Psyched Up

by Daniel McGinn

  Zinsser instructs Quinn to load the track onto his phone and listen to it before every practice and game. Quinn says he’s going to play it before going to sleep, as well.

  The psychologist, who is sixty-two, with a wiry body and receding gray hair, has appointments like this every hour on the hour, mostly with varsity athletes, but also with army cadets who want to learn techniques to perform better in academics, military duties, or in the rest of their lives. The amount of one-on-one attention he provides is extraordinary. For example, Zinsser estimates he’s spent more than fifty hours working individually with the lacrosse team’s starting goalie. In offices down the hall, two other PhDs are doing similar work with members of other army teams.

  A photo on his office wall recalls the moment when Zinsser became interested in sports psychology. The photo shows him as a 123-pound high school wrestler standing next to an opponent he’s just defeated. In that pivotal match, Zinsser was losing with just sixteen seconds left, when he entered what he recalls as an “altered state, out-of-body, in-the-zone moment.” Time slowed down, and he suddenly felt all powerful. He was able to execute a takedown of his opponent to win the match. (He eventually won the state championship.) After migrating through a series of coaching jobs in his twenties, Zinsser figured out his goal in life: to help other people learn to enter the high-performance zone that he’d discovered while wrestling.

  He earned a PhD in sports psychology from the University of Virginia, where he studied under Bob Rotella, whose psychological techniques are well known in golf. Zinsser was working at a state university in Pennsylvania in 1992 when West Point recruited him away. When he’s not working with cadets, who call him “Doc Z,” he works with professional athletes (his office wall contains a collection of autographed “Thank you” photos) and practices martial arts.

  West Point began its foray into sports psychology in the late 1980s, when one of its football coaches thought better mental preparation might help Army’s placekickers better handle the pressure of making last-second, game-winning kicks. Under Zinsser’s guidance, the program expanded. Today the Center for Enhanced Performance offers tutoring and classes on study skills and performance psychology, but much of its work resembles what Zinsser has spent the last hour doing with the backup goalie: teaching cadets to use visualization, relaxation techniques, affirmations, and other methods to build confidence and to focus on thoughts that are likely to help, rather than hinder, game-day performance.

  After lunch, Zinsser meets with a West Point graduate who’s now a captain back from tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. The captain is teaching military science and working out like a madman. In a few months, he’ll travel to a secret location to participate in what he vaguely describes as a “special mission selection.” As we talk, it becomes clear he’s attempting to join the army’s Delta Force, a special operations unit so secretive that the army declines to officially acknowledge that it exists. (Given the secrecy and occasional threats to Special Forces operators, I have opted not to disclose this officer’s name.)

  As the captain prepares for the selection process, from which most soldiers wash out, he’s using his own motivational sound track, which Zinsser produced.

  Set to the song “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons, it begins: “This is it, my chance to take a big step toward accomplishing my dream of being a Delta Force operator.” It reinforces the soldier’s self-identity as “a relentless workhorse who can accomplish anything. . . . The officer of choice for any task or job.” It focuses on how he’s going to manage his time to reach peak fitness in the months ahead, how he will improve his navigation skills, and eat right to get his body ready.

  This captain listens to this sound track over and over, getting psyched for the selection process, imagining his body getting stronger and visualizing himself at the front of the Delta force recruits as they slog through training courses. “I’m trusting in the fact that I’m putting in the work, so I can stop worrying whether I’ve worked hard enough, and just go execute,” he says.

  2.

  In the moments before a performance event, it can be extremely useful to dial down the excessive anxiety you’re feeling as much as you can, the way Noa Kageyama teaches students at Juilliard to do before auditions. But to really make the most of the final moments before you perform, reducing anxiety isn’t enough. You also want to build positive emotions, such as confidence, self-efficacy, and power, and sports psychologists have spent decades figuring out the best ways to do that.

  The field’s roots lie in a midwestern university lab. Coleman Griffith grew up in Iowa and played collegiate baseball before landing a job as a psychology professor at the University of Illinois. In 1925, he opened Research in Athletics Laboratory. He published books and papers, including the 1926 book Psychology of Coaching, which contains a primer on how coaches should help athletes get “keyed up” before games, such as talking to teams about opponents’ unfair tactics, shaming them by personal abuse, inspiring them by recalling their past achievements, or bringing in alumni to fire them up.

  Today Griffith is recalled as the father of sports psychology, but the path from his early studies to the work being done by modern practitioners such as Nate Zinsser isn’t exactly linear. In the early 1930s, the University of Illinois pulled funding for Griffith’s lab; as a result, Griffith’s research ended, and he trained no graduate students to follow in his footsteps. Then, in 1936, the chewing gum magnate Philip Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs, asked Griffith to deploy his psychological techniques on the baseball team.

