The Science Behind Peak Performance

Todays discussion on peak performance is a continuation of a previous post titled Finding Peak Performance in The Sea of Life. First we’re going to talk about the work of Dr. Debbie Crews of Arizona State University on the importance of a balanced brain. Then we’re going to look briefly at the characteristics of hypnotic susceptibility. Let’s start with Dr. Crews’ research.

Dr. Crews’ Research

Dr. Crews’ research centers on how a balanced brain leads to a better golf game. In one of her projects, Dr. Crews has golfers hit putts on an adjustable putting green. Every few  putts, the green twists, changing the undulations and contours. This means the golfer must reread the green and adjust for distance and direction. It’s the kind thing that’s fun until you have someone looking over your shoulder with every putt.

Measuring Brain Waves

Not only does Dr. Crews watch and rank each putt, she’s also measuring brain waves. She can see things going on in the golfer’s brain, like the left brain firing when the golfer thinks about changing the distance. Then comes the cool part.

Balancing the Brain

Next, she has the golfer stand on a balance board for about ten minutes. Imagine a slab of wood sitting atop a can of beans. Obviously, she feels that physical balance is important. Does physical balance affect mental balance?  You bet and the results are going to blow you away.

Study by Roland A. Carlstedt, Ph.D.

Before we get to the results of Dr. Crew’s study, I want to bring up the work of Roland A. Carlstedt, Ph.D. who is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Director of Integrative Psychological Services of New York City.  He wrote a study titled The Theory of Critical Moments: A Mind-Body Model of Sport Performance and Mastery of Pressure Situations that is truly rigorous and insightful.

Critical Moments Study

Dr. Carlstedt studied critical moments during athletic events as he needed a way to organize data on peak performance. He studied about 600 student athletes in Division I, II and III and looked closely at those critical moments when the contest was on the line. The key moments he studied included:

• A pressure packed free throw shot at a basket ball game
• The intense focus of hitting a baseball during a baseball game
• The skill and concentration to hit a soccer ball squarely on goal during a match

There were others, but you get the point.

Three Key Psychological Factors

Besides these key moments, Dr. Carlstedt also rated the student athletes using three important psychological factors. Basically, he correlated the mental abilities of each student athlete against their success in competition; Talk about a great way to assess the mental aptitude of a group. The three key characteristics are:

• Hypnotic Susceptibility- The ability to be hypnotized. Carlstedt  links hypnotizability with the ability to easily find “The Zone”  and excel in athletic completion with very little effort. Remember the movie “The Natural”?  Paul Newmans character would fall into this category.  Ironically, low hypnotizable athletes can also excel, but for a different reason.  
• Repressive Coping- The ability to stay positive (despite a negative situation) by bringing up positive memories. Basically, Dr. Carlstedt is saying that a positive person moves on  and performs in the moment and doesn’t looking back.
• Neuroticism - The tendency of a person to experience long lasting negative emotions. The negative person, no matter how skilled athletically, will be dragged down by negative events during the game or contest and struggle to recover emotionally.

Hypnotic Susceptibility

I have a point I want to make today, so let’s take a brief look at hypnotic susceptibility. To take the “black magic” out of the study, let me give you little bit of background. To assess hypnotic susceptibility, Carlstedt applied a test (or questionnaire). I did some research into this as I was a bit skeptical. It turns out that there’s a fair amount of research that validates the use of tests as a measure of hypnotic susceptibility. As you probably guessed, the test rated some athletes highly hypnotizable and some low hypnotizable. Most athletes were in the middle.

Athletes who are highly hypnotizable have powerful imaginations and easily apply vivid imagery in their thinking. The key is that during a game, they are able to process the information more automatically. Think of Wayne Gretzky. They say Gretzky had incredible anticipation and always knew where to be on the ice. In basketball, the same was said about Magic Johnson’s ability to see the court.

These are the athletes who enter “the zone” and understand the game because of their ability to process the images they are seeing and react - They get it. Their minds are highly agile. It turns out that people who are highly hypnotizable are physically different.  See ( Horton, Crawford, Harrington,  Downs, 2004) Their corpus callosum (the part of the brain that controls all the activity between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere) is larger.

