Bounce

by Matthew Syed

they eat food like it is fuel.

‘That’s fine,’ he says as his student hits a forehand long. ‘You are on the right track. It’s not the mistakes; it’s how you respond to them.’

‘Every endeavour pursued with passion produces a successful outcome regardless of the result. For it is not about winning or losing – rather, the effort put forth in producing the outcome. The best way to predict the future is to create it – therefore, we believe we have the best training methods to help each athlete achieve their dreams and goals and ultimately reach their ability level in the arena of sports and life.’

left to their own devices, children will eventually settle back into the default mindset that pre-dated the praise.

They may arrive thinking they can cruise their way to success, but they quickly learn that nobody has got anywhere in life without working hard, by showing tremendous discipline, and by taking responsibility for their actions. That is what ultimately separates the best from the rest.’

‘Doing well was so important to them that they felt compelled to distort their performance in order to impress unknown peers,’

Enron recruited big talent, mostly people with fancy degrees, which is not in itself bad. It paid them big money, which is not that terrible. But by putting complete faith in talent, Enron did a fatal thing: it created a culture that worshipped talent, thereby forcing its employees to look and act extraordinarily talented. Basically, it forced them into the fixed mindset. And we know a lot about that. We know that people with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.

(Why should I risk losing the talent label by losing to inferior opponents?);

It is also necessary to translate one’s abilities into peak performance in the cauldron of competition and with one’s livelihood, or at least one’s ego, on the line. This, it turns out, is a strangely difficult art to master, and one that often separates the best from the rest.

capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective.

All that matters is that the patient believes.

it could be argued that religion is the ultimate placebo.

And it does not matter if your particular God is real or not (in the same way that it does not matter if a sugar pill has genuine pharmacological properties or not), so long as your belief is sincere.

If Murray is up against, say, Rafael Nadal on clay, he should (on mathematical grounds) believe he is going to lose. But Murray knows that doubt is a perilous thing when walking on to a tennis court.

‘I am now convinced that if you expect the best, you are given some strange kind of power to create the conditions that produce the desired results.’

in an exaggerated belief in the efficacy of the self; to remove uncertainty by building conviction in one’s capacity to achieve.

‘Doubt is the fundamental cause of error in sport,’

when addressing a ten-foot putt, you might remember the action of simply picking up a ball out of the hole.

Trinko Keen, sitting on the floor, his head in his hands, his mind so deep in concentration he didn’t even hear my approach.

Inhale, relax; inhaaale relaaax; inhaaaaaale…relaaaaaaaax.

To win, one must surgically remove doubt – rational and irrational – from the mind. That is how the placebo effect operates.

As Arsène Wenger, one of the most successful football managers of recent times, put it: ‘To perform to your maximum you have to teach yourself to believe with an intensity that goes way beyond logical justification. No top performer has lacked this capacity for irrational optimism; no sportsman has played to his potential without the ability to remove doubt from his mind.’

This ability to instil belief in others is a vital facet of leadership

Could it be that his nearest challengers, infected by the world number one’s sense of assurance, find it difficult to sustain theirs? It often looks that way.

figured if I didn’t have the physical gifts, I could challenge them on a mental level, be tougher and out-think them.’

To put it another way, top sportsmen have learned to filter out unwanted evidence in order to sustain exaggerated beliefs in their own abilities.

As Arsène Wenger, the widely admired manager of Arsenal football club, put it: ‘Unless you have the ability to manipulate your beliefs over the performance cycle, it is difficult to perform well at anything, sport or otherwise.’

So what Gallwey is really saying is that a successful golfer must attempt to create subjective certainty in his own mind that he will make the putt while simultaneously playing it at such a pace that acknowledges the possibility he might miss; he must execute a shot that is certain to drop in a way that concedes the possibility of failure.

‘You have to be very calculating in selecting the right shot,’ he said. ‘You have to make a decision based upon a realistic assessment of your own weaknesses and the scope for failure. But once you have committed to your decision, you have to flick the mental switch and execute the shot as if there was never any doubt that you would nail it.’

We accentuate the positives, suppress the negatives, block out the traumas, create mini narratives about our lives and loves that, on honest reflection, have little basis in reality; we do this not merely to win, but to survive.

yet it was if I had regressed to the time when I was a beginner.

As my coach put it with brutal and characteristic honesty: ‘It is simple, Matthew,’ he said. ‘You choked.’

failure. Sometimes, a lull in form just happens by chance.

it only ever occurs under conditions of severe pressure, often when a sportsman is confronting a career-defining moment. It hardly needs stating that this is precisely the time when you would least want to choke; when you are striving hardest for top performance; when playing well matters most.

And second, it frees up attention to focus on higher-level aspects of the skill such as tactics and strategy.

Choking is a problem of psychological reversion: the flipping from a brain system used by experts to one used by novices.

without choking. ‘Just do it,’ as the Nike commercial puts it.

the key psychological skill for someone with a tendency to choke is to ditch that belief in the minutes before competition and to replace it with the belief that the race does not really matter.

I had learned the art of ‘playing as if it means nothing when it means everything’.

If goal fulfilment induced indefinite periods of contentment, we would be robbed of all future motivation.

experts are better at extracting information from what is going on around them,

What this shows is that attention is a resource with severe capacity limitations.

Most of us have roughly the same amount of bandwidth available for conscious processing, but experts, by automating perceptual and motor programmes, are able to create spare capacity.

This means that he has plenty of available attention with which to think strategically and to deal with looming emergencies, such as a sudden switch in tactics from his opponent. It is often the difference between success and failure.

Success would be determined not by ability and hard work but by a willingness to trade future life expec-tancy for present glory.

The performance seems less real, less one’s own, less worthy of our admiration.

He invariably refers to Krause as ‘my wife’, as though he has long wished to use those words and has yet to exhaust the novelty factor.

The problem for the racial scientist is his yearning to generalize.