Michele Ionno, our Recover Lead, is a Doctor of Physical Therapist and not a Psychologist nor a mental health counselor of any kind. The articles written during Recover Week may at times reference mental health or mental skills training. When this occurs, it is only Dr. Ionno, DPT, bringing these important topics to your attention. The information should be taken only as entertainment and his opinion but if interested, we are happy to connect you to one of our colleagues in the Psychology profession to explore these topics further. In fact, we recommend each of you include a Psychologist on your Performance & Wellness Team. Do you want to learn more information on the topics we’ve introduced here? Are you ready to seek the help or services of a mental health clinician? If so, you could start at the American Psychological Association, National Register of Health Service Psychologists, or the Association for Applied Sports Psychology. If you do not find what you are looking for, reach out to us and we will happily help you find a licensed provider in your area.
The mental side of performance and wellness.
This week, I am introducing to you the final component to our Recovery system, the mental side of performance and wellness. This is an introduction to a few topics that have piqued my interest. There are psychologists working all over the world who are qualified to speak in-depth on these topics. As FMR rolls along, we will bring some of these people to you so you can learn from them. If you would like help immediately, you can utilize the resources I listed above or reach out to me via e-mail, Twitter, or Instagram and I’ll help you find them.
Here are three questions that I am interested in learning more about:
How well do I control and deploy my emotions?
How do I mentally manage adversity?
How do I perform while under stress?
I struggle with the management of the mental side of life. Maybe because it can’t be seen or touched? It seems harder to understand something I can’t grasp with my hands and manipulate physically.
Here are three concepts that I discovered while exploring the self-reflections I listed above.
Emotional Intelligence (How well do I control and deploy my emotions?)
Anti-fragility (How do I mentally manage adversity?)
Cognitive Performance Enhancement (How do I perform while under stress?)
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EI) is defined as how I understand, use, and interpret my emotions while properly interpreting others emotions. This is a component of performance and wellness that is very much inwardly-focused.
Daniel Goleman explored EI in a book in 1995 that seemed to propel the popularity of EI. The model he presented included 5 domains: self-knowledge, self-control, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Mr. Goleman’s model expanded from a scientific article by Salovey & Mayer (1990) that has been cited over 25,000 times by research that came afterward. The authors lay out EI as having four domains: Perceiving emotions, reasoning with emotions, understanding emotions, and managing emotions. This VeryWellMind article provides some more detail about EI if you want to learn more beyond the Goleman book and scientific article I referenced above.
There seems to be mixed to lacking evidence about the effectiveness of EI when to use as a measurement of leadership qualities or employee performance. But for me personally, I’m glad to have discovered this concept because of its benefits for understanding myself and how I interact with people in both my personal and professional life.
Antifragility
Being antifragile, a concept described by the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is when you experience negative or challenging things and figure out how to utilize that challenge to be better than you were before the negative thing occurred. (This is a fantastic book and I recommend it also.) This is simple but hard to do. Think of how our muscles work when you go for a difficult hike or do challenging weightlifting for your legs. The next day or two, your leg muscles are sore. A few days after that, you do the same amount of walking or exercise and it’s EASIER! We need our muscles to break down so that they can be rebuilt and grow. Without the trauma of a workout, there aren’t any gains.
The author, Ryan Holiday, has written books like The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy, which detail leveraging adversity, which is unavoidable, to your benefit. I highly recommend The Obstacle is the Way, it was literally life-changing for me and I look forward to going through his newest book Stillness is the Key. Since I was first introduced to these books a few years ago, I have worked to be more introspective and more mindful about the benefits of challenging myself. Funny how I am an expert in challenging muscles to stimulate growth but never appreciated how it affected me personally. I am very grateful for having discovered those books and authors because of the benefit that I have gained from them.
Cognitive Performance Enhancement
The section that we are calling Cognitive Performance Enhancement (CPE) is all about learning how to think clearly and make good decisions while under stress. CPE is different than Decision-Triage, which is about the choices you make to optimize your recovery (aka, what you decide to do determines how stress accumulates on your body and mind). Instead, CPE is about how you think and process information while under stress. This reminds me of “dual-task” activities; where you need to perform a physical activity, while also making decisions.
Dual-task training is a commonly used tool in physical therapy or strength and conditioning for when an athlete has reached the advanced stages in her recovery or training. What this allows us to do is challenge her ability to successfully complete a movement with the timing, alignment, sequence, etc. with also dealing with a cognitive demand. I will finish will two examples: one from my experience in the physical therapy world and one from my personal life.
The first is a soccer player who was rehabilitating a reconstructed ACL. She was excelling in the safe and calm environment of my facility. To challenge her, I would stay in the clinic but set colored dots around her on the floor. I would call out a color that she ran to as I passed a ball to her. She had to get to the dot, square up, receive the ball, and shoot it while having proper alignment and mechanics that she had worked tirelessly to master. Alex has combined hoping down the field tuft in sequence while also doing math. Even taking my athletes from the sterile environment of our clinic and going to the bumpy, uneven grass soccer field across the street added another layer of complexity. As physios, we leverage the stress of cognitive processing to improve your movement patterns.
Lastly, as I have said in articles and the podcast, stress is stress. It may not test or feel the same as the real deal but in my opinion, simulating it can help you respond better when things are real. As listeners of the Fuel. Move. Recover. Show know I am heading out on a hunting trip this weekend. If my experience of whitetail deer hunting in Ohio has taught me anything, being 40-50 yards from a screaming bull elk in rut is really going to challenge my ability to stay calm so I execute a safe and ethical shot on the animal. Well, we don’t have any elk in Ohio so I had to come up with another way to stress myself out so I could work on concentrating while shooting my gun. So we would arrange our practice targets and I would run up and down a nearby hill - sometimes with a backpack on - so that when I picked up my gun, I was experiencing some physiological stress that I had to concentrate in spite of.
Take-Home Message
Awareness and control of your emotions are possible. Your emotional intelligence allows you to use all of your emotions correctly while changing from one emotion to the next when it’s appropriate and necessary. I say, ninja because it’s essential that despite what you’re feeling on the inside, that you remain utterly in control of the emotions that are outwardly expressed to others.
Be an Adversity Gymnast. Gymnasts utilize literal obstacles as vaults and springboards to do fantastic, death-defying acrobatics. We can do the same thing with figurative obstacles! Instead of viewing the adversity that comes from obstacles as a reason to stop progress, think of them as performance tools that allow you to reach new heights and different spaces. Some, if not all, of these places you arrive at, would be unreachable without the benefit of the obstacles.
Challenge your mind. We can challenge our control of movement patterns by incorporating mental tasks into our physical tasks. This will challenge your mastery of the movement because of the chaos that comes with multi-tasking.
Get better. Just like Alex or I can help you with your movement game or Lindsay can help you with your Nutrition gain, a Psychologist can help you with your mental game. Remember that seeing a physio (like me or Alex) or seeing a Dietitian (like Lindsay) is not only for those who are “broken” or in dire need of assistance. Well, add a licensed mental skills coach or Psychologist to that make. Use us and the resources we listed above to get the help you need to take your game to the next level!
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