  Griffith recommended modifications to the team’s practice regimen. (Example: Coaches should conduct infield practice at shorter distances to improve fielders’ reaction times.) The team mostly ignored his suggestions. “The clash of cultures between the baseball players and the university professor seems to have been almost immediate,” historian Christopher Green writes. The tension was particularly acute between Griffith and the team’s manager (he dubbed Griffith “the headshrinker”), who Griffith felt was sabotaging and bad-mouthing his work. Few of Griffith’s ideas were implemented, and his engagement with the Cubs lasted less than two years. Along with the demise of his research lab and his failure to train a next generation of researchers, Griffith’s failure to help the Cubs is another reason sports psychology failed to take hold.

  The field remained mostly dormant until the mid-1960s, and the discipline’s first academic journal didn’t come into existence until 1970. Since then, the field has progressed in fits and starts. (One of the fits: When the San Diego Chargers hired a team psychiatrist in 1973, he was caught prescribing steroids and amphetamines to players.) But by the 1980s, sports psychologists were regularly consulting with U.S. Olympic teams, and by the 1990s some Division I universities had psychologists working with varsity athletes.

  Still, in many sports, even elite athletes remain completely unschooled in the techniques taught by Zinsser and his colleagues. In some cases, there remains a stigma about working with a psychologist. It somehow suggests weakness or mental illness. In team sports, some coaches consider the mental part of the game to be part of their purview, and they’re reluctant to cede power to an outsider. Often athletes, parents, or schools lack the resources to provide sports psychologists. Even for those willing to pay, it can be hard to locate a qualified professional. In the United States, there are just 390 certified members of the Association for Applied Sports Psychologists, according to its online directory. As a result, sports psychology is a discipline with a powerful arsenal of tools of which a broad population of athletes remains largely ignorant.

  3.

  Nick Bollettieri is eighty-four years old and has been coaching tennis for more than sixty years. His roster of past pupils includes ten players who’ve been ranked number one in the world, including Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Monica Seles, and Venus and Serena Williams. By all rights, Bollettieri should probably be retired and spending time with
his current wife, his eighth.

  Instead, he begins most mornings at 6 A.M. beside a tennis court in Bradenton, Florida, giving lessons for $900 per hour. The court is one of dozens on the campus of IMG Academy, a five-hundred-acre training center for elite athletes. Bollettieri founded the facility—a boarding school originally focused on tennis instruction—in 1978. Nine years later he sold it to IMG, the sports agency that has represented skier Lindsey Vonn and quarterback Peyton Manning, and IMG expanded it into new sports. Today IMG Academy has more than a thousand students who pay $72,000 per year to live at the school and train in sports ranging from golf and tennis to football and lacrosse.

  For a sports fan, it’s an incredible place to hang out. Wander by the tennis courts and watch a powerful young man—the world’s number four ranked under-eighteen player—firing serves, while out on a driving range, last year’s Women’s U.S. Open champion crushes long irons under her coach’s supervision. While IMG is best known for launching young prospects into professional sports careers, it also prepares athletes for collegiate competition: At a morning ceremony on the day I happened to visit, thirty-two IMG students signed commitment letters to attend colleges whose athletic programs had recruited them.

  In addition to state-of-the-art advice on strength training and nutrition, IMG’s students also benefit from a nine-person team dedicated to “mental coaching.” A staff this size makes IMG a big player in the field; former members of its staff work for a variety of professional sports teams (particularly in baseball), and over the last decade it’s trained dozens of psychologists who now work with the Navy SEALS and other military outfits.

  Taking a break from a lesson on the tennis courts, Bollettieri argues that mental training has always been part of what good coaches do. He refers to a saying attributed to Vince Lombardi, an old friend of his: “We didn’t lose the game. We just ran out of time.” That shows the pervasive confidence and optimism the best athletes learn to adopt, he says. “You should judge a person by the effort they put into things, not the results,” Bollettieri tells me. “What happens today is children are graded by the results they attain, which is wrong. . . . The scoreboard may say you lost based on the score, but if you did everything you could, you won.”

  Whether you learn these lessons from the psychologists at IMG, or in the PL360: Psychology of Elite Performance course at West Point, or by reading Sports Psychology for Dummies, or in a more sophisticated textbook (Applied Sports Psychology by Jean M. Williams is the one most pros recommended to me), the fundamentals are the same. Many of them aim to teach performers to increase their confidence and focus. To do it, the psychologists teach techniques including self-talk, mental rehearsal, and visualization.

  We’ve all seen the crowd at NCAA basketball games waving and cheering behind the glass backboards to try to distract a free-throw shooter. Elite athletes are taught to tune out distracting, irrelevant stimuli and focus on the task at hand. Psychologists distinguish between attentional tasks that are narrow, such as a baseball hitter tracking a pitched ball, versus broad, such as a quarterback surveying the entire field before deciding where to pass. They also distinguish between external tasks, typically involving other players or game conditions, versus internal tasks, things that take place in your head. They can offer specific drills to increase athletes’ ability to use these different types of focus and to retain their ability to concentrate even as the environment changes (say, at an away game with a hostile crowd) or the stakes around the performance grow higher.

  There’s a relationship between a free-throw shooter’s ability to tune out distractions and confidence, because his focus is partly dependent on feeling assured he’s going to make the shot. Indeed, research shows a direct link between confidence and performance, which is why so many star athletes come across as cocky. While sports psychologists don’t seek to breed arrogance, they do systematically try to instill confidence by teaching athletes to remember successes and explain away failures.

