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March 28 - April 23, 2020
lower anxiety scores don’t automatically lead to better performance;
everyone has an Individual Zone of Optimal Functioning (IZOF), a level of anxiousness beneficial to his performance.
there’s a difference between experiencing a stressful situation and being in distress.
The real distinction between amateur competitors and professionals is how they interpret anxiety.
They recognize that they’re anxious, but they also remain confident that they’re still in control and well prepared, and that their goals are attainable. They’re stressed, but not threatened.
what’s good for your well-being is not necessarily going to be effective in a competitive context, or help you sustain the drive to achieve your goals.
Having a little doubt in the mind leads you to not underestimate your opponents, and it ensures that you truly push yourself.
The problem with all those positive images and fantasies is that you aren’t as motivated to work toward your goal because you’re taking success for granted.
“Many of them play best when they are intense, moody, or irritated. I don’t take them away from what got them there in the first place.”
What matters is not Positive Thinking vs. Negative Thinking, it’s Additive Thinking vs. Subtractive Thinking.
An additive counter-factual is, “If only I had driven toward the hoop . . . ,” while a subtractive counterfactual is like, “If only I hadn’t missed the shot . . .”
People who look back on their performance with subtractive counterfactuals perform worse the next time. Those who employ additive counterfactuals perform better over time.
additive counterfactuals trigger a problem-solving mindset.
a bit of fantasy at the outset can be productive, because it helps you envision all that you could achieve. But it takes thinking about the obstacles in your way to turn those lofty aspirations into a binding goal.
It is quite rare to find someone who performs as well or better in a competition than at practice.
Practice, it seems, doesn’t make perfect. Even “practicing perfect” doesn’t make perfect. To compete at the highest levels requires something more; it requires taking control of the body’s physiology.
Trying to compete in the threat condition is close to impossible,
they’re watching their mistakes—over and over again. They aren’t supposed to analyze and critique their technique. They’re just learning to keep the mind steady, without feeling the sense of dread at the errors they made.
People who respond with anger to a confrontation have higher emotional intelligence scores while ranking higher in life satisfaction and greater well-being.
anger only works if people believe they are in control of the situation. Again, anger is about being able to remove an obstacle that stands in your way.
It’s often when people are angry that they finally recognize what they want, and the intensity of their desire surges. Anger doesn’t cloud the picture: it clarifies it.
if you’re full of anxiety and you can’t calm down, find out what is holding you back. Then try getting angry about it. And channel that anger into doing something productive.
top player hadn’t gotten a boost in testosterone before his first match. Perhaps overconfident, his body hadn’t readied itself, and he’d lost as a result.
“I like to think of testosterone as intensity, not as aggression,”
Competitors learn to recognize a future contest, and their minds need to mark it as a salient challenge in order for the testosterone response to kick in.
If you envision yourself cruising to victory, false overconfidence fails to trigger the testosterone response.
Success in competition requires taking risks that are normally constrained by fear. This is one way testosterone works, by acting on the amygdala and dampening the fear response.
This chemical, originally assumed to make people irrational and primitive, actually helps you be more rational.
Though we often become very emotional during a competition, testosterone keeps those emotions from interfering with cognitive processing.
When an opponent breaks the rules, high-testosterone people react more strongly. Their sense of right and wrong intensifies into fury.
When someone doesn’t care that much about the outcome—regardless of gender—then testosterone doesn’t respond. Chatting up opponents, making friends with them, can defuse the testosterone response for everyone.
A savvy competitor may even take advantage of this mechanism, by knowing when to distance himself from his rivals and when intentionally to befriend opponents.
the body is producing cortisol in response to stress. It’s the body’s remedy for stress.
spikes in cortisol following an acute stressor—such as a competition—are a healthy response.
Cortisol is not stress—it is repair.
one might draw the wrong conclusion, thinking that ambulances cause car wrecks. Instead, they’ve come to help.
cortisol defuses the competitive desire. It makes you care less about the outcome.
Cortisol and testosterone regulate each other; one tries to stop the other and vice versa.
Some people think that competing is the opposite of nurturing, that fighting is the opposite of loving. But in fact one is at the core of the other, and they are forces in parallel.
We compete our hardest to protect our team. We fight hardest for those we love.
It was women who had been given testosterone who shared the pot far more often with their opponents.
The truth about testosterone is that it makes you care more that others hold you in high regard.
The more a player’s testosterone rose during the game, the higher his teamwork rating.
Testosterone and motivation are locked in a chicken-and-egg cycle. Testosterone increases motivation, but it’s equally true that motivation increases testosterone.
If you want to harness the power of testosterone—if you want to change the behavior it expresses—then change the rules of what earns social regard.
If you change the culture around high-testosterone competitive people, you’ll change what they do to earn respect.
Being on a team is a chance to belong to something greater than yourself. Even the barest suggestion of a shared identity can trigger an esprit de corps.
Mirror processing is one of the ways people on teams unconsciously influence one another through nonverbal cues.
Teams have vibes; everyone can feel when a team is gaining confidence, or when a team is turning indifferent and passive.
the National Basketball Association, great team chemistry is worth six more wins a year, above what would be predicted from players’ individual contributions.
