll realise as we go through this book together that you must continually strive to follow your breath, feel your feet on the ground and let your mind rest in the centre of gravity. It’s not a given and trying once or twice won’t suffice.
The following morning while getting showered and ready, while driving to the venue, having breakfast with the group and so forth and even during the actual presentation itself, my attention kept coming and going from the present to the imagined and the fear of what might happen. As such I had to continually remember to anchor myself in the moment and not let my thoughts get the better of me.
Controlling your biochemistry
Let’s examine what performance anxiety (often called stage fright) actually is. When you worry about something, your mind becomes even more dominant than it usually is, but that’s only part of the picture, as we’ll soon see. Simply put, it’s the biochemistry which triggers feelings of anxiety, and the ensuing negative thought patterns only serve to reinforce this as the mind seeks consistency with the state of nervousness.
Sitting at home worrying about the upcoming Tai Chi demonstration, I started to experience ‘control freak mind’ and had less and less connection to my physical self and my breathing. This caused a change in my biochemistry such that I began to feel anxious and soon started imagining the worst; however, my inner equilibrium was restored when I remembered my training, started to breathe more slowly and felt my feet on the ground.
Although it’s difficult to catch oneself and even more difficult to practice, controlling the biochemistry changes how you feel, how you think, and most importantly for athletes, how your body moves.
Here’s why.
Think of your nervous system as having three different settings: the stress response (aka fight-flight-freeze), neutral, and the relaxation response.
As a human being, you are a self-regulating organism; therefore, you unconsciously seek coherence such that if you start to feel anxious, the mind will get involved and produce one image or scenario after another to affirm why you should feel nervous.
These thoughts and mental pictures can be anything from ‘Remember when you shanked the ball on this hole’, ‘Remember how you always mess up your dismount from the high bar’ or ‘This opponent always beats me’.
The pictures in your mind correspond to the sensations of anxiety and can include fear of what others might think, the negative consequences of messing up your routine, and playing safe instead of going for the shot you want. They can also lead to poor decision-making, lack of clarity around your intention, hesitation and lack of commitment or rushing your preparation.
It becomes impossible to move naturally in this state, as the shots or routines you’ve perfected and performed so well in practice and rehearsal are nowhere to be found. There is no touch, feel or finesse; your smaller muscles and fast twitch muscles stop firing in perfect sequence; there is a distinct lack of co-ordination and all this gets compounded the harder you try and the more you think about how to perform your technique well.
Where does all this self-interference begin?
As documented in my book Breathe Golf: The Missing Link to a Winning Performance, performance anxiety, stage fright, the yips, choking and otherwise failing to perform under pressure what you can do easily when nothing’s at stake or nobody’s watching all begin with a change in the breathing. Working with your breathing will be the cornerstone of your Performance Practice, as it’s the linchpin of the whole thing.
For most people, unless they are practising meditation, Chi Kung (Qi Gong) or Yoga, the breathing pattern tends to be fairly quick and short using only the top part of the lungs. For those with some experience of these arts, or who sing or perform on stage, it can involve the diaphragm, and after more intensive practice the breathing begins to take place in the lower abdomen.
Throughout the course of your training, you’ll develop an awareness of the symbiotic relationship between your breathing and your mind, noticing that when your breathing is soft, smooth and regular and coming from lower down in your body, your mind will tend to be quiet.
You’ll begin to notice the connection between your breathing and your biochemistry and how conscious breathing into your centre reduces the sensations of stress, including nervousness, adrenaline, an increased heart rate, a nervous tummy, shaking legs and all the common signs and symptoms of anxiety which can lead to what one of my readers called the ‘collapse’.
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The Athlete’s Ascent will be published by Rethink Press on Thursday 11th April.
