by Ross Bentley
• To perfect skills: If you vividly imagine the look, feel, and sound of performing a skill, the likelihood of you doing it on the track is improved. These skills may be a specific driving technique, an interpersonal skill, or just about any other skill, technique, or act you need.
• To familiarize: You can use mental imagery to drive thousands of laps of a track to learn it for the first time, refresh your memory of it, or fine-tune the details of it. It can also be used to preplay a meeting, a speech, a media interview, or any other activity, helping you to feel more at ease when the real situation occurs.
• To trigger a performance state of mind: By vividly recalling your feelings of a past success, it’s almost impossible not to get into a great state of mind. Over time, and by building in a “trigger” word or action, you can literally say a word and get into the ideal state to perform at your peak.
• To program behavior: You need to behave in different ways, in different situations. By preplaying these situations and adapting your behavior, you improve your ability to act in the ideal manner, that is, more aggressively, more patiently, or in a more outgoing manner when the need arises. Mental imagery programs the ability to adapt your behavior to suit the situation.
• To preplan: Although there are infinite possibilities that can happen in a race, preplanning for as many of them as you can will allow you to act more quickly, more accurately, more confidently, and with more ease. For example, preplaying a number of scenarios that could occur at the start of a race will help you develop the attitude that “it doesn’t matter what happens; I’m ready.”
• To refocus: If you form a mental image of yourself dealing with problems on the track, especially the problem of losing your concentration and then immediately refocusing and continuing, you will develop a program for doing this. When it happens on the track, it will be much easier to regain your focus.
Sports psychologists define two different types of mental imagery: cognitive and motivational.
Cognitive is essentially focused around forming mental images of techniques and strategies; for example, the line, braking zones, trail braking, sensing the limits of the car, racecraft, and so on. Motivational is focused on your belief system, state of mind, ability to focus during a race, pushing hard when laps are down on the field, mental toughness, control or use of emotions, and the “rewards” that come from performing the skill or technique well. Each is equally important. In fact, every time you do mental imagery, there should be a balance between cognitive (technique-specific) and motivational (relaxed, balanced, confident, enjoyment-specific).
Ultimately, these two types are further broken down into the following:
• Cognitive general
• Cognitive specific
• Motivational general
• Motivational specific
To give you an idea of how you would use each type of mental imagery, take a look at this chart.
Motivational
Cognitive
Specific
Goals and goal attainment: setting mental objectives and goals for an event or session and having them be more than just something you’ve thought about at the conscious level; they’ve become a part of your mental programming.
Rehearse specific skills: the line, braking points, throttle application, applying what you’ve felt from the car to a chassis setup change, and so on.
General
Arousal control, self-confidence, mental toughness: where you develop mental programming of your beliefs (confidence), your state of mind, your behavioral traits, as well as feeling the rewards of a job well done.
Rehearse race strategies: how you handle the start, problems with handling throughout the race, pit stops, and so on.
Mental imagery can also be “associated” or “dissociated.” Associated means you see, feel, and hear yourself in the very act; that is, you’re behind the wheel and your view is from this vantage point. Dissociated is as if you’re seeing yourself from above or from a camera view, not from behind the wheel. For some reason, some people naturally do mental imagery from an associated perspective, while others do it from a dissociated perspective.
Which is best, associated or dissociated? Some people will tell you that neither one is better than the other; however, I disagree. While there is nothing wrong with dissociated mental imagery, it’s best to program your mind from the perspective that you’ll experience when driving, from behind the wheel. Having said that, doing some mental imagery from a dissociated perspective, as if you’re watching yourself perform from a TV camera’s viewpoint is also valuable. The key is to make your mental imagery as real as possible by seeing the view from the cockpit, by feeling the car and motions from the seat, and hearing everything from behind the wheel. A message you’ll hear over and over from me is that the more realistic you can make your mental imagery, the more effective this whole process will be.
The more senses you include in your mental imagery, the more effective it will be. Notice in the lemon example that you used all five senses: you “saw” the lemon (visual sense), you “felt” it (kinesthetic), you “heard” the knife cutting the lemon (auditory), you “smelled” the lemon juice (olfactory), and you “tasted” the lemon (taste). But did you really see, feel, hear, smell, and taste the lemon? Only in your mind, right? Only in your imagination. By involving all five senses, you made the experience real in your imagination. If you had only “seen” the lemon, using only your visual sense, it’s likely that your mouth would not have salivated because you would not have made it real enough to your mind.
Obviously, your smell and taste have relatively little to do with driving a car, but certainly visual, kinesthetic, and auditory have a lot to do with it. Most people who claim to do mental imagery really only visualize. That is, they only imagine the visual scene in their minds; they do not imagine what they feel and hear. And that’s the difference between mental imagery and visualization; mental imagery involves more than just your visual sense, and visualization doesn’t.
