Finding Your Groove

CHAPTER SIX - The Groove

As discussed earlier, doing your very best means doing exactly the right thing at the right moment. When you hit the right thing, you'll probably recognize it instantly: The moment you release the ball you know it will go in, even without watching it; the instant you make contact with the ball you know it's a good drive, even before you see how far it goes.

The feeling of doing something right has little to do with brute strength or strict conditioning. It's that special feeling of being tuned-in or in a groove. When you hit this ideal state everything seems to go right, and it feels like you can do no wrong.

Almost everyone seems to hit their groove occasionally, but for the average player, it happens all too often only during practice, and then without any witnesses. Sport tales of, "You should have seen me this morning, I couldn't miss," rival fish stories in frequency. The real trick, however, is to do your best, to hit your groove, during competition when it counts the most.

The only commonly agreed upon fact is that the groove is delicate. It's understood that anyone under pressure to perform can easily be distracted, so spectators try to be quiet during putts, and laughing during match point would be a major transgression. But, then again, some players seem to thrive in the midst of the same turmoil that distracts others.

The idea of being in a "groove" has always seemed rather mysterious. As a result, playing well has attracted a variety of personal superstitions such as wearing a familiar "lucky" hat, patting a teammate on the shoulder before a kick or carrying lucky trinkets.

Much of the difficulty with finding your ideal mental states, your groove, stems from the fact that everyone is different. Where one person needs to be intense, you may need to be relaxed; where another person needs to see the ball going in, you may need to feel centered. What works for one person, may not work for you. For that reason, you need to design a performance strategy custom made to get you into your ideal state, your groove.

The following sections provide a method for identifying the practices that get you into your ideal state and require serious study. Understanding the principles is not enough, you need to fit and shape them to your way of doing things. In addition, if you perform in several sports, each one may require a different mental adjustment. It's not unusual to need a different strategy for catching footballs, scoring baskets and sinking putts.

The results are well worth the effort, however. It goes without saying that an ability to control your ideal states, to get in the groove when it really counts, provides an immense advantage in almost every undertaking. When you develop the ability to do this at will, you will have a winning advantage.

YOUR CONCENTRATION FLOW

When designing a concentration strategy for competitive situations, it helps to break your concentration flow into a Travel Stage, a Focusing Stage, and an Ideal State.

Figure 13. Your Concentration Flow.

The TRAVEL STAGE begins when you start the actions leading up to that day's performance. This is the period when you leave your house or work space and head toward the gym or wherever your performing area is.

Travel times are an excellent place to start concentrating because travel has that feeling of transition that helps sets the tone for a shift. It helps you ease out of whatever you were doing, and begin your shift into the focused performing state.

The FOCUSING STAGE contains your main concentration adjustments. It includes your focusing techniques, ways to handle distractions, and ways to counter disturbing thoughts, such as, "Your future depends on this next shot."

Your IDEAL STATE, or "groove," is a very special point. It is the place where things go right. The principle here is: The thing that got you into your groove once is the thing that will get you there again. Once you get there, there are no more adjustments, you are mentally ready to perform at your best. USING PATTERNS

Before going into the techniques for each stage, you need a way to simplify things so you can use them in tight places. This means using patterns.

When you examine the idea of doing the right thing at the right time, one problem surfaces early: Each moment is different. To apply the mental adjustment principles perfectly, you will need to assess each and every moment to determine the right thing to do. Though it's theoretically possible to do this some of the time, it is virtually impossible in the confusion of normal competition.

To avoid this problem, your responses can be grouped into simplified categories. For example, if watching each move the pitcher makes seems to help you get in the groove, rather than mentioning each little move, you could group them together and say the pitcher's motion focused you. Your category for getting in the groove becomes, "watching the pitcher's motion."

This may seem silly at this point, but the ability to group your responses forms the basis for some very sophisticated maneuvers. It becomes the key to concentrating in the heat of battle. Rather than trying to come up with groupings on the spur of the moment, it helps to select a few groups ahead of time, ones you can get used to using. Fortunately, this idea already has been studied, and a system for grouping was developed by Bandler and Grinder.(1) They came up with three groups: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (feeling). These categories help to simplify the most complex maneuvers. Eventually, you will want to put all your mental adjustments into these groups.

GROUPING YOUR ADJUSTMENT

Figure 14. Categories for grouping your adjustments.

The theory behind these groupings is quite straightforward. At any given moment you experience the world in a visual, auditory or feeling way. For example, if you can mentally see yourself performing or see the event about to happen, this is visual. If you talk to yourself with expressions like, "I can do this," or, "I'm tuned in," you fall into the auditory mode. If you feel yourself in a certain way, such as centered or smooth, you are in the feeling pattern. With a little practice you should be able to recognize your patterns quite quickly.

As you begin to identify your groups, remember that they only apply to one activity. Because of this, you may need to work through different groups for separate sports. Putting a golf ball may require a visual group, whereas catching a pass might be auditory ("I've got it.").

