The BEST that LIFE can offer: orienting toward your highest purpose

 

Interview with V V S Laxman

Creating Routines for Self Improvement - Part 4 from Thinking in Bets

Extracts from Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

In 2004 Phil Ivey destroyed a start studded table in a poker tournament. After his win, during dinner, Ivey deconstructed every potential playing error he thought he might have made on the way to victory, asking others’ for their opinion about each strategic decision. A more run of the mill player might have spent the time talking about how great they played, relishing the victory. Not Ivey. For him, the opportunity to learn from his mistakes was much more important than treating the dinner as a self-satisfying celebration.

Ivey, clearly has different habits than most players and most people in any endeavor in how he fields his results. Habits operate in a neurological loop consisting of three parts: the cue, the routine and the reward. In cricket the cue might be a won game, the routine taking credit for it and the reward is a boost to our ego. To change a habit you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward but insert a new routine.

What we do: When we have a good outcome, it cues the routine of crediting the result to our awesome decision-making, delivering the reward of a positive update to our self-narrative. A bad outcome cues the routine of off-loading responsibility for the result, delivering the reward of avoiding a negative self-narrative update. With the same cues, we flip the routine for the outcomes of our peers, but the reward is the same – feeling good about ourselves.

The good news is that we can work to change this habit of mind by substituting what makes us feel good. The golden rule of habit change says we don’t have to give up the reward of a positive update to our narrative, nor should we.

We can work to get the reward of feeling good about ourselves from being a good credit-giver, a good mistake-admitter, a good finder of mistakes in good outcomes, a good learner and a good decision maker. Instead of feeling bad when we have to admit a mistake, what if the bad feeling came from the thought that we might be missing a learning opportunity just to avoid blame? Or that we might be basking in the credit of a good result instead of recognizing, like Ivey, where we could have done better? If we put in the work to practice this routine, we can field more of our outcomes in an open minded, more objective way, motivated by accuracy and truth-seeking to drive learning. The habit of mind will change, and our decision making will better align with our long term goals.

When we look at the people performing at the highest level of their chosen field, we find they have developed habits around accurate self-critique.

Changing the routine is hard and takes work.

How do batsmen cope with the intensity of their lonely skill?

Digging the pitch, repetitive body movements, talking to themselves, superstitious behaviour, visualisation - different ways that batsmen deal with the pressure of their profession


Michael Bond in Cricinfo


All sportspeople like to imagine that their discipline is the most mentally challenging, that winning or losing comes from within. But batsmen have a stronger claim than most. What other sport demands such intense concentration, affords participants so little control over their situation and penalises mistakes so cruelly and with such dramatic ritual?

Batting is a game of life and death like no other. Success - a century, a match-saving last stand - can live with you forever. But getting out feels like the end of everything: you are dismissed not just from the field of play, but from your own dreams of hopefulness and redemption.

---Also read

THE MASKS WE WEAR

----

Dismissed batsmen are like mourners at their own funerals. The dressing room falls silent as they return, "in respect for the dead", as Mike Brearley puts it in The Art of Captaincy (1985).

"There aren't many situations in sport where you have this challenge of one tiny mistake and that's it, finished, the rest of the day you're watching from the sidelines," says sports psychologist Steve Bull, who worked with the England cricket team for 17 years. "It creates a particular type of pressure which I don't think other athletes experience."

Given the intensity of the mental drama, it is little wonder that a batsman's struggles are with himself as much as with the bowler he faces, and that a lack of confidence can invite negative thinking and a fear of failure. For top-level batsmen with near-perfect technical skills, protecting themselves from such tendencies is critical. The methods they use to reduce anxiety, stay positive and maintain focus are idiosyncratic, often eccentric and tell us as much about the quirks of the human mind as the nuances of cricket.

If you watched England's three-match Test series against Sri Lanka this summer, you will have spotted a graphic example of one of these methods. Before each ball, the Sri Lankan opener Kaushal Silva performs what psychologists call a "pre-performance routine". He adjusts the velcro on his gloves, moves his bat from his left to his right hand and holds it up in front of him, moves his left elbow back and forth eight times (fewer if he's facing a spinner) as if pulling on an imaginary rope, then, gripping his bat with both hands, arches his back before settling into his crease.

