The Secret Imagination of Elite Performers | Charlie Unwin | TEDxHolyhead

[Music] [Applause] raise your hand if you are a younger brother or sister okay so the good news is is that you have a distinct advantage should you wish to become a world champion in your chosen sports so congratulations now for those of you who didn't raise their hands don't worry if you want to become a world champion in your chosen sport you still can do it's just going to be a little bit harder now in order to help me explain let me take you back to when I was about 10 years old and playing in the garden with my brother at home we used to play cricket a sport that can take five days to complete and even longer to explain so I'll spare you the details all you need to know is that the garden version of it involved my brother bowling a bull from about five yards away as hard as he could towards me and he aim to hit these kind of wooden stumps behind me I kind of resemble part of Stonehenge or something like that now my goal was to try and hit the ball with this over prized piece of wood something which very rarely happened given the speed that he was bowling at when the roles were reversed he would have no problem slugging the ball to the next solar system due to my pathetic attempt at bowling now that was okay because he was bigger than me he was older than me he was actually quite good at cricket as well which meant that I had very few opportunities to look good so one day however probably by luck more than anything else I connected sweetly with the ball the ball went flying across the garden landed underneath the bush and as he went off to disappear and find it I was stood there for the first time with time to think how did I do that I remember coming to two conclusions one is that I kept my eye on the ball and the other is that I kept a straight bat from that point onwards I became obsessed with doing these two things really well keep an eye on ball keep a straight bat over time I started to get better at it my motivation for going and playing was get better at these two things and then one day I got good enough at those two things that I hit the board enough times that I scored enough points to beat him that was the day he folded up his arms went inside and said don't want to play this anymore and I'll only we've ever played crickets in Caesar now little bit I realized at the time but this was the genesis of a mindset later coined younger brother syndrome it's something I want to come back to at the end however first I want to ask the question a question that perhaps we've all asked ourselves at some point especially if we've ever endeavored to be as good as we can at something how do we know our true potential whether it's playing sports whether it's starting in musical instruments first day at work or even starting your own business how do we know how good we could be one thing's for sure and that's that knowledge is no longer our biggest barrier to success we live in a world where we can pretty much learn anything from Google from how to change a bicycle tire all the way to how to wore a house although having said that I'm pretty sure that Google has done nothing to diminish the number of failed DIY projects in my home however it is pretty good at finding people who can fix them for me and I imagine that Google if I relied on it to save decommission a nuclear reactor I probably suffer some confidence issues at some point during the process this is because understanding something rationally is very different to the lived experience of actually doing it a footballer steps up to take a penalty in the dying moments of the game he steps up and boots the ball wide not because he hasn't practiced taking penalties the last 10 years of his career but because the lived experience of being in that moment is very different a stock market trader loses millions on the stock markets because he should have pulled out of a position much earlier than he did it wasn't it he didn't have a plan that stopped him from doing that because he did but he hadn't accounted for the influx of stress hormones and chemicals that made the emotional reality of making that call very very different now this is something that every performer has to contend with and it's something that I'm passionate about in the world of performance psychology both from a scientific perspective but also through the work I do with some people who are the very best in the world at what they do these people have many qualities but one in particular that I think guides their focus and control in almost any situation and it also allows them to learn new skills quicker and more accurately than many other people the skill that I'm talking about is visualization also known as imagery or mental rehearsal a vital component of mental preparation people for me it sounds sophisticated enough to give myself an inflated view of my own self-importance when I'm actually delivering this to to other people however that was until I saw my two year old nephew who was doing this without any formal training whatsoever it was when my brother and I took him to a fairgrounds and we thought because we weren't particularly good with rollercoasters he would just want to stick to the merry-go-round and maybe those little tame teacups that go round gently Oh No he found the biggest roller coaster and said that he wanted to go on it in moments we found ourself at the back of the queue with many opportunities for him to turn back because it was quite a long queue he was there kind of ruminating on the on the significance of his decision but eventually we got to the front of the queue and at that point I saw him doing something which I wish I'd been able to video he closed his eyes and in his imagination he imagined every single twist and turn of the roller coaster that he had just been watching for the last ten minutes no one had told him to do this what he was doing was internally recreating that environment in order to be able to better control the reality of being there this is something which many elite performers do deliberately it's something we all do but we don't necessarily do it as consciously as we could do and should do there are a number of things that happen when we do this and for the brain thinking as the same endures doing in young Freddie's brain what was happening was that by imagining doing something he was using exactly the same neural pathways as if he was actually doing it what's more is that the more accurate you use that imagination so the same sight sounds smells doing it in real time the more accurate the pathway that we carve out for yourself now people who do this on a day-to-day basis effectively enjoying many benefits not least visualization allows us to learn and reproduce skills more quickly accurately and smoothly an amazing study at Stanford University demonstrated the elite gymnasts using focus visualization were able to execute complex skills that they're being working on for over a year execute them for the first time also allows us to manage your expectations and emotions more effectively when we imagine doing something scary we are going to feel scared that's a reality but we can either imagine it or we can wait until we're