Being larger, it is more conductive and allows the left and right brain to communicate more efficiently. If an athlete’s left brain needs information from the right brain, he can easily access it. Their minds are not weighted too heavily either way. Their brains are naturally open and in balance. What about yours?

Getting Back To Dr. Crews

When the putting green twists, the golfer must make a judgment. He must use the left side of his brain to take in the information and assemble it. He must also use the right side of his brain to interpret these results and apply the right about amount of force and direction. It’s a unilateral process.

When Dr. Crews put golfers on the balanced board to balance their mind, guess what happened? Their game improved dramatically. In fact, there is a video narrated by Alan Alda that will take you through it. You can see Alda go from hitting 2-3 putts out of ten up to 8 or 9 putts out of 10.

A Balanced Brain is Key

Does it make sense to have a balance board at your cubicle at work? Perhaps. What about during a meeting, on the golf course, making a presentation or taking a test?
What can you do to increase your ability to think evenly and uniformly with both sides of your brain? 

Using Focus Stones could be your answer. We’re preparing to launch Focus Stones in the next few months. If you would like to be part of our Priority Notification list, register here and we will let you know.

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Finding Peak Performance in The Sea of Life

The Struggle to Be Your Best

Every single day you wake up. You get out of bed and then the world smacks you in the face. There is so damn much to do - so much weighing you down that it’s nearly impossible to do any one thing well.

Is There a Way to Overcome The Little Things?

Some things require your complete focus and attention - For instance:

• Maybe you need to raise your grade in a class with a perfect final exam?
• Maybe you’re nervous about delivering a presentation at work?
• Maybe you need to overcome the yips on the 1st nervous hole of your next round of golf?

Finding Peak Performance

If you’ve read this far, you probably have an activity that you want to excel at. Keep that idea in mind as you continue to read. The following chain of posts is going to take a look at some of the science behind performing at your best or operating at peak performance at whatever you do.

I’m a firm believer in gaining perspective. Consider the times in your life when everything was easy. You just did it - You didn’t edit yourself - Critiques were left outside the door. Think back to that day. Man it felt good!

Contemplate that feeling and ask yourself:

• What was happening?
• Why were you so successful?
• Have you ever been able to recreate that feeling with any consistency? If you’re like most people, probably not. Why?

The Left Brained World

Because it’s a left brain world, your left brain (the part of your mind that edits and reviews and criticizes) is incredibly active. You need your left brain to guide you through life. Your left brain tells you not to invest money into one of those crazy Ponzi scheme emails with a rich relative in Nigeria or invest in swampland in Florida (The exception being all the swampland Walt Disney bought in Florida fifty years ago. Yes, that would have been a good investment).

Your left brain is very active as it guides you through some important decisions. Here’s a few examples of how the left brain helps you:

• Paying your bills on time
• Language syntax and punctuation
• Educated, logical business decisions - Much of what you do at work or at school involves analytic left brain thinking.

The problem is that your left brain also holds you back from utilizing all the power in your right brain.

Right Brain Power

Your right brain is full of fantastic abilities that make you special. Your right brain doesn’t hold judgments. The right brain just performs. When you see athletes like Tiger Woods play, you know he has access to his right brain. Listen to what Tiger says after a big win. He says he played within himself and he felt good. He uses the word “feel.” Feeling is a right brained activity.

Go to an art museum and look at a Picasso. Is it possible that Picasso painted with a great deal of logic? No - Picasso’s paintings are beautiful and inspiring, but heads are displaced onto midsections. Eyes are large and colorful. Cubism is a representation of the world. Picasso’s mind, likely his right brain, saw things in a different way.

I’m sure you can think of famous scientists or politicians that you really connect with or business people you admire - all performing at a different level than the rest of us. There are people in this world who overcome the distractions in life and who reach their G-d given potential. These are the people who get the best grades, get the best jobs, make the most money, hit the golf ball more accurately, write with more emphasis and emotion, give the best presentations, etc. These are the people who are able to rise to the occasion and perform in an extraordinary way.

The Question is Why? To better understand this question, we’re going to look at some of the science behind people who have learned to access both the left and right side of the brain. Stay tuned for my next post - The Science Behind Peak Performance.

