By Adam Evans

Bio

With a passion for journeys both physical and metaphorical, Adam is a professional mental game performance coach, a British Canoeing Guide Scheme Assessor, Canoe Coach and Advanced Canoe Leader and an ambassador for Hou Canoes. Questions from David Groves Clean Language.

Home

The power of positive thinking: making magic happen

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you’re reading this magazine because you like paddling. I don’t mean role the trouser leg up type of paddling with water up to knees on Blackpool Beach. I mean the floating on the water type, on some kind of inflatable stand up or sitting down thing, or some kind of kneeling or sitting plastic floating container. Either way you like paddling.

I’m also guessing you read this magazine primarily for two reasons, to be inspired and to learn stuff. So here we go, I’m going to try to inspire you to learn new stuff by that I mean new skills and less about knowledge. We have enough knowledge at our fingertips in this world. We instead need new skills, or at least the desire to improve on the mental game approach that we already have. We all have a mental game approach we just might not consciously know what it is.

If you think about it, that 1.3 kg lump of grey, wrinkly, jelly between your ears is entirely responsible for how you engage in your paddle sport. What you think about it, how you think about it, what it means to you and how you feel about it, and quite seriously how well you do it, is all down that little piece of grey jelly between your ears.

I like to think about it this way, we spend a lot of time, and energy selecting our equipment, from our technical paddle sticks to our colourful shiny floaty boxes.
We also spend a lot of time and effort physically practising with and without equipment, training skills and developing fitness and technique. But and it’s a big but how much time do we devote to training that 1.3 kg lump of grey jelly, that in reality controls the entire show, from our body, how we use it and our equipment, to how well it lets us perform.

If you are interested in improving any aspect of your paddling performance, it’s highly likely the fundamental factor in that improvement can be controlled by how that grey jelly is thinking, what it’s thinking and how it feels about that thinking.
It doesn’t matter if it’s skill acquisition or anxiety control, or developing power, or increasing stamina, improving confidence and self belief, or indeed accessing a wonderful state of automatic ‘flow’. I guarantee and so do a bunch of clever people with letters after their name, that what’s going on between your ears will have a massive impact on your ability to achieve any of those skills above.

Let’s start by talking about knowledge and skill

I implore you right now to continue to develop more useful mental skills, you all already have mental skills, but do not confuse a theoretical understanding, also known as knowledge, for a skill.

Reading an article on any skill, be it a new paddle stroke for you, or a different body position, or a mental skill, will increase your knowledge, but not your skill. We all know what develops skill. Practice.

If it’s a specialist skill, it’s learnt by devoting time to intentional high-quality practice.

So ask yourself this, “When was the last time I devoted resources to developing a mental skill, to actually intentionally practising or simply actively applying a psychological tool I’ve learnt or read about? Until it became a skill?”

You know, a skill to engage and use, in just the same way you have a skill to engage your paddle and use it for purposeful results. A while ago I asked myself, where do I start and how do I write an article on mental skills in performance? Probably not like this?

Which brings me to my first point. Not. This is both elementary and very important so it’s a great place to start.

Don’t think about the things you don’t want. This is a classic common mistake most people make, when you ask them what they want they often tell you what they don’t want. I don’t want to get scared. I don’t want to tire out easily. I don’t want XYZ. I won’t be XYZ. I’ll not be doing XYZ. You get the idea.

It’s easy to understand why we have these away from goals or ‘not’ goals, because they certainly helpful for our survival. However, here is a useful way to think about it, wrapped up in a phrase that I really like: “Where attention goes energy flows.” Which means we can often become exhausted trying to not get something we don’t want, therefore often missing what we do want instead.

Keeping this in mind it’s useful to remember advice from international author, performance psychology expert and ex-SAS soldier Andy McNab CBE DCM MM. “The Number One principle for getting what you want is also the Number One principle for avoiding what you don’t want.”

