Here is a short interview conducted by Chris Womack, Sports Anchor for WLOS, on my work with USA Table Tennis during the time of COVID-19.
Category Archives: Goals
Training in the time of COVID-19
Today’s post is from journalist Fred McCormick, who published the following in The Valley Echo.
Thanks, Fred, for capturing the essence of the work and the importance of mental training so well.
Olympic table tennis team turns to Warren Wilson psychology professor
BOB SWOAP SERVES AS SPORT PSYCHOLOGIST FOR U.S. NATIONAL TEAM
Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
May 13, 2020
When the U.S. Olympic Table Tennis Team Trials tournament concluded in Santa Monica, California on March 1, six of the country’s top players were one step closer to realizing their dream of competing for a medal on a global stage. Just three weeks later, those aspirations were put on hold with the announcement that a global pandemic forced the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to be rescheduled for 2021, representing the first postponement of the modern games for reasons unrelated to war.
For the athletes focusing on representing their countries in the Summer Games, which were initially scheduled to open July 24, the move was a sudden pause in the years of dedication in pursuit of a goal as their reality shifted from intense face-to-face competition to social distancing in the era of COVID-19.
The U.S. Olympic table tennis team turned to Warren Wilson College Professor of Psychology Bob Swoap for help.
Sport psychology and table tennis have been of interest to Swoap long before he began his 22-year career with the Swannanoa liberal arts college.
“When I was in graduate school I did a one-year internship in sports science, specifically sport psychology,” he said. “I was working with all sorts of athletes and teams, but one of the teams I was assigned to was the residential table tennis team.”
In 1990, Swoap met Sean O’Neill, who was in the midst of a decorated career in the sport in which he earned eight Pan American Games medals and was a two-time Olympian. O’Neill, a member of the U.S. Team in the competition’s inaugural year as an Olympic event in the 1988 Seoul Games, is the high performance director for USA Table Tennis.
The two worked together as O’Neill successfully pursued a return to the Summer Games in 1992 in Barcelona.
“We’ve remained friends through the years and he’s come out and given a guest lecture for my sport psychology class at Warren Wilson,” Swoap said. “He reached out a few weeks ago and said he thought that during all of this craziness, the team could up its mental training and asked if I’d consider doing that.”
Much of Swoap’s remote work with the team focuses on providing support and teaching coping strategies for dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. He develops weekly lesson plans, revolving around a specific topic, for the athletes.
“They practice that for the week and we come together on a live Zoom meeting to talk about how it’s going,” he said. “The lessons include some standardized sport psychology training, like visualization and goal-setting, but I think what makes it unique is that we’re also spending a good amount of time talking about how to deal with adversity and stress.”
As athletes continue to sharpen the skills needed to cope with living in a world in disarray, the social isolation also creates an opportunity to work on the mental aspect of their games.
“Table tennis is extremely fast and takes extraordinary concentration, hand-eye coordination and the ability to immediately reset after every point,” Swoap said. “Of course, in table tennis you make a lot of mistakes. So your ability to rebound from those mistakes quickly, and come back to the present moment, is vital to your success.”
Turning to the basics of mindfulness and attention control has allowed Swoap to offer practical tools for the athletes to use inside and outside of the competitive arena.
“We’re focusing on how to stay in the present moment and not get worried about what just happened or what’s about to happen,” he said. “So, you can see that actually works for the competition, which they’re preparing for, but also for worrying about the future related to the pandemic.”
While Swoap has worked with athletes in more than 30 sports, his familiarity with table tennis offers him a unique perspective for his role with the U.S. Olympic Team. He began playing the sport as a young child and he still competes regularly with the Asheville Table Tennis Club.
“I think I can speak the language and understand the technical concerns that the elite players have,” he said. “Even though I’m not at that level, we still play on the same size table and deal with spins, loops and blocks.”
While table tennis has long been part of his life, Swoap makes an effort to better understand the athletes he works with by participating in the sports in which they compete.