The repetition looks neurotic, but Silva has developed it to help him feel settled. "I don't really count the exact number of times I do it, it just comes from my body," he says. "I do it until I have calmed my nerves and I feel OK and I'm really focused. These small things help me to be myself and to just concentrate on the next ball."

It seems to be working. Sri Lanka lost 0-2, but Silva won his team's Player-of-the-Series award for his 193 runs.

Most batsmen have pre-performance routines, though few as elaborate as Silva's. They might wander a few steps towards square leg, tap the bat on the ground a particular way or pull at their shirt. What psychological purpose does this serve? Brearley thinks it's "a way of clearing the mind of the last ball, getting on with the next one, making clear to oneself that a line needs to be drawn under the last one".

In Jonathan Trott's case this is literally true. He marks his guard with a shallow trench, which he reinforces before each delivery, as if to bury everything that's gone before, a habit he repeats whether he's batting in the nets or in a county or international game.

Such repetition is critical to why routines work, says Bull. "It has to be 100% consistent, every ball always the same. You need to get your routines habitualised to the point where you don't think about them, to practise them so that when you're in the middle you go into automatic pilot."

In other words, batsmen should tune their mental routines alongside their physical ones so that the two coalesce. Consider Kevin Pietersen's advice to a 12-year-old budding cricketer who asked him on Twitter how to stop "second-guessing" himself when playing a shot, a common mental error among cricketers still developing their technique. "Practise, practise, practise, and trust your practise," Pietersen replied. "Hardest thing to do but when you do it changes your game."

Perhaps the most tangible function of routines is that they give the batsman a sense of control over a situation which, for the most part, is out of their hands. The state of the wicket, the weather, the path of the ball through the air and off the pitch are beyond his reckoning; his pre-ball ritual is all his own. This need for control amid so much uncertainty may explain why batsmen are particularly prone to superstitions. Unlike a pre-performance routine, a superstition - essentially an irrational belief in implausible causality - is unlikely to improve performance. Yet cricket is full of them.

The Glamorgan opener Steve James avoided eating duck meat until he retired, and he wouldn't allow his daughter to have plastic ducks in her bath. Mike Atherton had to be first on to the field at the start of an innings, even if it meant barging past his opening partner on the way down the pavilion steps. The South African batsman Neil McKenzie used to tape his bat to the dressing-room ceiling because his team-mates had once done this as a practical joke prior to him scoring a century. Steve Waugh batted with a red rag in his pocket for similar reasons.

Derek Randall, like many batsmen, hated being on 13. "I couldn't wait to get off it," he says. "Sometimes I'd get out because I was trying too hard to get off the blooming thing."

Ed Smith, one of the most notoriously superstitious cricketers, had a habit of asking the umpire, mid-over, how many balls were left. For the first part of his career he did this always after the fourth ball, then switched to asking after the third ball. Since he batted for around 15,000 overs in his career, he must have asked this question of the umpire around 15,000 times.

"It was silly and I knew it," he writes in Luck: A Fresh Look at Fortune (2012). "It was unintelligent and I knew it. It was a source of mirth and I knew it. But I did it anyway. Superstition was a dependency I found hard to give up."

Many batsmens' superstitions revolve around an obsession with their kit. Trott is scrupulous about how he arranges his bats. Atherton always followed the same padding-up routine: box, chest guard, inside thigh-pad, outside thigh-pad, left pad, right pad, arm guard, gloves, helmet. This kind of fastidiousness is not too surprising since batting is much about organisation, repetition and structure.

Yet rigorously adhering to a ritual is unlikely to put you in the runs and could make things worse. "If the superstition is something you might not have control over, like wearing your lucky socks, what happens when you lose your lucky socks or they fall apart," says sports psychologist Stewart Cotterill. "It will have the opposite effect: you'll feel you're not ready."

