How to Fortify Your Mind

How to Fortify Your Mind

Author

Prof Grant Schofield. PREKURE, Chief Science Officer, Human Potential Centre, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand.

It’s April 8th 2023 and in UFC 287 Israel Adesanya produced a stunning second-round knockout to finish Alex Pereira and reclaim the undisputed UFC middleweight title in Miami.

He used a new version of Muhamad Ali’s “Rope-a-dope” technique to take some blows on the edge of the cage, then used that apparent disadvantage to strike four unbelievable blows in the blink of an eye to knock Perreia out.

He seemingly came out of nowhere to win the fight by knockout after he had been knocked out himself by Perrira in his kickboxing career.

Israel Adesanya delivered a comeback performance for the ages. His off-the-ropes technique was playing with fire. Pereira is lethal in close range and Izzy was milliseconds away from taking one of these blows.

Notwithstanding Asnaya’s post-fight theatrics of drawing a virtual bow and firing arrows at an unconscious Prira, and mocking his son who had previously mocked an unconscious Asanya in his kickboxing defeat, he made an impromptu speech to the crowd and massive TV audience.

In the post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, Izzy grabbed the mic and spoke straight down the camera lens as he sent a message to everyone watching.

If you’ve seen this, you know what I am about to talk about. If you haven’t then watch it now. Actually, watch it again if you have already seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKQ-FgTl7_4

“Hey, shush! Listen up! I want to say something!”

“People! Earth! I need to say something! Listen to me. I hope every one of you behind the screens or in this arena can feel this level of happiness, just one time in your life.

“I hope all of you can feel how f*****g happy I am, just one time in your life. But guess what, you will never feel this level of happiness if you don’t go for something in your own life – when they knock you down, when they try to s**t on you, when they talk s**t about you, and try and put their foot on your neck.”

“If you stay down, you will never ever get that result. Fortify your mind and feel this level of happiness and let’s rise. One time your life, but I’m blessed to be able to feel that, again and again and again and again and again!”

So how do you actually “fortify your mind”?

This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently.

Why?

First, I’m interested in how we can all be the best we can be. That’s what my whole research and practice career is about, at least broadly. That’s why I am the Director of the “Human Potential Centre” where I work at AUT. That’s what we are trying to achieve at PREKURE where I am the Chief Science Officer.

I think that suffering setbacks and overcoming them is the psychological equivalent of weight training for strength.

It’s also because I coach a small group of high-performance young endurance athletes.

For them suffering adversity in their training and racing is normal, but they often struggle with this. Mostly we have more failures than successes.

Long distance running and triathlon especially 70.3 and Ironman distance are my thing. I know the thousands of details you need to know to compete at the highest level in these sports as a pro and elite age group athlete. I’ve done it, and now love the interaction and relationships to build pathways to personal excellence that I get with these driven and talented young people.

Over and above the day-to-day trudge of training and technical know-how, it’s psychology that is the major application of coaching.

What is experienced in the crucible of training, and especially racing is at the hard end of fortitude.

What is inevitable is an overwhelming experience of negative thoughts and feelings.

A great example is usually about halfway through the run, during a long-distance triathlon.

The body is sending all sorts of information to the mind. These feelings are sent by the body for good reason. Pain, anxiety, fear, soreness, and plenty of other uncomfortable sensations are a normal response to pushing the body hard for a long time. Even in shorter races, it is sometimes even worse simply because the sensations are far more acute. After all, you are running so much faster.

The question is then how do you “fortify your mind” against this as Izzy said to do? How do you deal with the inevitability of negative thoughts and feelings in the crucible of high-performance sport?

Also, why would you even want to?

That’s a great question, and I often wonder about the value of high-performance sport in its own right. Actually, you’d be surprised to hear me say that there is very little value to these pursuits in their own right. It’s only that these situations provide such a learning ground to learn how to live your life. The inevitability of bad stuff happening and learning how to deal with it is the only way I know how to fortify your mind.

This fortification is transferable to everything else that will be part of the life well lived you experience.

Yeah, yeah Grant, but what do you actually do?

I use Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) tools as a clear and easy framework to work with my athletes to help deal with the inevitability of the hard stuff.

If you haven’t heard of ACT, it’s worth learning a bit more about. It’s easy-to-use, contemporary psychological skills that can change your life.

All about ACT.

ACT has two parts, acceptance, and commitment.

1. Acceptance: Negative thoughts and feelings are not just inevitable, they are completely normal. No matter what you do they will arrive. They are impossible to delete, remove from thought, or otherwise get rid of. In fact, actively trying to do so not only doesn’t work, it can result in something called “fusion” where you are engaged so much with wrestling that thought or feeling is amplified even further.