“That helps me understand some of what they’re going through,” he said. “But, that has limits. For example, I don’t do gymnastics, even though I work with gymnasts. And, I’ve never been a place kicker, even though I’ve worked with place kickers.”
The Asheville resident also operates a website — robertswoap.com — which highlights athletes and offers his perspective from the field of sport psychology.
The grit of Carli Lloyd
Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction. – William James (1907)
Last Sunday, 26.7 million viewers were awestruck by the soccer played by the U.S. against Japan in the women’s World Cup Final. The U.S. team came out with intensity, confidence, and execution that resulted in four goals in the first 17 minutes. The team played as a cohesive unit allowing all of the players to thrive. (And while I now turn to one particular player, it should be obvious that none of the individual highlights are possible without the support of the team.) Three of the first four goals came from Carli Lloyd in the 3rd, 5th, and 16th minute. Lloyd was magnificent: aggressive, assured, strong — a finisher. Her play during the entire tournament was outstanding and built on successes from the previous two Olympic Games. But success at this level didn’t come easily to Lloyd. It never does, for any athlete, but Lloyd’s trajectory is particularly interesting and instructive.
Twelve years ago, during her college playing days, Lloyd was cut from the U.S. under-21 team. She was told by the coach (Chris Petrucelli) that while she was talented, there were too many holes in her game for her to make the team at that point. In a great article by Jeff Carlisle, Lloyd admits that being cut was devastating to her. And instead of fighting, she felt more like giving up. In fact, Carlisle writes, Lloyd told her parents that she was going to finish her final year at Rutgers, quit soccer, and get a job.
And, in fact, this could have happened. It does with many players who simply decide that the work is too hard and not worth it. Which is okay… unless you really want to see how far you can go.
Luckily, Carli’s dad decided to try one more avenue. He asked youth coach James Galanis whether he would be willing to train Carli. Galanis, who specializes in player development, agreed. When he first met with Lloyd, Galanis saw a player who was unfit, uncommitted, and not mentally tough. It seemed to Galanis that Lloyd was full of excuses, anxieties, and poor training habits. But he saw potential. And so he asked her how good she wanted to be. How far did she want to go?
This is the crucial question before we start any mental or physical training. How good can you be? How far do you want to go? If the motivation is there, then it’s a matter of developing the right habits. Too often, people believe that “grit” (passion and perseverance for long-term goals) is mostly a matter of personality. I argue that it is mostly a matter of habit: what you say to yourself, what you do on a daily basis….
Lloyd answered Galanis that, yes, she would put soccer first and do the things that he asked to restructure her game. What followed was years of retraining — physically, nutritionally, mentally, tactically — to help Lloyd develop into a national caliber (then world caliber) player.
She’s done some things over the course of the last 12 years that not many athletes would do, from sacrifices in her personal life to changes in her eating and sleeping habits, and never switched it off. She put in the work and I was happy to see her rewarded on the biggest stage in the biggest possible way. ~ James Galanis, NYPost (July 6, 2015)
Galanis adds that “as [Carli’s] getting older, she’s understanding the game more and her tactical awareness has evolved. She keeps getting stronger physically and she’s only stronger mentally. She’s still got a lot of years left in her.”
Which brings us back to the quote by William James, a founder of American Psychology, at the beginning of this post. We have an ability to “push through the obstruction,” but we often need guidance and support to do so. Lloyd needed Galanis and his coaching skills to help her develop her grit. She put in the hours on the pitch. And she put in her hours for mental training.
Lloyd has repeatedly talked about her mental toughness program. She has learned a disciplined approach to training and how to react better when things go poorly. Prior to her games, she follows a routine to get her to the optimal level of focus and preparedness. This routine includes music, visualization, and meditation.