Once all the fussing and the rituals and the routines are done and the batsman is settled at the crease, he can then focus on the bowling. This is where the real test begins. Unless you are an expert meditator, paying close sustained attention to something for long periods can be mentally draining. To deal with this, coaches encourage batsmen to "dial up" their focus when the bowler is running in and "dial down" between balls.

Atherton says switching on and off like this is "absolutely vital" and came easily to him, a naturally relaxed character. "All studies show you can't concentrate for lengthy periods without a break. The ball is 'live' for maybe six to ten seconds, so that is all you have to concentrate for."

Silva pares down the window of concentration even further, to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. He calculates that this way, if he sets out to score a century in, say, 180 to 200 balls, he will have to concentrate deeply for just ten to 15 minutes. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier. You don't worry about the long term, you just focus on the particular ball."

"Mental skills are like physical skills. You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives"

STEVE BULL, SPORTS PSYCHOLOGIST

The thought of surviving hours at the crease can seem overwhelming if you don't break it down.

Tammy Beaumont, who this summer became the first woman to hit back-to-back ODI centuriesfor England, during the series against Pakistan, worries only about the next five runs. "I'll tell myself: get to five, once I get to five get to ten, keep it like that, keep it all about the next ball."

Another approach is to segment time. Brearley and Randall did this during the Centenary Testbetween England and Australia in Melbourne in 1977. Needing 463 to win with a wicket down, they decided to take it in 15-minute sections. "Stick at it, Skip. In ten minutes there'll only be 15 minutes to tea," Brearley recalls Randall saying, in The Art of Captaincy. They lost by 45 runs; Randall scored 174.

You don't have to be an international or even a professional cricketer to benefit from these mental heuristics. Bull says the key difference between elite and "Sunday afternoon batsmen" is that "Sunday afternoon batsmen tend to overcomplicate things. They're standing there tapping the ground as the bowler runs in, thinking about where the fields are, thinking about their left-hand grip, where their shoulders are. The best players in the world are just standing there saying: watch the ball."

Mental routines are a way to simplify things, to shut out technical thoughts, memories of mistimed shots and other internal distractions, and to help the batsman settle into a state of readiness that Bull calls "relaxed alertness". But routines alone may not be enough, especially in international games where the pressures can be immense. To settle nerves and maintain confidence through an innings, many batsmen engage in what used to be considered a symptom of mental illness but is now recognised as fully functional: talking to yourself.

In a 2013 study at an English first-class cricket club, psychologists at Cardiff Metropolitan University found that batsmen used self-talk regularly, either to motivate themselves in challenging situations - when walking out to bat, for example, or after a poor shot - or to deliver instructional cues that focus attention, such as "Watch the ball!"

In fact, "Watch the ball" seems to be the default cue for most batsmen. Ricky Ponting used it. You can sometimes see Eoin Morgan mouthing it before a ball. Beaumont, after watching one of Ponting's masterclasses, adopted it then adapted it - her current cue is "Time the ball, play straight". Easy if you know how.

One of the most notorious self-talkers in cricket history is Randall. He did it constantly and out loud. "It was spontaneous, it was a natural thing to do. When I'm nervous I start talking. It would help me concentrate. It annoyed everybody, including the people who played with me."

During the fourth Test of the 1978-79 Ashes, when Randall scored 150 during the second innings and turned the series in England's favour, his monologue continued throughout the nine hours and 42 minutes he spent at the crease. Here's a snatch of it, as related to Sunday Times journalist Dudley Doust by his opponents and team-mates: "Come on, Rags," he says. "Get stuck in. Don't take any chances. Get forward, get forward. Get behind the ball. Take your time, slow and easy. You idiot, Rags. Come on, come. Come on, England."

Younis Khan, who averages 53.72 in Test cricket and is Pakistan's highest-ever run scorer, also talks to himself all the time when he's at the wicket. But he has a slightly different approach to most, conducting his conversations with an alter ego that he conjures up as he goes out to bat.

"I imagine there is a guy standing in front of me and he is Younis Khan, and just talk with him. It's like there are two Younis Khans standing face to face like a boxer, and they are talking and looking each other in the eyes. Come on, Younis Khan, you can do this, you can do that."

