By Adam Evans
Photos: Adam Evans

Bio

Adam is a professional mental game performance coach, a British Canoeing Guide Scheme Assessor, Advanced Canoe Leader and Canoe Coach and also is kindly supported by Hou Canoes and Palm Equipment. www.mental-game.co.uk

Everything we do, we do twice

Where was I? Oh, yes, imagination. We all have one. Yes all of us, even those of us who think or believe they don’t have a creative side or imaginative side, have an imagination. The funny thing about our imagination is it clicks on automatically and creates a preconceived idea of what might or might not happen, and how we preconceive something will affect our belief and likelihood of it happening.

As Emile Coué said in 1922, “Every thought entirely filling our mind becomes true for us and tends to transform itself into action.”

The trouble is that the automatic nature of our imagination happens so quickly it’s beyond our conscious awareness; we don’t even know we are doing it. Often that automatic quality has been trained through life experiences, to envisage things in a way that can seriously limit our paddling ability, or if we are the lucky ones seriously improve our performance.

But, did you pick up the operative word there? Trained!

Our imagination has been trained to do it. Now that’s excellent news because it means it can be retrained or even enhanced. Trained in such a way, it becomes an even more useful mental skill. And we know how to develop a skill, don’t we? Practice, or should I say purposeful practice.

So what exactly are we going to practice?

As paddlers and paddle coaches, we often hear the word visualise, sometimes wrapped up in the unfortunate phrase ‘Just visualise it’. Which is a bit like saying to someone needing technical input on their paddling approach ‘Just paddle it’. Gee thanks for the tip!

The very way we visualise, or a more accurate description would be to imagine, has an enormous impact on our arousal level, our tactical decisions, our self-efficacy and even our physiology. Yep seriously, what you think and what you imagine and how you do that, will affect your performance by changing your emotional arousal level, your cognitive ability and your physiology. So says the science, but I’m not here for the science I’m here for the art.

So how do we visualise or imagine things more effectively?

This little article doesn’t have the space inside it to cover the prolific variety of ways and nuances in how we imagine things, but let me give you these golden nuggets, from which you can extrapolate a whole array of improvements in your mental game for paddling.

Let’s take a moment to consider those times when our imagination is operating significantly. It’s always running in the background; however, when we are dreaming at night and daydreaming during the day, it’s most active and creative.

We can have good dreams and bad dreams, we have good daydreams and bad daydreams. Good daydreams where we smile wistfully to ourselves as we stare into the distance, and good dreams where we wake up with a smile on our face, of course, we also have dreams and daydreams where a less enjoyable experience is also envisaged.

Within these two positive and negative imaginings lie some beneficial information for us. Compare the way you imagine things positively and negatively. You can do this in a paddling context or any other part of life. I don’t mean consider what you imagine, I mean consider the qualities of how you’ve imagined it. You might notice a pattern in how you imagine things negatively, and alternatively a pattern and how you imagine things positively.

Compare for a moment, the differences between a great, enjoyable daydream and an unpleasant nightmare. Pay attention not to what you see, but the qualities of how you see it. Not what is it, but how is it?

Which brings me to my next point, when we daydream and when we dream we don’t just see things a.k.a. visualise, we also hear, feel, smell and taste.

Now think of your favourite daydream, how do you see it? What are the qualities in the way you see it? How do things feel in it, both inside your body, perhaps emotionally, and outside your body in the environment that you are imagining? How do things sound too? Maybe you might have tastes and smells involved as well. I don’t know; it’s your imagination, not mine.

Take note of the qualities of how you imagine, then use these qualities and information to empower your visualisations for your paddling.

When you’re ‘Imagining’ yourself paddling at your best, employ these qualities into your preconceived experience. See it, feel it, hear it, and maybe smell and taste it in the same way when you daydream at your best. Make it how you want it, really imagine it, imagine it until you can almost know its happening and it feels very compelling.

Then rehearse that, again and again, until it becomes a skill and it happens easily and feels good. Rehearse it until ‘you can’t not do it’.

Some might call this visualisation; some might call this meditation, or hypnosis, or symbolic learning; I call it a mental skill.

As Grete Waitz said, “Spend at least some of your training time, and other parts of your day, concentrating on what you are doing in training and visualising your success.”

Being realistically optimistic as we said will have a positive impact on your performance; however, being overly or unrealistically positive and ignoring factors that need consideration can be quite dangerous or foolhardy.

That’s why when someone asks the, “yes, but what if…?” question when thinking about their upcoming performance, it pays great dividends to instead of skirting over or ignoring the question, to dig in and help them come up with their answers.

The, “Yes, but what if…?” question is something I hear a lot, “Yes, but what if what if I can’t make the eddy?” “Yes but what if the wind picks up?” “Yes, but what if I fall out my boat?”

It usually and understandably comes from a place of anxiety and worry.

Sometimes the trap we fall into as people and as coaches is to calm, reassure and placate by giving them the answers and saying something like “Don’t worry it’s going to be ok.”

A great way to help people is to bounce the question back at them, “Ok, what will you do if that happens?”

Successful responses

This is an opportunity for them to clarify their tactics, responses and skills as they respond. Anyone who creates their successful responses will feel far more capable and resourceful than someone who has had the answers given to them.

But here’s the catch, when people are feeling anxious or worried about the quality of their thinking drops significantly. Simply put, when emotions are high, thinking is low. So if thought is a skill, then it pays to practise the skill before you need it, so when you need the skill, you can do it quickly.

A simple analogy for paddlers would be, “When do you want to learn to roll? Before you need it, or when you need it?” Or “When do you want to learn to use a throw line for your buddy? As they need it, or before they need it?” You get my point.

So if you’re feeling, or someone else is feeling anxious and worried about what to do if things don’t quite go to plan, a great way to deal with this is to write down your plan. Why do you want to write it down? Because writing takes time, and time and reflection are what you need to focus, be creative and be resourceful. As I said, when we are anxious and worried we tend to think poorly and too quickly, we jump to ill-considered and preconceived solutions a.k.a. heuristics.

The very physical act of writing things down on paper encourages us to be slower and more diligent, and imagine things in a more measured and helpful way. We are slowing the thinking down, leading to more resourceful imaginings.

Generally speaking, this is what high performers do when dealing with those ‘what if?’ scenarios. Astronauts do not sit inside rocket ships with crossed fingers saying, “I hope nothing goes wrong,” they’re saying instead, “I know what to do,” they know what to do because these experts had to write the book on ‘what if…?’ scenarios.

This mental outlook about having some semblance of control and influence in situations, by our response to them is robust. Welcome to self-efficacy.

With this mental skill, we become more at the cause of the situation rather than the effect of the situation; we are becoming a focus of control.

We can boil this whole article to a straightforward concept.

“Everything we do, we do twice, once in our minds and once with our bodies.”

So the qualities of how we imagine it in our minds will have a significant influence on our bodies. This isn’t new-age mystical woo woo; this is measurable peer-reviewed science.

So as I like to say, “We are the personal owners of a very powerful and individual imagination, and it would pay us well to learn how to use it.”

With that in mind, please take a moment now, to imagine you are paddling at your best. Imagine it, create that experience as entirely as you can inside your mind, imagine it happening, then imagine you do not imagine it, and it’s simply happening anyway.

Imagine that!