Several months ago, Lloyd was training alone back home in New Jersey when she allowed herself to fantasize and visualize about the World Cup. This mental rehearsal was particularly optimistic:
“It’s kind of funny,” Lloyd said Sunday night following the U.S.’s 5-2 World Cup victory over Japan. “I’m running and I’m doing sprints and it’s hard, it’s burning, and I just completely zoned out [at the practice in NJ]. I dreamed of and visualized playing in the World Cup final and visualized scoring four goals.
“It sounds pretty funny, but that’s what it’s all about. I think at the end of the day you can be physically strong, you can have all the tools out there, but if your mental state isn’t good enough, you can’t bring yourself to bigger and better things. And for me, I’ve just constantly been visualizing, constantly been growing confidence with each and every game and I was on a mission.” (USA Today, July 6, 2015)
I’ve written about visualization several times in this blog and know that it is crucial to athletes’ success. But what is most important in Lloyd’s story is the lesson that grit and mental toughness can be developed. The fact that passion, persistence, and perseverance are important to achieve excellence should not surprise anyone. But the need for behavior, habit, and support to improve these is too often not emphasized. We tend to see our sports heroes as superhuman — different in some fundamental way. But as we see with Carli Lloyd, she earned her toughness and skills through gritty behavior in the context of support and guidance — a sure recipe for growth with no limits.
William James
It’s like riding a bike…
Check out this video from Destin Sandlin on his popular YouTube channel, Smarter Every Day. It’s almost eight minutes, but watch it all the way through.
What Sandlin explores is key for improving our performance — in sports and in other areas of our lives. He demonstrates the importance of HABIT and hints at the neuroscience underpinning it.
When Sandlin is first trying to ride the “backwards bike,” he fails because the habit is so firmly established in his brain. The neural pathways, in a sense, are “hard-wired” and difficult to overwrite. The “wiring” (long-term potentiation of synapses) is found throughout the brain, but particularly in the basal ganglia upon which procedural memories (like riding a bike) rely.
So, when we are trying to change a habit, we are trying to rearrange the synaptic potentials throughout the brain. This takes time, effort, and persistence, as Sandlin readily demonstrates in eventually learning to ride the backwards bike.
In a post from 2013, I describe ways to overwrite these old pathways in order to establish new habits, especially through deliberate practice. (The old pathways may not disappear, but they become weaker and slower to be triggered.) It’s worth reexamining those strategies now:
~ Write down your goals
~ Describe the potential roadblocks (and what you’ll do specifically when you encounter them)
~ Increase self-control. (Self-control is best thought of as a limited resource — but one which can be bolstered and expanded.)
~ Monitor yourself.
~ Avoid self-licensing (allowing yourself to back-off or indulge when you have previously acted in accordance with a goal)
~Surf the urge (mindfully riding out temptations to engage in the old behavior, temptations, fatigue, etc.)
The full post is here for you to further explore these habit-changing strategies. And a couple of earlier posts on using deliberate practice effectively are here.
How to overcome procrastination
About this time of year, I see a spike of anxiety in my college students. Papers, term projects, mid-term exams all loom in the near future. Many tell me that they have procrastinated and now feel the pressure to perform. Some tell themselves — mostly falsely — that they do better under the gun. That they need the last-minute deadlines to spur them into action. In most cases, this is more stressful than effective. (I should know. This is my September blog piece. Posted on the 30th…)
Most of us do it. Procrastinate. Give in to our impulses rather than follow a clear, long-term path.
A recent study by Daniel Gustavson and his colleagues at the University of Colorado investigates why we procrastinate. The researchers, using techniques from the field of behavior genetics, discovered that there is a strong relationship between procrastination and impulsivity. Gustavson speculates that procrastination is a by-product of impulsivity — a trait which may have been useful in past times.
From an evolutionary standpoint, impulsivity makes sense: Our ancestors should have been inclined to seek immediate rewards when the next day was uncertain.
