Replying to Psychology of skiing- by Joe Murréll - blog 2

COMPETITIONS

One of the most mentally demanding parts of skiing is when it comes to competing, as this is a time when you are expected to perform at your best. With a crowd eagerly watching and the judges examining your every move this highly demanding situation can cause anxiety for a lot of riders. Also knowing you only have two or sometimes even one chance to complete a successful run only adds more pressure to the situation. A slip or lapse in concentration could be the difference between winning and losing on the day.

Aside from all this and one of my main qualms with competing in this 2 run format, is the length of time the riders have to wait around before it is their turn to drop in. This can sometimes take hours to get underway which leaves the riders at a huge disadvantage. The waiting stage is bad news for your body as it will cool down and get less responsive; also it can be hard to keep your mind focused when you’re inactive for this amount of time. This is often when you become most anxious and nervous about what you’re going to do.

So when your name gets called and you’re standing at the top of the in-run what kind of state are you really in? Take a moment to think about it, is your body prepared and active, is you’re your mind sharp and ready, are you in the right state, physically and mentally to performing at your best?

The answer in a lot of cases is ‘no’. Without being aware, you’ll have built up a set of habits that could restrict you from performing at your best. It’s easy to see how this happens, with all these external pressures stacked on top of you the natural reaction is to feel nervous. However when anxiety sets in it can often have a negative effect on your performance.

I think it’s weird we’ve been put on this earth with incredible devices in our head, far more powerful than any computer, the problem being it didn’t come with any instruction manual and actually learning how to use it effectively requires a bit skill in itself. Hopefully this series of blogs will help with that and provide you with some essential ‘buttons to your own brain’. This stuff has had a massive effect on my life and I’m excited so be sharing it with you.

NAS (Neuro Associative Conditioning)

So, if you will, I want you to imagine the impact on your skiing if you could turn on your high-performance state at will. If you could snap into that state of readiness were your confident, strong and in control in a heartbeat. In this blog I want to talk about the science of NAS (Neuro Associative Conditioning) and specifically a term call ‘Anchoring’ which teaches you how to achieve your best psychological state of mind in seconds.

This is used by top athletes, musicians and actors and is essential in order to be resourceful in the moment. An actor must be able to commit himself to the role when the curtain goes up, not an hour before or halfway through the second act.
If you give yourself time to master these techniques I guaranty your riding will not only improve but will become a lot more consistent. So when you’re standing at the top of the in-run, you’ll be charged and confident, physically and mentally in the right frame of mind to perform at your best.

EMOTIONAL STATES

Ok so the first little bomb shell I’d like to drop is that the ONLY difference between you performing well and you performing badly is the state of mind you’re in at the time. Think about it, and this applies to any situation in life but maybe think back to two different days you’ve been riding and try and remember how you felt on those days. Re-live a memory when you were riding at your best, feeling confident and strong, where everything you tried just worked and it all came naturally. Got that, ok cool.

Now think about a day when the opposite happened, you didn’t feel yourself and you couldn’t land anything. Again take a moment to really feel how you felt on this day, if you can make a vivid picture in your head this is a good thing. Now specifically think about your different states of mind in both, think about the difference between them. Your emotional state you were in at the time ultimately was the thing that changed your performance. (That was some dam fine visualising you just did...I patronisingly approve!)

SYNAESTHESIA

So in my first blog I demonstrated how you can create physical responses in your body just by using your imagination. Just by visualising yourself eating a lemon your body reacted as if it were actually real, as you start salivating and smelling lemon (if you haven’t looked at this go back and have a quick gander) We called this process synaesthesia and we can use the same principle again here.

Essentially I’m saying if you vividly imaging a past memory when you were in a high performance state, so your body will change to be in that same state. These physical changes can include the releasing of adrenalin, increased heart rate, more acute sense of hearing and touch and sight. This emotional state activates your entire nervous system and creates an entire biochemical change is our body.

Applying this in a positive way to skiing we can first look at how to create a high performance state at will. Then we can look at ways of making them consistently available and stabilizing them in the here and now.

ANCHORS

Everyone that reads this will have a personal history that is rich in different emotional states. However to make these states consistently available when ever we feel like we need a trigger. This is some association in the present to elicit the original experience.

Our minds naturally link experiences; it is the way we give meaning to what we do. For example, a favourite piece of music might transport you back to a summer when you listened to it none stop. Maybe smelling freshly laid tarmac might magically send you back to your childhood when you first smelt it.

An anchor is anything that anchors an emotional state, and they are so obvious and widespread that we hardly notice them. An alarm clock rings and it is time to get up, a red traffic light means stop. I actually find it a bit scary when you start to analyse how much of human behaviour is actual just conditioned responses to certain stimuli, we all walk round on auto pilot totally unaware. Ha, so there’s space for a big rant here but I’ve decided against it, however it might be interesting to think about the anchors you have in your life and see whether they are affecting you in a positive or negative way.

I know when I started to look at the associations I had unconsciously put in place, I realised my life was unnecessarily limited by fear, and this was often built up from past memories that simply hadn’t been re-evaluated. I want to bring the focus back to riding in a competition but essentially I’m saying you can take whatever experiences in life you find most difficult or challenging and simply re-associate the conditioned response you have with that situation, it’s that simple.

Anchors can be created in one of two ways.
1. Repetition. If you see repeated instances of red being associated with danger we will make an association between them.

2. Secondly, and much more important, anchors can be set in a single instant if the emotion is strong and the timing is right. Repetition is only needed if there is no emotional involvement. Think back to when you were at school and found that something interesting and exciting was easy to learn. Facts that did not interest you needed a lot of repetition. The less emotionally involved you are, the more repetitions are needed to learn the association.

So it is quite probable that when you’re waiting around at the top of the slope you’ve made associations between anxiety and the pressure of competing. Being fearful can easily become a conditioned response that you will naturally feel when you’re in that situation. But it doesn’t have to be. By anchoring in a new set of emotions you can change the way you feel when in this high-pressure situation.

CREATING ANCHOR’S

Ok so instead of writing about this I think it would be more beneficial if you listen to this audio recording I’ve uploaded about how to create you own anchors.

http://soundcloud.com/sonicwolf/anchoring

Four key points for creating anchors.
1. Create a strong, intense emotional state
2. Create anchor at the peak of the emotional state
3. Make sure the anchor is unique
4. Fire the anchor off the same way it got set

The anchor I use to feel energized and charges is linking my little fingers together. Also, rather than just anchor one memory I’ve linked a number of powerful memories on top of each other. My first back flip, my first double back flip, the pistol flip and a number of other memories drawing from that amazing feeling you get from landing a new rick for the first time. I’ve stacked all these memories on top of each other and associate it with something as simple as linking my fingers together. Now the ability to perform at my peak is literally at my fingertips and it’s available whenever I like.

So if you want to be stood at the top of the in-run in the best possible state for a competition I encourage you learn these technique and practice them, they can be incredibly powerful.

It does take a bit of time to master though, when I first read about it years ago I tried without committing 100 % and that didn’t get me anywhere. It’s very much a trail and error process and in this blog I’ve only really scratched the surface of NAS (Neuro Associative Conditioning). Don’t hesitate to get in contact if you’d like to ask me any other questions about it. This stuff can range from improve your skiing or getting rid of life long phobias, so fire away ha.

Until next time.

Peace x

P.S Shameless plug I know but I’m currently in the process of writing an album, as in a musicy one, so if any of you would be intrigued to hear what wonderful noises I can make please follow me on soundcloud.

http://soundcloud.com/sonicwolf