EXAMPLES:

Figure 15. Some optimum response patterns.

These patterns will save you a great deal of time and make complicated adjustments in the heat of battle a snap. When things go wrong in the middle of the game and you begin to lose your concentration, you only need to shift back into your mental adjustment group to regain your composure.

If your group is visual and you get distracted by the crowd noise, you can use anything visual to get you back on track. The color of the grass, the shape of the batter, anything visual has a good chance of working. This relieves you of having to find exactly the same banner that helped get you into a hot streak two weeks ago. Anything visual will do.

If you use an auditory group, any sounds or words can help you focus. If you are the feeling group, and sensations help you focus, the feeling of the club in your hand, the pull of your sleeve or the warmth of the sun may help.

Remember, everyone is different, and the group that works for someone else may not work for you. Just because someone else uses the visual, that doesn't mean it will work for you. Actually, if your adjustment is to talk to yourself, trying to see things happen will be a distraction. Be sure to identify your own personal adjustments.

The exact technique for handling distractions will be covered later in the chapter. The important thing for now is to begin recognizing the different groupings your mental adjustments can fall into. The following examples illustrate these groupings in action.

EXAMPLES:

VISUAL:

AUDITORY:

EXAMPLE:

If you've never realized there were patterns you could use to concentrate, just identifying them will improve your ability to focus. In the long run, however, there are several additional adjustments you need to learn.

Unfortunately, for really consistent results over time, it isn't enough to simply identify your pattern and follow it. The problem is that the pattern you identify is usually quite specific, and for that reason it's easy to miss. This is the reason consistency is so often a problem.

For example, you discover that a certain type of music helps you to get in a groove on that day.

Because this is quite specific, it leaves you open to the possibility that you might not be able to find that music, and as a result you may not be able to get into your groove.

If the country and western station is off the air and you can't find any tapes, you stand a good chance of throwing your performance off. Whenever you don't complete your travel pattern you will probably be a little off. The more your system is disturbed, the more you will be off. If you've ever had really bad days for no apparent reason, you can understand the impact of this.

When you're performing on the road, or when traveling during international competition, it's easy to have your pattern disturbed, just because so much is different. Since these times are as critical, if not more, than competition in your own predictable territory, it's important to modify your concentration pattern so it can't miss.

To change your specific pattern from a small target to one that's very large and almost impossible to miss, only requires a minor adjustment. You make your pattern more general.

To make your pattern more general, you need to recall the groupings mentioned in the last section: visual, auditory and feeling. Next, identify which of these groupings your pattern falls into. Everything in this grouping becomes your new general pattern. In the case of country music, since it has words and sounds, it becomes auditory. The auditory group is your new general pattern. This means that everything auditory, everything related to sound, can be used as your pattern. Country music can be expanded to all music, the sound of the car engine, or even the noise your team is making.

EXAMPLE:

By using his general pattern to start focusing on the way to the gym, Bob effectively eliminated the possibility of "off days" due to changes in his surroundings. Since every gym and competition has some noise to focus on, he always felt at home.

Starting your concentration warm-up in the Travel Stage will eliminate many of the distractions of your daily routine, such as getting the laundry done, or what time the meet is tomorrow. As your event gets closer, the loose concentration of the Travel Stage needs to tighten. During the critical parts of your event you need to call up all your ability, all your skill, and bring it to bear in exactly the right way. This shifting of your concentration levels takes place in your FOCUSING STAGE.

FOCUSING STAGE

Your focusing stage holds the final mental adjustments that prepare you for your event. When you make these adjustments properly, you will do your best.

To identify your final mental adjustment, you need to think back to the times when you did really well, and identify what you did then. If you saw only the rim as you took the shot, that's what must happen again; if you felt you had sticky fingers when making the catch, that's how you need to feel again; if you said to yourself, "I've got it," that what you need to do.

IF YOU DO YOUR FINAL ADJUSTMENT CORRECTLY, YOU WILL DO YOUR BEST.

EXAMPLES:

These people were able to identify a final mental adjustment that seemed to bring out their best performance.

As mentioned earlier, the simplified groupings can make identifying your ideal mental pattern easier, especially if it changes slightly from time to time. For instance, on one occasion you did best when seeing the ball, on another you could see the defense shifting, and another time you could see your team moving. This seems to be a visual pattern, and should become your guide for final adjustments.

Not surprisingly, many athletes know they have patterns which underlie their best performances, even if they don't always know how to duplicate them. When asked if they have made special preparations for the big game, many reply, "No changes, I'll just do the things that got me here." They intuitively know that doing their best is a matter of duplicating what worked before.

The easiest way to make sure you hit your final adjustment correctly is to identify your general pattern as visual, auditory, or feeling, and to focus on that. If this is unclear, review the sections in the Travel Stage on making your pattern more general.

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Notes:

1. They formed groups using a linguistic analysis of perception. Richard Bandler and John Grinder. The Structure of Magic I. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Science and Behavior Books, 1975.)