Reclaim Your Game
Under stadium lights nothing remains unseen.
Fear not excluded.
What’s working behind the scenes on the mind always gets exposed in the light.
It’s written on all the faces chosen for the championship’s shootout. The coaches and the fans.
This is the silent part of the game no one ever wants to be in. This hush that echoes so long you’re suddenly aware of the weight of a hundred eyes.
You’re not responsible for the nature of your chimp, but you are responsible for managing that nature.
I’ve been here a thousand times. In this same heavy, insulating pause of time. This is what it comes down to.
How you handle this moment defines everything. Not just your performance or the outcome, but the you walking away.
As an athlete, you face myriad mental obstacles. From the very first day you take on a sport (whatever it is) to that moment when you need to dial in.
Your mind a junkyard of anxieties and criticisms throughout the duration of learning, preparing, training, competing, rehabbing, recovering, aging.
Doubts cloud. Fears circle. Thresholds get kicked up.
And somewhere in your acceptance of those suggestions as fact, you lay the mortar for your own stockade. Imprisoning your potential with negative conditioning. One hundred percent self- created.
And you wonder why you never hit your PB.
But with another perspective of how your mind works and navigates the world, you can then recognize your options. You can learn the techniques to manage the side of you holding you back. So you can do what you came to do.
This is what Dr. Steve Peters offers athletes in his book, The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Program to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence, and Happiness.
Another Way to Look at Your Mind
There are two ways to look at who’s behind the controls.
There’s you, the human. Calm. Cool. Collected.
You’re logical in your thinking, with a rational foundation of reason behind your arguments. The one who makes nutrition plans and quarterly goals. This part of you lives in the frontal cortex and ideally would oversee your life.
And then there’s your chimp.
Erratic and out of control, loading you down with a heavy mood and self-defeating monologues.
My quads are on fire. I can’t go any further. I have nothing left.
Our 150-million-year-old, branching-swinging, ancestral dictator dwells in the limbic brain, and basically makes our life hell. (Thanks, friend.)
Completely high maintenance and overly sensitive, it doesn’t take much to awaken your inner primate. It’ll go completely out of its mind, for a hundred different reasons, at any given moment, and you have to live with it. For the rest of your life.
“You’re not responsible for the nature of your chimp, but you are responsible for managing that nature,” says Peters in his book.
You do so with your computer (parietal brain). This basically operates using behavioral programs and responses uploaded by the chimp and human during experiences. Then, when later activated, pulls the best information from your combined memory banks.
Our automation systems help us steer our lives from the perspectives of two personalities who want very different things and have separate modes of thinking and operating.
Poised human and an unhappy, wild animal. The punchline?
How we manage this ball of impulsivity greatly determines our overall success and happiness. Not just in sport, but life.
How They Work
Your chimp and human operate in different modes.
To find harmony between the two, you first have to know what motivates them.
And it’s not the same thing.
As they tend to work with different value systems, your duo often have conflicting agendas.
What Does Your Chimp Want?
Power, territory, ego, dominance, sex, food, troop, security, inquisitiveness, and fulfillment of parental drives.
With a dominating personality and will five times stronger than your human counterpart, the chimp’s whole purpose is survival.
Looking at the world from a jungle-centric perspective, this ancient part of our brain controls our thoughts and emotions, using them to interpret the world. Often building a perceived reality on guesses and assumptions. Paranoid, irrational, and prowling for threats, your insecure chimp thinks catastrophically, always on edge.
When needs go unmet or it’s exposed to vulnerability, the chimp reacts with a personality that’s entirely autonomous. With its own obnoxious mannerisms. Most of which rarely elicit a reaction your human likes, agrees with, or even condones.
Chimps like to go on how they feel to decide on future actions, whereas Humans tend to go on what needs to be done and also how they will feel at the end of the day when look back on how they have used their time.
What Motivates Your Human?
“Chimps like to go on how they feel to decide on future actions, whereas Humans tend to go on what needs to be done and also how they will feel at the end of the day when they look back on how they have used their time,” Peters says.
Soul-soothing satisfaction and achievement stemming from deep, personal fulfillment of purpose. (Oh, that’s all?)
Coming from a place of honesty, compassion, and conscientiousness, your true self seeks a far more civilized, controlled demonstration than your unpredictable compadre. One found through sound analysis and sensible deduction using evidence and contextual evaluations.
“Chimps like to go on how they feel to decide on future actions, whereas Humans tend to go on what needs to be done and also how they will feel at the end of the day when they look back on how they have used their time,” Peters says.
For your athlete, this might be finally nailing that trick, taking the trophy, or simply getting lost in movement.
What Does This Mean for You?
You can up your game simply by reclaiming your mind.
And Dr. Peters explains how.
Among his many insights, he gives you the tools to reign in your chimp and program your computer for the long haul.
The same techniques famed cyclists ) credit for their success.
So, definitely worth giving a go. Why not.
Wrangle the Chimp
Your chimp is going to get triggered. Something, at some point, will set it off.