Left Brain “Mild” Anxiety During Peak Performance

In a previous post Mounting Evidence of Peak Performance, we established how mild anxiety affects your left hemisphere and how panic affects your right hemisphere. Today, we’re going to look exclusively at how social “mild” anxiety is processed in the left hemisphere of your brain and how it affects peak performance.

Imagine the following situation. You’re nearly ready to perform (take a test, swing a golf club, give a presentation, etc.). You sir or madam are ready, but your brain has an issue. There are two mental processes competing for left brain resources.  First, you have the mental processes associated with what you’re doing.

Left Brain is Past Experience - Right Brain is New

In the post The Mounting Evidence of Peak Performance, you can read a summary on the work of Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg of NYU School of Medicine. He has determined that left brain processes are more closely aligned to past experience and right brain processes are more closely aligned with new concepts and ideas and inputs.

The Left Brain

Today we’re looking at the left side. For example:

• If you’re playing golf your left brain remembers how to swing; it guides your alignment; it remembers how hard to swing the club.
• If you’re giving a presentation, your left brain knows the order of topics and what you want to say and when.
• If you’re playing the piano, your left brain remembers when to get ready to turn the page, when to play loudly and when to play softly.

The fact that you’re performing means that people are watching. It means that someone is keeping a score or at least assessing you. It means you are competing. You’re on stage baby. You’re in your own reality show and you’re probably a little bit nervous. Nothing intense mind you - just enough to make you edgy. Your left brain is activated.

The Left Brain Thinks It’s in Total Control

Can your left brain really do two things at once? The problem is that the left brain thinks it’s in total control. It thinks it doesn’t need any help from your right brain, but that isn’t what happens to the peak performers. The people who step up and are the best are the ones using both sides of their brain.

How The Brain Works For Peak Performers

To address how the brains of peak performers function we’re going to look at a study by Dr. Debbie Crews and Dan Landers - “Electroencephalographic Measures of Attentional Patterns Prior to the Golf Putt,” Med. & Sci. in Sports & Exercise, Vol. 25, #1, Jan 1993, pages 116-126). Isn’t that’s a mouthful! This study found that the very best golf putters used the following brain pattern:

• At first when the golfer is setting up over the ball the left side of their brain was the most active. (Doesn’t this sound familiar. This is the left brain process described by Dr. Goldberg. This elevated activity is the left hemisphere mental recall from all the hours of practice.)
• Then (and this is the cool part),  just before the putt, activity in the left hemisphere subsides and gives way to a more active right hemisphere. Somehow these people are able to put aside their nervous anxiety and use their entire mind. They use their left and right brain.

What Happens to the Rest of Us?

For example, what happens to those golfers who choke and are less successful? Just before the moment of impact, they are unable to move the dominant processes to their right brain. They are stuck in left brain mode. They’ve choked. Their anxiety is activating left brain activity and the anxiety is not letting go. You’ve probably seen people in this mode in everyday life.

Let’s use presentations as another example. Have you ever seen someone say something embarrassing in the middle of a presentation and suddenly they turn red? Their brain locks up. They lose their way as they are consumed by the thoughts going on in their mind - thinking things like”I’m so stupid,” ”Why did I say that” or “Why can’t I edit what I say.” These people are engaged in negative self talk - Doubt has crept into their presentation and they’ll probably never recover.

On the other hand a confident speaker will allow himself to speak extemporaneously and if something odd does come out, they’ll simply shrug it off and move onto the next topic. The confident speaker doesn’t feel any nervousness and lets it all flow.

Left Brain - Right Brain Balance

Yes, you need some alignment between the two hemispheres. You need a method. You need a way to stay focused and on task even when you know you’re going to be a little bit nervous. You need a way to activate your right brain during critical moments.

Mounting Evidence of Peak Performance

Today, I learned something about peak performance and how the left brain and right brain work and I’m so excited to share it with all of you. 

I found this incredible book by Elkhonon Goldberg, a Clinical Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine. In the book titled The Paradox of Wisdom: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older (2005), Dr. Goldberg looks at how the left brain and right brain learn. This is the type of information that’s really interesting if you read it on msnbc.com, but without context you might just say, so What! - Today I’m going to add a little context.

Left Brain - Familiarity

Dr. Goldberg goes into extensive detail describing how the left hemisphere is predominant once you have a task completely figured out. Take for example a tennis player who has developed a killer forehand after hours and hours of practice. The brain processing, in order to hit the killer forehand, is weighted to the left brain. This is because the process of hitting the forehand has been practiced over and over - it’s ingrained in the left brain.