Self-talk can keep you focused, and it can also help maintain confidence, without which batting can feel like Russian roulette. Mark Ramprakash, the England men's batting coach, says confidence and self-belief are "absolutely paramount. They can work wonders: they can make up for a less-than-perfect technique. The thing with cricket is that you have a lot of bad days. You make one wrong decision, or someone takes a great catch. The best players, like Alastair Cook, are incredibly resilient to those bad days. They maintain a belief in their own ability."

Ramprakash himself suffered a crisis of belief early on in his England career when he failed to make a big score and began to question whether he belonged at Test level. Then in 1998 he started working with Bull, brought in by England as team psychologist.

"He gave me a very simple framework of coping with all the scrambled thoughts that were going on in my head," says Ramprakash.

Silva pares down the window of concentration to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier"

It proved pivotal. Soon after meeting Bull he scored 154 against West Indies in Barbados - his first Test century - and then topped the averages the following winter in Australia. His team-mate Atherton, writing in his autobiography, said he sensed at the time that Ramprakash was "a totally different person, and consequently, player".

Today the mental side of batting and the pressures that come with playing at international level are taken very seriously by England's management, due in no small part to Ramprakash's influence. Yet confidence is a fickle trait. Sometimes it's necessary to fake it to make it, so to speak. Psychologists have known for decades that feelings and emotions stem from changes in the body, rather than the other way round - a phenomenon known as embodied cognition - which means it's possible to generate confidence simply by acting it out.

"Shadow batting" - practising sublime strokes between balls - or walking out to bat with head held high, can have a positive effect on the way you play. The sports psychologist Jamie Barker, who works with Nottinghamshire Cricket Club and the ECB's performance programme, makes a point of getting players to focus on their body language as they leave the pavilion, to appear confident even if they don't feel it: "If you're assertive, your brain will pick up on that."

Another way of "faking" confidence is to visualise the way you want to play in your mind's eye before the game begins. In 1974, early in his career, Randall suffered four first-class innings in a row without scoring a run. "It was a nightmare," he says. "The pressure just builds on you." So on the morning of his fifth innings he got up early and arrived at the ground while it was still deserted, strapped on his pads, walked out to the middle, played a cover drive and took a run, "just to remember what it was like". He scored 93 that day.

Ramprakash encourages England's batsmen to use this kind of visualisation, which serves as a cognitive rehearsal for the main event. There is much evidence that it works. One problem with all these approaches is that worrying too much about your own performance can easily make things worse. Steven Sylvester, Middlesex's psychologist and author of the recent book Detox Your Ego(2016), thinks that for players at the top of their game what really matters is "where your heart is, why am I here?"

The important thing, he says, is to believe at an emotional level that you are playing not for yourself but for your team or your country, or some other ideal that transcends you. "When players start to think about their performance as serving the group it increases their self-esteem, their belief goes up and they become a bit freer in their skills. It gives them a little bit extra."

In 2013, Sylvester helped Australia and Middlesex batsman Chris Rogers after he was called up to the Ashes squad more than five years after his previous Test. "It became blindingly obvious that his fear of representing his country in the Ashes as an opening batsman was stopping him from moving forward," he says. "Through a deep discussion of how to serve his country he came up with a more compelling reason to doing well than if it was just about him."

Sylvester coached Moeen Ali through a similar process, helping him put his cricket in the context of his faith and his desire to be a role model. The Pakistan batsman Asad Shafiq, who has scored eight Test centuries at No. 6 - a world record - gives an equally compelling reason for his own success: "To bat at No. 6 you have to be patient, as most of the time the tailenders are with you. You have to give them confidence and support."

Shafiq is batting not just for himself, but for Nos. 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 as well. He epitomises CLR James' portrait in his classic Beyond a Boundary (1963) of the batsman as the ultimate team player. When facing the ball, writes James, he "does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side."

Without doubt, all batsmen can improve their confidence, resilience and other mental attributes if they're willing to practise. "Mental skills are like physical skills," says Bull. "You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives."