  Much of the psychological work to build confidence focuses on self-talk, the internal dialogue in our heads. Many people have a tendency to be self-critical, negative, or pessimistic, and sports psychologists seek to avert that behavior by teaching thought-blocking techniques or cues and affirmations to focus on before or during performances. At times, these techniques may feel a bit like the affirmations offered by Stuart Smalley, the Saturday Night Live character played by Al Franken in the 1990s. (“I’m good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”) But even if they feel a little silly, decades of research show that they work.

  If positive self-talk is an audio sound track, mental imagery and visualization go further, involving all the senses, as an athlete imagines what a successful performance looks like in the moments before she begins. Elite golfers typically visualize every shot before they take it. Some will intentionally imagine a hole looking supersized, to make the putt seem easier. In faster-moving sports or other venues, people visually rehearse important movements ahead of time. One sports psychologist told me how, at the 1988 Olympics, U.S. track athletes were offered the opportunity to visit the stadium for a walk-through the day before competition began. Most declined, preferring to nap at the hotel. But Edwin Moses meticulously toured the locker rooms, then set up hurdles around the track. He carefully took off his sweats, just as he would at a competition, and then walked around the track, over and over, visualizing how he hoped to perform.

  At IMG Academy or elsewhere, the specifics of how students are taught these skills will vary from coach to coach; the process will also vary based on the sport they play. Self-talk is especially important in slower-moving sports like golf, in which players have lots of downtime between shots to think positive (or negative) thoughts. In team sports, training in self-talk and concentration may focus on the team dynamic, such as avoiding getting distracted or turning negative by comparing oneself with a teammate.

  Many of the ideas in sports psychology echo the tenets of the positive psychology movement pioneered by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman in the 1990s. Aside from emphasizing qualities such as optimism and confidence, both positive psychology and performance psychology share an ethos that everyone can and should benefit from these “enhancement” techniques. That’s in contrast to traditional clinical psychology, which is aimed at treating maladaptive or neurotic behaviors. This is one reason IMG avoids using variations of the word “psychology,” and instead refers to “mental coaching” or “mental conditioning.”

  David Hesse, IMG’s director of athletic and personal development, worked for a British management consulting firm before quitting to study sports psychology. From the time he spent inside corporations, he has no doubt the techniques being taught to world-class athletes in his offices work equally well outside of sports. “These tools apply to any type of high performance, whether you’re in an emergency room, a law firm, a courtroom, a boardroom,” he says. “We’re biological creatures, and we have that fight-or-flight response, even in a corporate setting. These tools can absolutely help.”

  4.

  If you happen to attend a conference at which Jonathan Jenkins is speaking, you’ll probably notice how calm and confident he appears. It looks like he’s given this same talk hundreds of times, even though today’s topic is specific to this particular event, so he can’t simply be repeating an old speech. The second thing you may notice is how, about five minutes into his talk, the speech seems to make an abrupt pivot.

  Jenkins’s introductory remarks are autobiographical, and at some events they don’t seem particularly relevant to the topic listed on the agenda. He talks about his childhood in Texas, and how his original goal in life was to be a cowboy. (He’ll often show a slide of himself as a child wearing a Lone Ranger mask.) He describes being hospitalized at age twelve, and how he read a book about China over and over as he recovered. That book led him to want to live in China, so after college he asked his
parents for an airline ticket to Beijing. He lived there for several years, and during his time in China he wound up launching a company, now called OrderWithMe, that helps small companies compete with big-box retailers.

  Only after he’s related his personal story does he segue—sometimes smoothly, sometimes a little jarringly—into the specific message of that day’s particular speech.

  As a start-up CEO, presentations are crucial to Jenkins’s job. He’s pitched his company to dozens of venture capitalists, successfully raising millions of dollars in funding. He frequently gives keynotes to industry conferences. On average, Jenkins gives one speech a week. He considers anything fewer than a hundred people a “small group,” and doesn’t consider it a “big speech” unless the audience is more than a thousand.

  Jenkins is also extremely busy. He has limited time to write speeches, and he doesn’t have much time to rehearse. So he’s developed a unique technique: For nearly every speech he gives, he uses a standard autobiographical introduction, a well-honed, memorized set of remarks he’s used hundreds of times. As a result, Jenkins doesn’t have to think about what he’s saying during the first few moments of a speech. He needn’t figure out when to pause for effect or an audience reaction. Like a trucker changing lanes or a nurse who’s taking a temperature, he’s doing something that he’s already done so often it requires no active thought. He can go on autopilot, speaking without a hint of nerves before he segues into the custom-tailored portion of the speech. By that point, he’s won over the crowd.

  “I start with my story,” Jenkins says. “I figure if I got invited to speak at an event, there’s something in my background or past that prepared me to be there talking, so the first part of the speech is always trying to make a personal connection with the audience.” The biographical opener sets the stage and lets him gain confidence on the stage telling a story he knows cold.