How did this knowledge get into the left brain? Well, it turns out there is an order to things and the order is best described by a single question. (Isn’t there always an important question!) Your brain asks: Have I confronted this challenge before?

Right Brain - New Ideas

Whenever you see or experience something, you’re brain applies a filter. It questions and then decides how to handle the idea. A new idea is handled differently than a familiar concept or thought. It turns out that a new challenge or novel idea is principally handled in the right brain and a familiar routine (hitting a well practiced forehand for example) is principally managed in the left brain.

For example, Dr. Goldberg points out that the face of a new acquaintance is processed in the right brain and the face of an old friend is processed primarily in the left brain. The data is undeniable. Right is new - Left is past experience. When a professional musician plays, the left brain is predominantly active. When I play, I’m “all thumbs” and I’m predominately right brain. I’m trying to learn and it’s new to me. The process of learning is right brained.

The sooner you move the processing into your left brain, the more quickly you build competence. The trick then is to figure out how to build competence quickly, moving the processing from your right brain into your left brain.
 
But there is a rather big issue with the left brain. The left brain doesn’t only efficiently execute tasks that have been learned. It’s also an editor and a critic. The left brain is built to analyze and dissect. Imagine what happens when things go wrong?

Left Brain - Golf

Let’s use golf as an example. You’re playing a great round when suddenly you make a dumb mistake. You release your left hip early.  Now on every shot, you’re over analyzing your stance, you’re thinking about your position and alignment. You’ve gone from playing your game to dying over every shot, hoping that you only have to play nine holes instead of eighteen. The problem is the left brain - its own worst enemy.

Stay tuned for my next post - Left Brain “Mild” Anxiety during Peak Performance. If you think mental and physical balance plays a role, you’re definitely onto me.

When Tests Keep You From Achieving Your Goals

We’ve all heard the story…the sad luck story of, “I had the grades. If I only could have done better on the SAT, I would have gotten into the right college.” And as my mother in-law says, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

Tests can be a hurdle due to obscure questions, rarely used words and math problems that seem otherworldly. Yet, for those planning to go to college, SATs are a necessity of life. You have to take them and you have to do well.

Tragic is the young person who has decent grades but is unable to get a good SAT score. Maybe they have test anxiety. Maybe they don’t like taking exams in a crowded lecture hall. Whatever the case may be, their test scores don’t reflect their true ability. It’s heartbreaking when the SAT becomes an arbitrary wall that keeps them from moving. In fact, many studies show that SAT tests have proven to be an invalid predictor of future success. What SATs are good for is identifying kids with extremely high IQs and filtering out kids with very low academic ability.

For the rest of us, including myself – the average, the mediocre, the masses – the SAT was basically useless as a predictor of later success. The more important characteristic is the ability to persevere. More on this another time…

Here’s the question – For those of us that are average, how do we get better at the eternal SAT? What can we do to improve our score? It’s obviously important. Those of us average people who do well will go to the best schools. And yes, you can always take SAT training, which has been proven to help to a degree, but that’s not really my point today.

Ask yourself the following question: What would happen if you could take the SAT in the comfort of your own home, where you could stand up for a moment to stretch, take a walk to solve a particularly vexing problem or just lean back on your favorite pillow and think? Would you get a cup of coffee? Go to Starbucks? The test taking environment is difficult – painfully so. It’s almost another form of hazing. I know because I suffered through it.

Wouldn’t it be better to give someone unlimited time to answer the question? Perhaps, but would that be fair? Would it be better to allow students to take the test in the comfort of their own home? Perhaps, but that wouldn’t be fair as it couldn’t be administered.

So, we put our children through all-day tests in a ridiculous feat of extended concentration. Consider how many of us are at our desks at work for 5-6 hours without hardly uttering a word or taking a minute to check out a baseball score or stock price or simply just to read the latest in entertainment news. My point is simple. The tests and the resulting anxiety that comes from these tests is unnatural.

Even Focus Stones can’t take the place of a real break and a more relaxed test taking environment. When I look back on the importance of these silly tests, how I felt while taking them and how the results could have impacted my life, it frustrates me - just a little.