Procrastination, on the other hand, may have emerged more recently in human history. In the modern world, we have many distinct goals far in the future that we need to prepare for – when we’re impulsive and easily distracted from those long-term goals, we often procrastinate.
And that’s the rub. In modern times, impulsivity is far less valuable. In fact, to reach our goals, we often must delay gratification and focus on longer timelines. There is a whole line of research on this including, most famously, Walter Mischel’s “Marshmallow Test”, recently explained in the Atlantic and on the Colbert Report:
So, what if you’re one who would have failed the marshmallow test — unable (or unwilling) to delay gratification, like Colbert? Are you destined for mediocrity?
There is good news. We can strengthen self-control and the ability to set and reach longer-term goals. The key is understanding that we are dealing with skills, not personality traits. “Confusion about these kinds of behaviors [tremendous willpower in one situation, but not another] is erased when you realize self-control involves cognitive skills,” says Mischel.
It may be helpful to remember that “executive function” — central to self-control and originating in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) — can be trained. Here, then, are some ideas for athletes, students, and others pursuing long-term goals. These eleven strategies come from a large body of psychology research, but are beautifully presented by Celestine Chua on her lifehack blog. I have summarized them here:
- Break your work into little steps. (Think staircase.)
- Change your environment (especially when your environment triggers impulsive, procrastinating behavior).
- Create a detailed timeline with specific deadlines.
- Eliminate your procrastination pit-stops (e.g., distractions like social media)
- Hang out with people who inspire you to take action.
- Get a buddy. (For training, for inspiration, for accountability.)
- Tell others about your goals. (Tell others beyond your buddy in #6.)
- Seek out someone who has already achieved the outcome.
- Re-clarify your goals.
- Stop over-complicating things. (Avoid perfectionism as you are moving towards your goals. Focus on the process and the outcome takes care of itself.)
- Get a grip and just do it.
Olympic dreams supported by sound mental habits
Watching the Olympic Games is always a treat for me. The pressure on these athletes to put in a “performance of a lifetime” helps some thrive, while others struggle. I was fortunate to work at the Olympic Training Center (based in Colorado Springs) in the early 90s, helping young athletes develop their mental skills as fully as their physical skills. We were always working on improving consistency, mental toughness, and focus.
There are a lot of good books available for athletes looking for that elite mindset: Toughness, by Jay Bilas; Choke, by Sian Beilock; In Pursuit of Excellence, by Terry Orlick; Eleven Rings, by Phil Jackson. But for a quicker look at the mental habits of elite athletes, you should read the recent column by Carolyn Gregoire of the Huffington Post. This article, The Brain-Training Secrets of Olympic Athletes, is superb: current, on-target, and with many helpful links.
Gregoire focuses on five practices that Olympic athletes use to reach their peak. (She also makes it clear how we can use these strategies in our own lives — a focus of my own practice and blog.) So, without further ado, here are the strategies that Gregoire highlights:
(1) Visualize the outcome you want. I would add that you should also visualize what you will do when something sets you back — a mental contingency plan.
(2) Meditate daily. It seems daily that there is a new finding on the benefits (psychological and/or physiological) of mindfulness practice. Being in the moment is, not surprisingly, a key skill in high level performance.
(3) Evict the obnoxious roommate in your head.
“Do your thoughts tend to lift you up — or are you constantly tearing yourself down with an inner monologue of fear, self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness? Great athletes, through all the challenges they face, are able to exert a great deal of control over the way they talk to themselves, and they’ve managed to evict the”obnoxious roommate” living in their heads that tells them they can’t do it.” ~ C. Gregoire
(4) Set smarter goals. Goal-setting sounds so basic because it is. It is simple to do. But it is also simple to do poorly — for example, setting outcome goals without also setting the process goals. Set daily goals. Build on small successes. Emphasize what is in your control — attitude, effort, focus — rather than things like times, points, or places.