In addition to your visual, kinesthetic, and auditory senses, experience all the emotions and feelings that you possibly can. The more you tie your emotions and feelings to each mental imagery session, the more real it will become to your mind. More important, the easier it will be to trigger the specific mental program in the future, on and off the track. This motivational piece of mental imagery is critical to your success.
Prior to beginning a mental imagery session, know exactly what you want to accomplish. This is a good case for writing out a narrative, even if it’s a simple bullet-pointed list. By doing this before beginning, it’s more likely that you will stay focused throughout the imagery session. This book is full of examples of narratives. You can make them as detailed as I’ve made them here, or you can make a few short bullet points to help you remember the key points you want to program.
Many drivers talk to me about not being able stay focused on the specific scenario that they want to imagine and program for long. Some drivers have a difficult time doing a specific mental imagery scenario for much longer than a minute or two. If that’s you, know that you’re human. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about imagery admits that they are similar. The ones that continued to practice imagery got better and better, to the point where they may be able to stay focused on imaging a scenario for up to an hour or even more. The drivers who get frustrated that they can’t do it perfectly the first time tend to quit and, of course, never improve.
Emerson Fittipaldi, the year he won the Indianapolis 500, spent more than three hours sitting in his car in the garage the day before the race. He claimed that if he couldn’t imagine sitting in the car for that long there was no way he was going to be able to drive the entire race without losing his focus.
Mental imagery takes practice. Don’t expect instant results. It’s best to perform mental imagery at least twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, in addition to the specific sessions you do at the track. Also, have a
plan for the type of skill or technique you’re going to work on. Mondays could be for programming specific driving skills, Tuesdays for working on your beliefs about your abilities, Wednesdays for race strategy, Thursdays for your overall state of mind, and so on. Like any skill, and mental imagery is a skill, be patient and your ability will improve. It’s an acquired skill.
Which brings me to a major and common misconception. Thinking about driving the car is not mental programming; it’s not mental imagery. Thinking about something is done at the conscious level, which is not the most effective state for your mind to be in to truly learn something, for it to become part of your mental programming. Until you allow your brain to get into the right mental state, you’re not using mental imagery to program your subconscious.
So what is the ideal mental state to be in to program your mind? Let’s start with a little background or theory. Doctors and researchers define four brainwave states, as measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG). By attaching a few probes to your head, the EEG can “read” the bio-electrical activity going on inside your head and therefore measure the brainwaves. These brainwaves are broken down into four levels or states:
• Beta is where your brain is primarily producing brainwaves in the 13- to 25-hertz (cycles per second) range. When you’re in a conscious, thinking, active state, like when you’re reading this book, your mind is in the beta range.
• Alpha is where your brain is primarily producing brainwaves in the 7- to 13-hertz range. Alpha is when you close your eyes, relax, and begin slowing down your mind. While getting to this state, you should feel your body relax, your muscles letting go, and your body sinking into its chair or seat.
• Theta is where your brain is primarily producing brainwaves in the 4- to 7-hertz range. Just before you fall asleep you pass through a state where you can feel yourself drifting off, but you’re barely aware that you’re doing this. You may also have flashes of odd images in your mind. This is theta.
• Delta is where your brain is primarily producing brainwaves in the 0- to 4-hertz range. When you’re asleep, your mind is producing mostly delta waves.
Notice that I never said that your brain is only producing one level of brainwave at a time. No, it’s always producing some amount of all four, but it’s the concentration that matters. When consciously awake and conversing, thinking, reading, and driving a car, your mind is producing mostly beta waves, some amount less of alpha, less theta, and much less delta. When asleep, you’re mostly producing delta, less theta, less alpha, and even less beta. In other words, your brain is practically always producing some amount of all four levels, but the concentration of the various levels change depending on what state you’re in.
What does this all mean?
For your brain to be in the most receptive, effective programming state, you want to relax your mind enough so that it is in what is called an alpha-theta state, where your brain is primarily producing waves in the 6- to 12-hertz range. The best way to describe this state is that your mind is not busy, it’s relaxed, you haven’t drifted off to sleep yet, but if you let your mind relax and slow down much more it would.
If you simply close your eyes and consciously think about something, your mind will be in a beta state, and the effectiveness of your mental imagery will be much, much reduced. By allowing yourself to get to an alpha-theta state by relaxing your mind and body, everything that you imagine will become imprinted within your brain much more deeply and strongly. This is how you program your mind.
Prior to beginning a mental imagery session, take a few minutes to allow your mind to relax and slow down, to get into an alpha-theta state. If you do, whatever you focus on will seem more real to your subconscious mind and therefore become more deeply programmed in your mind. From there, your ability to reproduce it on the track is much greater.