Yet it also seems clear that some people are inherently better at this than others. In 2005, Bull carried out a psychological analysis of 12 English cricketers from the previous two decades whom county coaches had identified as the toughest mentally in the country. Among them were Atherton, Graham Gooch and Alec Stewart. Bull found them all to be highly competitive and motivated, full of self-confidence and with a never-say-die attitude, some of which derived from their upbringing, some from the teams they had played with and some from their personality.

For the rest of us, it is comforting to know that we can learn such skills - and that even the greats can struggle at times. Even Don Bradman called batting "a nerve-racking business". In The Art of Cricket (1958), he implores us to give a thought to the batsman's travails as he wends his way to the wicket: "He is human like you, and desperately anxious to do well."

How the science of sport can boost exam revision

Training your brain to revise well can be a bit like football training Picture: Alamy 

By Simon Briggs in The Telegraph

6:29PM GMT 27 Mar 2015

  

Jon Finn recently won the Education Initiative of the Year award for his programme Tougher Minds, which takes the insights of sports psychology and applies them to the classroom. Here he boils down the latest scientific research into a 12-point guide.

Tougher Minds from Pre-Shot on Vimeo.

The holy trinity

1. Before you even start planning your revision, you need to be aware of three key factors in the performance of your brain: sleep, diet and exercise. And the greatest of these three is sleep. Britain’s cycling trailblazers Team Sky value it so highly that they employ a sleep scientist during the Tour de France. So for the next few nights, rank your sleep quality out of ten each morning, as well as recording what time you went to bed and woke up. If you’re getting less than nine hours a night, try staying away from electronic screens for an hour before bedtime.

Mapping out your sessions

^{Setting small achievable goals will help you map out your revision and keep an eye on your progress}

2. The next stage is to set some goals. Use the four-column principle: write down each subject, the grade you got in your mocks, how much effort you are currently putting in (out of 100), and finally the grade you’re aiming for. Don’t make it easy: stretch yourself. Put the grid somewhere you can see it: on the fridge or in front of your desk.

• Teens 'cram revision into one night'
• Time for a new vision of revision?

3. Now write a brief revision plan for the next three days. Most people want to work on the subjects they like, but this can mean you’ll get polarised results: As and Ds, for instance. The better you are at a subject, the harder it is to improve, so spend more time on the weaker ones.

4. Follow the 20:20 rule. Research shows us that a golfer who stands on the range and hits shots with a varied sequence of clubs every day does better than a golfer who hits her driver on Monday, her five-iron on Tuesday and so on. The same applies when you’re revising: you’ll improve quicker if you spend 20 minutes on one subject, and then move on to the next. Aim to fit around 20x20-minute sessions into a day; that’s about the equivalent of being at school.

But do put some “Break” sessions in, because most people fare better when they don’t abandon their work-life balance completely. Some might want to reward themselves with an occasional 20 minutes on the Xbox, others will prefer to make time for netball practice or meeting friends. Also include a few “Flexible” entries, because some subjects will probably require more attention than you expected. Use a kitchen timer if possible, not the dreaded iPhone, because it only does one thing and won’t distract you.

How each session should work

^{Your twenty minute sessions should be like interval training, in that your confidence grows with time}

5. Our next piece of sports science is called functional equivalence. When revising, try to simulate the conditions you’ll be tested in, in the same way that Jonny Wilkinson repeatedly practised the drop-goal that won the 2003 rugby World Cup in training. So don’t revise with loud music banging away, or with your parent helping you, or by reading all day and not writing at all. Yes, in your 20-minute slot, you’ll need to look at your notes – especially in essay subjects – but then close your book or your folder and write out some answers, as if giving yourself a 10-minute mini-exam. You could even go so far as to wear the same clothes you will wear in the exam; every little helps!

