Psychological Preparation
Theory of Performance Excellence 1.0 Part 2b
Reading Time: 5 minutes
What to Expect:
Strategies for good psychological preparation
How to build a performance plan
How to construct a pre-performance routine
Now that you’ve got the physical skills down and practiced with repetition, variability, and representativeness, it’s time to get your mind ready. Olympic champions universally agree you can’t skip this step, and yet this is the performance step most people gloss right over. After working hard and practicing, we tend to take psychological readiness for granted.
Having an unready mind is the single biggest factor likely to tank your performance on the big day. When you get to a performance, you should already know what you need to do physically. It’s now about getting out of your own way and letting the performance happen.
And what stops you from letting the performance happen? That inner voice that starts to bring up all the possible permutations you didn’t practice for or didn’t expect to feel. The physiological changes that derail you. The pressure from the other people in the room.
When it comes to performing, our mind can be both friend and foe. Psychological readiness is about maximizing the time our mind stays in friend mode - coaching us up, keeping us engaged, and getting out of the way.
By the time we walk to the proverbial starting line - whether we’re running an actual race, standing up to speak, selling, prepping for surgery, or something else - our minds should be squarely positioned to facilitate peak performance.
The way we do that is by:
Developing a performance plan
Practicing contingencies and performance in our mind
Making our performance day predictable
Reflecting on past successes
Developing a Performance Plan
One of the ways we can get psychologically ready is to make our performance predictable. The simplest way to do that is to come up with a plan.
A good performance plan walks through what to anticipate at different times as the event unfolds, and possible contingencies if things go haywire. This isn’t something we should overcomplicate (an unfortunate tendency for most sports coaches) but instead should focus on the most important keys during the big day. Ideally, you’ll be able to simply recall your performance plan the day of, so if you get nervous you can remind yourself of what’s coming and how you’ve prepared.
You can develop a performance plan for just about anything, and most of us do this unknowingly for the things that we anticipate will make us nervous. For example, you’re making a performance plan when you reverse engineer the timing of naps for your baby so that they’re well rested before they go to their first swim lesson. You’re performance planning when you prepare a deck with talking points for each slide. You get the idea.
The main thing to keep in mind for any performance planning is to follow the KISS principle. Too many contingencies, too many wrinkles, and too many options lead to paralysis by analysis at the moment.
A good plan is empowering and allows you to stay focused on what’s most important and what you do best. Beyond that, it should be about being able to stick to it and return to it easily. It can be that simple.
Mental Rehearsal
Some of my favorite sport psychology research demonstrates the power of imagery and mental rehearsal. My favorite study in this area showed that simply imagining yourself doing bicep curls grows your muscles and increases your strength, almost to the level of actually doing the curls. The mind can do some powerful things.
It’s no wonder then that mental rehearsal and imagery of our upcoming performances is a great way to prepare. Similarly to the bicep curl imagery, good mental rehearsal for performance strengthens our ability to execute at the moment. It’s getting our minds ready to perform.
It’s likely that the way this works is by allowing our mind to create a richer mental model of what the performance will be like. The richer the model, the better, more accurate, and thus more efficient predictions our brain issues. The more efficient the prediction, the more efficient the execution.
Good mental rehearsal involves seeing yourself in your mind’s eye delivering both the whole performance and the subcomponents of the big day. You want to make these images and rehearsals as vivid and detailed as possible. Think of each rehearsal as a mental rep. The more reps you do, the stronger you become. And, just like any workout, some rest in between reps helps us consolidate gains.
If you want to be maximally ready, imagery and mental rehearsal are the icings on the physical preparation cake.
Making Performance Day Predictable
If you’ve watched a basketball game, you’ve seen some elaborate rituals at the free-throw line. From shoulder shimmies to deep breathing, these athletes are leveraging the power of a routine to make the moment more manageable. We can take that same principle and apply it to the performance day, or any day for that matter, as a whole.
In my work, I’m a big fan of routines for several parts of the day:
Getting started - what do you first do when you wake up
Transitions - how you seamlessly move between mental spaces and tasks
Wrapping up - how you end the day and transition to life outside of work
But let’s stick with just the performance for now.
Routines are important because they create a sense of control and predictability. When we’re getting our minds ready to perform, these feelings lead to an overall sense of confidence and readiness to execute. These routines also allow us to better modulate our psychology and physiology as we progress towards the performance itself.
The best pre-performance routines (and the other routines above, for that matter) start first with the feeling state you’d like to experience. Once you have identified how you’d like to feel, you can match an activity that brings that feeling. And then, you can put those activities in order to fully curate your physiological and psychological experience.
It might look like this:
30 minutes before the performance - focused - mindfulness
10 minutes before the performance - energized - music
1 minute before the performance - controlled - breath work
This is a simple example but hopefully illustrates the point.
By putting a plan like this together, we’ve made as much of performance day as predictable as possible. As we know, better predictability leads to better performance. Not only that, it puts us squarely in a position to CHOOSE how we feel and want to feel before and during the performance.
Don’t leave anything up to chance that you don’t have to.
Reflecting on Past Success
The final step we’ll touch on for psychological readiness is reflecting on past success.
It’s rare for high performers to look back and think about the strengths they use to deliver, or what they did in preparation or performance that led to success. The focus is often on the next hurdle, which can be helpful - but when rushed, leads to missing important data.
When I help elite performers get ready, we often spend time looking backward instead of forward. We want to answer the questions: what has helped you win in the past? How do we bring that to the next performance?
Reflecting on past success allows us to identify, and subsequently leverage, our strengths.
Since peak performance is often about maximizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses, this type of reflection has the added bonus of orienting us toward the things that help us be our best when it matters most, and away from some more trivial aspects of performance that can distract us if we aren’t careful.
Reflecting like this is a step worth taking. After some regular reflection practice, you’ll be able to refine both your physical preparation and the mental preparation above to keep putting yourself in a better and better position to win.
Reflecting is the key to good learning.
With these tools in hand, you’re ready to get psychologically ready. Combine this with good physical preparation, and you’re bound to have some performance improvements.
Up next: optimizing your energy.
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