It’s now like you are playing tug of war with the negativity and the more you tug the more energy you give the monster on the other side of the pit.

The way to deal with these negative thoughts and feelings is to develop “cognitive flexibility”. This is where you don’t actively wrestle or otherwise fuse with these thoughts. You simply acknowledge that they are there. You “notice” them. This is also known as defusion, or acceptance as the name suggests. That’s why we call the technique of letting go and just noticing these thoughts and feelings as “dropping the rope”.

In the endurance sports world, you might be fused if you are thinking “I’m hurting so bad, I’m slowing down…..”. You might be more flexible and defused if you say to yourself in the exact same situation “I’m noticing that I have incoming information from my legs that they are sore and tired. I guess that’s useful information for me to notice, and that’s what I’m expecting at this stage in the event (I’m 32 km in a marathon after a 4 km swim and a 180 km bike ride…).

These might seem like semantics, but noticing and accepting the normality of negative thoughts and feelings isn’t something we do without practice. It’s normal to want to engage fully with these. After all our evolutionary legacy depended on us taking most of these very seriously as our lives might have been in danger.

2. Commitment: OK given you can accept the normality and inevitability of negative thoughts and feelings, then you can progress to stage two. Commitment means deciding what you are actually going to do despite those thoughts and feelings. You are now at what psychologists call a “choice point”. The choice point gives you two different behavioural pathways. You can make an “away move” or a “towards move”.

You see, what really matters in the world of humanity, even if you feel overwhelmed, uncomfortable, or suffering a bit is how you actually behave. Does what you do next move you towards your best life (a towards move) or away from your best life (an away move).

To understand this you have to know what your best life looks like.

Sport because it’s such a closed system, relatively safe, and has known hard stuff designed into it is the perfect place to practice all this for real.

In the triathlon world, what are you going to do when you are overwhelmed with physical and mental sensations of negativity deep into the run? Are you going to accept the sensation was normal? Regard them as interesting and inevitable incoming information? Or are you going to become those thoughts and fuse with them, fight them and go into a downward spiral?

When your body sends these signals to your mind, are you fortified? Are you able to deal with the feelings and make a move towards your goal? Or are you going to slow down, walk the run in, or otherwise start the self-justification and mostly believable process of why you made an ‘away move’?

That’s the use of high-performance sport. It may be the only useful reason.

Even if you aren’t a high-performance athlete ACT works well in everyday life too. Are you hungry or noticing that you are having a thought about being hungry? Even when hungry, what are you going to do? What does eating that junk food mean in terms of moving towards your best life?

Even junior sport is a great learning experience for ACT. My coaching of junior football (soccer) is pretty limited and I have no actual skill in the game. So as the St Joseph’s Primary School Year 6 coach on tournament day, I was horribly out of my depth technically at least.

What I had noticed with these boys though was that in every game the referee, most of the coaches from the other team, would make a bad call or move against us. The boys would lose their cool, get really upset, as would many of the parents on the sideline.

Yes, the call was often outrageous, but predictable and almost certain to happen in every game we played. The same thing happened to the other team as well.

I saw this as our advantage. So I tried some ACT with the 11-year-olds.

We sat down before we left school for the tournament. I asked the boys what the chances of the ref having a bad call against us today were. They were certain that this would happen, that it would be unfair and that this was almost certain in every game.

I asked them how they would feel about this. They also all thought they’d be unhappy about that, and that was pretty much certain.

We then agreed that in every game calls would be bad, and they would feel crap about it. Acceptance!

Now, what are going to do about it? After some discussion, they decided as a team that since it was going to definitely happen the best thing to do was to notice this, notice that it annoyed them, and then carry on playing the best they could anyway. Commitment and a ‘towards move’!

We won the whole tournament that day, not because we were the best team, certainly not the best technically coached team, but because we never melted down when bad calls came. The other teams all did meltdown when the bad calls came to them. A great sideshow was their parents melting down when their kids did. Our parents somehow caught the now contagious acceptance bit.

Their young minds were now fortified!

That’s ACT in practice, and how I use it to help my young athletes fortify their minds.

The quick action phrase for ACT invented I think by my wife Louise, also PREKURE CEO always says “Things as they are now, what needs to be done?”

Fortifying the mind in fact is not about blocking out hard stuff. It’s about experiencing the hard stuff, noticing it, and going with it. The fortitude is despite that, realising that you have a choice about what to do next.