So if you’re planning, training or paddling, it is usually better if you aim for what you want in terms of your thinking, feeling and doing. Be it an eddie, or a point on the horizon, a tactical or physical skill or simply how you want to feel as you do things.

To help you to develop the habit of training your perception and outlook, a great question to ask yourself, or others you are coaching is, “What would you like to have happen?”

This question can be even more useful if we add a little specificity or context to it occasionally, for example. When I think about my up coming performance today, what would I like to have happen?

In terms of my emotional focus on this section, what would I like to have happen? As a result of this coaching what would I like to have happen? When I run this rapid what would I like to have happen?

The question, “What would I like to have happen,” almost certainly develops toward, rather than away from intentions. However, occasionally an away from intention or a ‘not’ goal might appear, such as: “I don’t want to hit the magnetic, pinning, death rock in the centre of the rapid!” Here’s where we can roll out a magic word to turn this into a positive goal… Instead!

“What would you like to have happen instead?”

Now we’re cooking on gas

This may sound elementary but this really is a very important skill to grasp, for you and others. It trains your mind to search for opportunities and potential in doing, thinking and feeling. A funny way to look at it is, can you imagine ever going shopping with the list of items you don’t want to buy?

Tiny little adjustments like this in our perceptional and attentional thinking, can have dramatic effects on our mental focus over time. They develop our ability to solution focus and imagine positively, rather than simply avoid problems as we paddle, or often before we paddle.

Let’s add to this goal focused approach

Imagine an archer, bow and arrow in hand, pointing generally to a target with a safety net behind. Imagine them saying to themselves, “I must not hit the net, I must not hit the net.” I wonder how that phrase is going to help their accuracy on hitting the target?

So they don’t want to hit the net, what would they like to happen instead? I’m sure they’d prefer it if they hit the target, and the chances of that happening will increase if that’s where they placed their attention and focus. Perhaps they could say something instead like, “I’d like this arrow to hit the target,” and if the arrow hits anywhere on the target that would be considered a successful result. However, it might be interesting to know that psychological research has discovered not only does becoming more precise with an intended goal increase our accuracy, it also reduces our perception of effort. Let me explain a little more.

In terms of precision, accuracy and target acquisition, for example taking a precise paddling line, the more pinpoint and nuanced you can make that line and target, providing it’s realistic of course, the more accurate you’ll probably be becoming in reality. I find this phrase really useful remembering that, “Aim big, miss big. Aim small, miss small.”

If we think about our archer and their positive reply, “I’d like this arrow hit the target” it might be useful to tease out of them a little more precision and accuracy with a really useful open question “What kind of…?”

For example, “So you would like the arrow to hit the target. What kind of… hit the target?” Say this with an intrigue and curiosity. This is a delightfully open question, that allows them to fill the space with a positive concept of what they want to have happen, even more accurately. They may choose to reply with a location on the target, such as, “I’d like the arrow to hit the bullseye,” or just as importantly, they may give you a lots of other information about how they’re going to achieve that, with their technique, the trajectory of the arrow, or anything else helping them to build a positive concept of that arrow hitting the target precisely.

Those brief few moments it takes for them to create the description of what they want to have happen, will also unconsciously include some of the first steps, aka tactics and techniques, that are required for that to become reality.

Applied in a paddling context, you might be thinking tactically about running a section of a river.

“When you run this section of river what would you like to happen?”

“I’d like to paddle down the river and hit the eddie.”

“What kind of paddle down?”

“I’d like to paddle confidently and decisively.”

“And confident and decisively, and when you hit the eddie, what kind of hit?”

“A hit right at the top of the eddie and carve in feeling balanced.”

These are incredibly simple tools and yet when practiced they train us to think about what we want, rather than what we don’t want, and they train us to think more accurately and descriptively. They can also incorporate some self generated ideas on techniques and tactics with attentional focus.

In short, they start to engage our imagination, that’s where the magic happens…