I really don’t have an easy solution, but what I do know is that the people who excel at these tests fit a distinct profile. They are the linear left brain dominant thinkers who can quickly work through the logic of any problem, memorize any passage and recall information in 2 nanoseconds from years ago.

Cheers to the right brain thinkers. Cheers to the men and women who think outside the box and read the nuance of what was supposed to be simple. Perhaps, all we need is a little more non-linear thinking to move us all forward in the world!

Overcoming Being Tired - What Would a Marine Do?

We’ve all been at the point in our lives when we have too much to do. When eye lids feel like heavy curtains falling down our face. You ask yourself how you’re going to get it all done. You have to make a choice. Do you struggle through it and try to force your mind to pay attention? It’s tortuous, especially when you’re doing something really boring. Or do you catch a quick nap and put your head down on hear desk? Maybe you stroll over to Starbucks for an Americano or Latte. That old caffeine buzz is always a good for a quick jolt of mental focus and concentration.

Thinking Like a Marine

They’ve been trained to think clearly even when they haven’t slept for days. Sleep deprivation – bring it on.
So what’s the difference between you and a marine? Why can they do it while you and I struggle on some days just to make it through an afternoon?

First of all, I believe it’s the wrong question. In recent studies, a local psychologist in Chicago tested pianists during performances. Each of the pianists knew the piece cold. Because they knew the piece so well, they could concentrate on the nuance and the art - thus, perform proportionately better. Their brain wasn’t trying to work anything out. The brain was not working on any logic or trying to understand how one note led to the next. The mechanics of hitting the right notes was already second nature. Does the fact they play this surprise anybody?

Here’s an interesting question. What would happen if you deprived one of these pianists of sleep and asked them to perform? How would they do? As far as I know, this test has not ben done, but here’s my hypothesis on the outcome. They would do pretty well. They’re trained in all the mechanics and they know what to expect. The rules of playing the piano are predetermined.

How does this compare to a marine? In warfare, a marine is just as highly trained. During the chaos of a military action they know all the rules. They know what to do in just about any situation. Their training is to reduce the chance of error from an unexpected situation. Thus, the highly trained pianist and the highly trained marine can rely on memory and rules.

However, what about a task that’s new - an unpracticed extemporaneous speech for example? How about site reading a new piece of music or answering an SAT question on a topic you know nothing about? That’s when it gets tricky. You’re tired and you’re supposed to learn something. It feels like slogging through mud. We’ve all ben there.

There are all kinds of people in this world and they think in many different ways, but for the most part, there are left brain dominant thinkers and right brain dominant thinkers.

Left Brain Thinkers

In situations where you need to think quickly in a logical manner, the left brainers have a huge advantage. Logical thinking is how they are programmed. Let’s consider a left brained marine, a left brained pianist and a left brained student taking the SAT. A left brained marine knows what rules to follow and what to do. He knows enough to interpret the situation and make a judgment call. A left brained pianist would also perform quite well – maybe not perfectly, but well with a few fits and starts. A left brained student taking an SAT test would able to work through the logic of the SAT and receive a decent score. (It is well documented that the SAT is really a test of logic and rapid comprehension.)

Right Brain Thinkers

What about the poor right brain thinkers? What would a right brained marine do? He would remember the rules a little more slowly and with a little more difficulty. He might waffle for few minutes as he considers what action to take and he would see many different alternatives. For obvious reasons, this would not be ideal during a time of war, but likely perfect during peace time.

A right brain pianist would probably struggle through the piece the first time. As an example, there are stores of Pavarotti performing horribly the first time he sang a new score. Al Pacino, during filming is also well known for requiring many, many takes. He seems to struggle at first, but after a few practices, he suddenly delivers an outstanding performance.

Then you have the right brained students forced to take the SAT-a test that measures the speed and logic of the left brain. Of course they are going to struggle. In fact, Dr. Robert Steinber of Yale University has proposed adding a section to the SAT to capture the creativity and ability of students to connect disparate information. Do right brained dominant students struggle on the SAT? Most certainly. They are taking a test designed for someone else.

Stay tuned for future posts on the specific things you can do to think more clearly - especially when you’re tired and on how right brainers can learn to function better in a left brain dominated world.