Of course, getting your mind into an alpha-theta state at home lying on your bed is relatively easy. But getting there while in your trailer or sitting in your race car at the track is more difficult. Why? Because of the distractions and the stress at the track. Fortunately, like most things in life, the more you practice, the easier it will get.
Have you ever installed a piece of software on a computer and then couldn’t locate the icon to click on to the launch the program? Imagine the frustration! How useful would a computer program be without an icon or trigger to launch it? Not very, right? The same thing applies to a mental program.
Imagine if you did mental imagery over and over again and developed the programming to flat the one fast corner that you’ve never been able to take at full throttle before. You can see it, feel, and hear it so clearly in your head. Then, on track, you can’t locate that mental program in the vast hard drive in your head. Imagine the frustration. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? As important as mental imagery is, it’s just as important to develop a trigger to launch this program. As an example, you could do this by simply saying the word “flat” in your mind as you imagine doing it, over and over again. The more you do this, the more your mind will associate the word “flat” with the program, eventually getting to the point where you almost can’t help but hold your foot at full throttle when you say it. It’s just like Pavlov’s dog.
Even when preplaying a success to develop your confidence or motivation, focus your mental imagery on the act or performance. Sure, see yourself be successful, but focus on what led to the success: the way you felt, the way you performed, the state of mind you were in, and the actual skills and techniques it took to get there.
One last point about mental imagery: Don’t expect it to compensate for a lack of knowledge or for hard work and practice. While it can and will make a huge difference to your performance, it can’t perform miracles.
TRIGGERS
Imagine installing the latest, most powerful software package into your computer, but it doesn’t have an icon on the desktop or start menu to access it. That is exactly what it would be like if you had the ideal program for driving, but not a “trigger.” A trigger is an action or word that allows you to access, or activate, a mental program. Without it, you could have all the mental programming in the world but will never activate it. A trigger word or action works just like a gun’s trigger. Once used, it fires the appropriate program.
Trigger words or actions should have some special meaning, or generate a vivid mental image. As an example, to trigger a program to suck up sensory input, you may use the word “sponge” to see yourself as a sponge, sucking up all there is to know. Other trigger words I’ve used either myself or with other drivers are “car dancing,” “watch this,” “party time,” “play time,” “time to kill,” “crank it up,” and “step it up.” Trigger actions could include giving the steering wheel a quick squeeze, looking at a specific sign or message on the dash, or a hand signal from your crew. You may need to spend some time discovering just the right word, phrase, or action to use as a trigger word.
Then, when you are using mental imagery to program something, initiate it with a specific trigger word or action. That way, when you are in the heat of the battle, the second you say the trigger word or use the action, the program will kick in.
THE PLAN
Okay, with that background, here’s the plan I’d suggest you follow.
Seven days a week (you can take a day off if you want, although I bet some of your competitors won’t and that means if you take a day off, they are getting an advantage on you) you need to spend a minimum of 20 minutes, twice a day doing a mental-imagery session. You can do one in the morning and one just before bed at night, one in the afternoon and one before bed, one after dinner and one before bed, or whenever. But there should be at least one hour in between the two sessions. You should also determine one consistent place to do them. Preferably this is not lying on your bed, as there is too much of a tendency to fall asleep while doing it (if you feel yourself drifting off to sleep, take two or three deep, quick breaths). Sitting in a chair is good, and in your car is even
better. You want to make sure you are comfortable and relaxed, it is quiet, and you will not be disturbed.
If you can do it in your race car, it’s even better if the car is up on jack stands, as you can then turn the steering wheel freely. Remember, the more you use your body, the more the session will program muscle memory to do things right when you’re on the track. If you don’t use your car, use as many “props” as you can to make it as realistic as possible. You can wear your helmet, and you can hold a real steering wheel. You can ask someone to sit on the floor in front of you and use their feet as pedals. This is a very effective technique, as you can even have the other person provide feedback to you on the amount of pressure you’re applying and the progressiveness of the application. Sitting in one of the latest driving simulators is fantastic since you can begin by driving a track and then go into your mental imagery session. Of course, you have a steering wheel and pedals to use with a simulator, as well. Again, the more realistic you can make your imagery session, the more effective it will be.
When you’re ready to begin a mental imagery session, read over the narratives that you’ve prepared. The reason for writing out a plan for your narratives is to make sure you stay on task. By that, I mean staying focused on what you’re working on: being the perfect driver, dealing with big moments, driving at the limit, working on a specific track or technique, or whatever. The only way for this programming to be really effective is to repeat it enough times. Repetition is critical. If you begin to stray off of what you’ve outlined in your narratives, you will not be repeating the session enough times.