(5) Go with the flow. Gregoire closes her piece with the idea that Olympic athletes need to be able to achieve “flow,” that state of mind in which time seems to slow and when one feels fully immersed in the activity. Flow is not a random event. In fact, it is much more likely to occur if you have committed to the first four strategies listed above. Mostly, it is a function of quieting the mind — allowing yourself to achieve the confident, but calm mindset. This doesn’t mean you can’t be aggressive if that’s your style. But it does mean that you shouldn’t have to force it.
Well, back to my nightly watching of the Winter Games. So inspiring…
We are what we repeatedly do…
Fall is a fun time to look for excellence in sports — soccer, cross-country meets, MLB’s World Series, basketball getting underway… I love this time of year. And I turn to Aristotle’s quote as one way to understand excellence. We are what we repeatedly do. We are creatures of habit in ways that most of us cannot imagine. When the habits align with a clear focus on and strategy for improvement, then we see movement towards excellence. And yet, as neuroscientist David Eagleman argues in Incognito, much of what we do during any single day is outside of our conscious awareness. We are too often on autopilot.
Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it’s not. ~~ David Eagleman (Incognito)
We may not want to believe this. Where is free will, we ask? Well, it’s there. It’s just that there are other forces to consider. And a major one for athletes and anyone seeking excellence is HABIT.
We most effectively develop habits through deliberate practice. “Deliberate practice” is talked about routinely now, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell and others who have popularized the term. But what is often missing is the simple aspect of habit-formation which takes place simultaneously on the behavioral and neurological level.
Here are some tips to help get your desired habit established and to maintain it most consistently:
1) Write down your goals.
2) Describe the potential roadblocks for the goals you have set. What will sap your self-control and potentially derail your pursuit of the goal? When is this most likely to occur? For each would-be roadblock, create a specific coping plan. Here, you want to use an active coping style that involves problem solving or another method that addresses the challenge. Under stress, many of us will choose an avoidance strategy to take the pressure off; this, though understandable, is ultimately ineffective. Many times, athletes will feel like dropping out, but will utilize a pre-determined plan to manage that moment. Without a plan, you are likely to revert to your old habits.
3) Give a boost to your self-control. Do you need to enlist more social support? Do you need to alter your environment, so that there are fewer distractions from your goal? Write down the concrete steps you can take to boost your self-control.
4) Monitor yourself. Look for and document small victories, which will allow you to see the progress towards your goals. This will also help you reduce black & white thinking patterns which are inflexible and which lead to demoralization: “I broke my diet by eating ice cream when I shouldn’t have. Oh well, I might as well finish the pint.”
5) Avoid the self-licensing trap. In the pursuit of a goal, expending initial effort can demotivate you from expending further effort. As a result, you may allow yourself to indulge when you have previously acted in accordance with a goal. “I went to they gym this morning. It’s okay to stop for fast food. I’m pretty tired anyway.” You need to plan for how to answer the self-licenser (SL) that pops up in your head. The SL is sneaky, quick, and persuasive. A key to managing this temptation is to expect that it is coming. Remind the SL voice that you treat each situation as separate from earlier behaviors. View that moment as an opportunity and challenge to strengthen your self-control habits while getting closer to your goal. Lastly, enlist friends who can give you support and whom you can ask to help keep you accountable to your goals.
6) Surf the urge. For 30 years, Dr. Alan Marlatt was the director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington. His approach to treating addictions focused on helping his clients recognize high-risk situations for relapse and then plan a strategy to deal with them. High-risk situations occur when there are strong cues (inside oneself, in the environment, or both) that trigger an urge to engage in the older habit. When working with clients who wanted to quit smoking, Marlatt used a surfing analogy. He taught clients to note any rising urge to smoke and then direct their attention to the growing wave, keeping balance until the wave crested and subsided. Athletes use this technique of surfing the urge to get through tough parts of their workouts and competitions.
Let me know how you do with these suggestions and what other things you use to establish and maintain habits most effectively.