they're actually doing it and therefore elite performers tend to evoke these feelings up front so that they can practice dealing with them before time we can avoid repeating the same mistakes I think this is because visualization isn't just about imagining the future but it's also about being able to recall accurately what's happened in the past we also maintain presence of mind in high-pressure situations we experience greater commitments and motivation and we also experience more confidence in our own ability and I think over time also in ourselves now to bring some of these things to life I want to take you to the small town of Lillehammer in Norway this is where I first had the opportunity to work in the Olympic sport of skeleton working with these slightly crazy athletes show no lights on the profound importance of being able to prime our brain before to take in complex skills here we have a sports where athletes travel down lights at around 90 miles an hour their chick just an inch off the ground going round corners their experience pressures of up to 5 G the same as a fighter jet pilots all of this was reserving the spare mental capacity to be able to think clearly make good decisions and drive the sled to pinpoint accuracy that's probably the equivalent of being towed behind a car in a country road speeding along whilst trying to you're 17 times table it's a pretty amazing thing to have to be able to do the thing is this isn't their only challenge believe it or not because of the pressures on their body they only get the opportunity to slide two or three times a day that's two or three minutes of physical training every day now if you subscribe to Erickson's 10,000 hour rule the rule that suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to come master at a skill then we're going to run into serious problems I worked out earlier that was about 1,300 years of training for these guys there for visualization isn't just something that adds value to training it's something that becomes essential and despite visualization being quite an intuitive skill the idea of training in motionless silence is a little bit alien even for these athletes but it's something that they have to get used to doing so can we extend these principles beyond lycra Clara fleets and into the realms of of other our other parts of life in everyday life well here I think we see some profound implications when someone suffers a stroke due to an arterial blood clots Brea blood is prevented from getting to the parts of the brain that once fed and without these oxygen and nutrients feeding them those tissues die and slowly to the surrounding tissues around it but when the sufferer imagines a moving that the limbs that may have been paralyzed as a results blood flow increases to the parts of the brain affected thereby diminishing the damage done to those areas of the brain there are two really important messages here for me firstly we are able to control blood flow around the brain at will using our imagination that's pretty amazing but secondly in order to do this effectively we have to have a positive focus in other words we've got to be able to focus on what we do once rather than just on what we done once it's a bit like me saying to you don't think of a yellow car if I said you don't think of yellow car you think of a yellow car probably the more I say to you don't think of a yellow car the more you think of yellow car so what's the positive focus how do you not think of a yellow car maybe think of a blue car and in the absence of this positive focus the problem is what happens is that blood flow tends to move to the emotional centers of the brain especially during high pressure performance geared around fear and uncertainty this is exactly what deke hilton and his team at the university of christchurch found in 2010 following the devastating earthquake there they found that whereas some people were able to refocus and get on with their day to day life and relative normality other people really struggled to get on with day to day activities activities such as conducting their work remembering to turn up to appointment and even just ordering the usual cup of coffee so what was differentiating those people who struggled in the aftermath of an earthquake compared to those who perhaps have more resilience well in the looming threat of follow-up earthquakes those people who were unable to visualize their day-to-day goals experienced greater blood flow to the emotional centers of the brain that that enhanced fear and uncertainty and actually in doing so inhibited the areas of the brain responsible for the positive action conversely those more resilience were able to effectively visualize and stay focused on their day-to-day goals thereby sending much more blood flow to the areas of the great brain responsible for decision making problem solving and general positive action it was therefore these people who ended up more resilience are under threats now what can we all take away from this and how can I help you go away and visualize yourself to success well in order to take advantage of this great skill I think we first got to remove two barriers and these are the two barriers that I see is most commonly getting in the way of people to visualize successfully firstly I'm too busy we've heard it before there's a huge paradox here visualization requires us to slow down and deepen our focus therefore visualization is and given that that's the complete opposite of what the brain would normally do under pressure visualization is therefore something that we we would need to do at the time when were probably least inclined to do it now elite performers recognize this and therefore they deliberately put time into their day to be able to do it and finally success removes the need to get better and this takes us back to playing in the garden with my brother at home you see the reason why younger siblings have a distinct advantage in competitive sports is because in the absence of too many opportunities to win at an early stage they become much more intrinsically motivated by the mastery of what they do rather than simply the outcome of what they do in the nurturing more time and effort in the quality of processes that get them there it means that they have greater access to the very ingredients that make them feel more confident and in control when the stakes are raised this is probably the single biggest paradox in the psychology of success we allow ourselves to get so distracted by the outcome of what we do whether it be winning beating other competitors winning you work notoriety success and actually in doing so we often neglect the very quality of processes learning creativity that allowed us to get there in the first place thereby hindering our true potential visualization therefore becomes something that we once did when we were learning and getting better and something that we stopped doing when we allowed ourselves to believe that we had made it thank you very much you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 85,109

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Life, Personal growth, Psychology, Sports

Id: FK3STeyLUEU

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2017