The way we think doesn’t get shaped overnight. It comes from years of experiences. Then the strories we tell ourselves about those experience. Those stories build a belief system that suggests to us, this is how the world works. Let’s pause for a moment and think about how important and dangerous this trait of ours is. One part of the world looks at a crop damaging storm as a combination of cold fronts slamming into hot air, while another group of people are convinced the gods have cursed them and child sacrifice is the only way to make the wheat grow again.
Ten years of observing athletes at every level I’ve come to this conclusion. How they think is their biggest skill set. The way they receive information exposed to them. I believe the meaning they place to what’s happening to them is the agent to all of their behavior. Let me explain what I mean.
It was my first year as a head strength coach and I thought I was God’s gift to strength and conditioning. We did all the cool kid stuff, appropriate demand, undulating programing, readiness questionnaires, rate of perceived exertion, the whole shebang a “great” coach does. We were strong, lean and could run for days. I did my job right? I couldn’t wait to tell everyone how smart I was.
That season we went on to get our heads kicked in for 12 weeks. I watched “tough” guys quit, “Great kids” refuse to practice. Apathy blanketed the organization and it physically hurt to come in to work every day just a couple months removed from the “best offseason of training ever.” We didn’t have a physical issue, or a lack of talent, we had a mindset epidemic. The way our team viewed the world was poisonous, especially for the adversity that was to come like a flash flood no one forecasted. Like the upside down in Hawkins Indiana (Stranger Things reference) it had been building for years right under our nose and no one knew it existed. Three seasons of 10 plus wins a year payed for by uperclassmen who had since moved on started to shape a certain way of thinking. Winning was easy because we were better than everyone and that’s just what we do. The prior experiences shaped the younger players born into all the winning into believing “if you’re really good at something, results come easy.” It’s the perfect recipe for getting punched in the mouth and blaming God for your misery when real competition shows up. The players where like the grandsons to a fortune five hundred company. Accustomed to the wealth but ignorant to the struggle that paid for it all. I had failed to show them who paid, and how much it cost. My first real lesson as a coach was clear, hard aint wrong and easy isn’t right. People need to struggle and they need guided feedback of why they struggled. When people experience improvement through struggle they start to respect the strain. The more they respect the process it took to get there, the more value they perceive in the result. It’s why construction contractors don’t BS other construction contractors. The real ones know what it costs to get the job done. And little haggling has to take place or price. But someone naive to the blood sweat and tears paid for the results at hand, finds it difficult to understand why it’s so expensive.
Angela Duckworth, bestselling author and the world’s leading researcher in GRIT atPenn University told me our brains turn off or on based on our experiences with pain at an early age. In a way too short synopsis of the research, the gist of it is this. Kids exposed to “random acts of mental violence,” extreme poverty, verbal and physical abuse start to take a certain view of the world. They start to believe the world is a cold, hateful place and they might as well get what they can from people before they get them. The pain experiences can be so potent that parts of the brain responsible for pain shut down as a defense mechanism, (emotional shock if you will).. Consequently that part of the brain is also responsible for feeling empathy and compassion for others. In just a few years of adolescence we have the perfect recipe for creating cut throats, Pirates that only care about themselves, because survival is their only interest. How as coaches, or teachers or pastors do we help people that are only interested in survival, care about things like empathy for others, and a strong work ethic.
It seems counterintuitive, but the answer, more strain, more discomfort. To take a human whose experienced this much trauma and take them through more strain seems almost cruel. Let me explain, Duckworth went on to describe a term known as pain mastery experiences. Pain and discomfort itself are not the damagers to the brain. It was the painful event’s randomness and the child’s perceived lack of control over the event that caused the neurological event.
We have take people through small consistent encounters with discomfort. Ones where they are always the master of their own fate. They can stop or prolong their discomfort with their actions. Slowly over time, the brain begins to rewire the circuits into a belief system that they are in control. I’ve witnessed this beautiful paradigm shift. I’ve witnessed kids become more resilient because they believed they are in the drivers seat. They make things happen, things dont happen to them. The transaction of their lives is no longer contingent on what people might do to them so they are much more likely to allow themselves to trust one another. If you can take away one thing let it be this. Pain and discomfort are not the enemies of happiness and love, they are the compass to them when applied with expertise. In the next article we will go in depth as to just what that looks like and how to be the guide to make your child, students and athletes the hero again.