However, that doesn’t mean it has to run the show, throw you out of whack, and wreak havoc on your outcome.
You can assume control using these strategies to finesse the situation away from complete destruction, rather than trying to strong-arm it. (Ultimately failing miserably.)
1. Realize you’ve been usurped.
Evident whenever thoughts, feelings, or behaviors you don’t want to take over or get in your way.
“If you don’t recognize this hijacking, then you may become disillusioned with yourself and feel like you are constantly failing. This in turn may lead to you beat yourself up,” Peters writes.
When you find yourself worrying about an upcoming event, angry about another performance, or procrastinating on anything eliciting resistance (hello, reverse indian runs), your chimp has taken over. You can head this off by being aware of your inner landscape’s ongoings.
Peters recommends asking, “Do I want these feelings?”
When you (undoubtedly) answer No, your human retakes the wheel. The good news being you really can override your inner punk and do those sprints.
The bad news being you really can do those sprints.
2. Define your Stone of Life–This “ultimate reference point” comprises your impression of how the world works, guiding values, end goal, and life purpose. “The Stone of Life is by far the most powerful stabilizer for your Psychological Mind and indeed for your entire Universe,” says Peters. And something you can and should work on.
Take the time to get clear about what you believe about you, your sport, what you believe to be possible, etc. Everything starts with your perception.
3. Reset your mindset–How you see yourself, others, and the world determines how you show up. Those with positive beliefs will experience a far different outcome than those harboring darker outlooks.
Evaluate your interactions and experiences and challenge yourself to reconsider how you want to approach life. What kind of attitude do you want to have? What work on yourself are you responsible for doing now?
4. Manage your chimp.
When your parental skills fall flat, move on to managing it by going through these steps in order:
- Exercise your chimp – Release your thoughts and emotions in the right way (to yourself). Allowing your inner animal to speak its mind calms it down and puts it in a state willing to listen and reason.
- Box the chimp – Cage it with facts and points counter to what’s driving the unwanted state of mind.
- Give it bananas – “These are things the Chimp wants that are either given as a distraction or reward.”
And on that note, before your chimp has time to mount a counter, you can move onto distraction and reward. Whatever will get you up and moving. “If I get up on the count of five, I’ll let myself grab a smoothie afterwards…Five, four…”
Repeat this consistently and eventually your chimp will start to fall in line with the expectations your human sets. At the same time, you’ll improve your self-awareness and self-control. A critical life skill—the management of your undomesticated side—no matter what you take on.
Program Your Computer
Constantly managing your chimp can drain you. Not to mention fracture your focus. For long-term success, you need to prepare accordingly, mitigating unnecessary future ish. You want something you can set and forget.
Say a lightning fast computer. Four times faster than the chimp, twenty times faster than the human, it’s the reference source both use for help and guidance.
As previously touched on, your computer operates using programs your chimp and human upload. Just like Neo in the Matrix streaming kung fu, except these are a combo of both positive (autopilot) and destructive (gremlins and goblins) tracks.
To set your chimp management on cruise control, you have to:
1. Clear your mind – Essentially, as an athlete, your greatest objective is to bury yourself deep within each moment of your sport. Completely step out of your mind and be as on point and present as possible. Unrealistic and unhelpful expectations (gremlins) make too much noise, steal your attention, and place it in unhelpful, self-sabotaging dimensions. Too many will destabilize you, and your performance will suffer.
Free up more concentration by identifying negative or anxious feelings or thoughts in relation to your sport and replace them with constructive autopilots. The more the better. Allowing your computer to come from a humane place. (Ha.)
2. Define your Stone of Life–This “ultimate reference point” comprises your impression of how the world works, guiding values, end goal, and life purpose. “The Stone of Life is by far the most powerful stabilizer for your Psychological Mind and indeed for your entire Universe,” says Peters. And something you can and should work on.
Take the time to get clear about what you believe about you, your sport, what you believe to be possible, etc. Everything starts with your perception.
3. Reset your mindset–How you see yourself, others, and the world determines how you show up. Those with positive beliefs will experience a far different outcome than those harboring darker outlooks.
Evaluate your interactions and experiences and challenge yourself to reconsider how you want to approach life. What kind of attitude do you want to have? What work on yourself are you responsible for doing now?
What Are You Waiting For?
If you’re not executing as the athlete you want to be, maybe the change needed isn’t in your form.
Dr. Peters might suggest you revisit your head game.
While a staple in the higher athletic echelons, mental conditioning doesn’t seem to garner sufficient attention across all levels. For those without professional aspirations, the conversation regarding training slants heavily toward physical exercises. Often times, the concept of mental training doesn’t even surface.
Considering the impact the brain plays, it’s surprising the number of athletes slacking in this area. Especially when implementing Peter’s simple strategies today could turn around your game. Tomorrow.
Any half-serious athlete should have a copy of this book on the shelf. Just for the simple understanding of yourself, let alone how it could absolutely break open the door of your potential. So, when you do find yourself in that moment of brutal honesty, you decide who shows up.
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