6. Repeat to remember; remember to repeat. It’s estimated that you need to go over facts four or five times, at spaced-out intervals, to achieve long-term recall. When Jon trains his students, he talks about “turning cobwebs to cables”, which is a reference to the way neurons form strong pathways through repetition. But as with weight training, you don’t do it all at once; you build up your muscles over a sequence of days and weeks. One practical option here is to use the Leitner System: a card-index approach in which you rank topics according to how confident you are with them, and then organise them so that the trickier ones come up more often.

7. Don’t expect revision to be fun! It’s important to remember that we are not well evolved for schoolwork. We still have the same basic cognitive framework as our prehistoric ancestors, who generally lived for 20 to 35 years, and so were designed to seek short-term rewards rather than building skills that might help them over the long term. Your inner caveman is probably going to get frustrated and cranky at the lack of instant satisfaction in this process. He is going to look for distractions, so lock that mobile phone in another room, and turn off your internet connection if you’re using a computer. It’s better to work with pen and paper anyway, because of point No. 6 above.

8. Build your house of confidence. At the end of each 20-minute session, identify three things you have learned or done well in that time. Because your caveman is designed for survival, he is always on the look-out for threats and negative thoughts – the voice in the back of your head that says “You will never be able to do this; it’s boring and you’re wasting your time.” A little upbeat checklist should help you gain a small sense of short-term satisfaction and so keep negativity at bay. Once you have done that, select one thing you can improve on when you return to that topic next time.

Self-reflection

^{While regularly checking your progress helps, putting your phone away will alllow you to really focus}

9. Assess yourself at the end of the day in a closing ceremony, an expanded version of what you did at the end of each session. How well did you follow the plan? Which sessions were most effective? Was there a pattern to times of the day when you achieved more? It probably feels like the last thing you want to do after a hard day at your desk, but this is actually where the greatest benefits are to be found. Athletes make good role models here because they track every detail of their lives, and use the data to optimise their performance levels.

• Ten ways to make the most of your Easter revision
• Last minute revision tips

10. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Your basic unit of study doesn’t have to be exactly 20 minutes – it could be 15 or 30 if that suits you better. Likewise, if your textbook is not helping you understand a certain topic, try searching on YouTube for a video that might present it from a different angle. Or if you suddenly hit a mental block, leave your desk and go for a walk before coming back to it later. Whatever changes you make, they need to be assessed during your closing ceremony. If they’re working for you, you might want to incorporate them into your routine (see 12).

11. One key variable that we haven’t talked about is “activation” – otherwise described as your energy levels. Most people find that their basic activation levels are too low, and therefore benefit from pumping themselves up when they come to study. They might want to do some jogging on the spot or push-ups before they sit down at their desk, but there are others who are happier to be calm. To optimise your productivity, you need to work out where you stand on that spectrum. Here's how to check.

Sample Activation Check

What is activation? It is a concept created to replace the term anxiety. Anxiety is not always bad for learning and performance; you just need to understand how to control it. The symbol below is the activation scale. Low numbers on the scale represent feeling clam and relaxed. If you are at a low number on the scale your breathing and heart rate will be slow. Zero on the scale indicates that you are dead! High numbers on the scale denote being pumped up, nervous or anxious - depending on how you interpret these feelings. If you are at a high number on the scale your breathing and heart rate will be high. You are always somewhere on the scale. Sitting at your desk and writing, aim for a 50 on the activation scale.

^{The activation scale}

You must check and actively manage your activation at the beginning of each 20-minute period to maximise your learning. As the day goes on, achieving the correct activation level can become challenging. You may find it difficult to achieve an optimal activation level during every session. Without good levels of sleep, diet and exercise it will be difficult to manage your activation.

Source: Tougher Minds

Try giving yourself an activation score out of 100 before each 20-minute session, and then at the end of the day look back and see how effective your revision was; a pattern should soon emerge that reveals your optimum score:

12. Once you have found a formula that works, make it a routine. Every professional golfer follows a precise sequence of steps before hitting the ball – both physically and mentally. What makes these people successful, even more than hand-eye coordination, is the ability to control their thoughts when the going gets tough.

• Click here for a free performance planner

Try to master the same single-mindedness in your revision: there is no more valuable skill, at school or in the rest of your life, than self-discipline.