On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 06:32:37PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: > We have two world class players, and Sven has built his entire tactics > around them.
Any one see the program the other week on the England team and Sven's sports pschology approach? One of the key points was that positive thinking is a Good Thing. Of course it should go without saying, but how often do we think positively when we're 1-0 down against Germany? :-) The more interesting point from my perspective was the discussion of conscious vs subconscious action. When you're learning a new skill you use a "conscious" part of your mind to teach you how to do something. When you get good, you do it on autopilot using instead a subconscious part of your mind which quite literally, does it without thinking. The worst thing you can do when you're Darren Southgate about to kick a penalty is to think too much about it. It causes you to use your conscious memory which is what you used when you were learning to kick a ball. The result: you kick it like a total beginner. To avoid this, one technique is to practice in your mind. Once you have a basic understanding of the techniques involved, you can literally imagine yourself performing the task and your brain will recreate the same nerve signals according to how you imagine yourself kicking the ball. The only difference is that in "practice-in-head" mode, the nerve signals get redirected away from the body (although you might still get small muscle twitches) and instead pipe them to the frontal lobe where your mind projects a lifelike simulation of you kicking the ball. The more you practice in your head, the better you get. The more lifelike you make the simulation (e.g. imagine the noise of the crowd, the smell of the grass, the feelings of nervousness) then the better the results. When it comes to really standing in front of a goal to take a kick, it's something you've done thousands of times already (in your head or on the pitch) and you can relax and let your mind take over. <alan_partridge> GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAL! THAT WAS LIQUID FOOTBALL! HE MUST HAVE A FOOT LIKE A TRACTION ENGINE! etc. </alan_partridge> I found this particularly interesting because it's a technique I've used myself for kite flying, skateboarding, kite boarding and other similar sports. Nailing a trick requires practice until you know when you're doing it right(ish), you know when you're doing it wrong, and more importantly, you know what it is that you're doing right/wrong (e.g. balance too far forwards, front foot too far back, etc). Then you can go home, practice it in your sleep until you get it right. Next day, you don't think about it, you just go out and land the trick. Well, sometimes :-) To bring this ever-so-slightly on topic, the same technique applies for non-sporting activities. You can practice giving a presentation in your head, field difficult questions from the audience, and so on, so that when you actually stand up and talk, you've done it a dozen times already and it all comes naturally. A similar point is raised in the Programmer's Stone (The Mappers and the Packers Paper: http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/). They advocate lots of daydreaming and talking to an imaginary friend (or imaginary conference audience) to explain your ideas. Your iFriend should ask tricky questions, seek out the holes in your theories, complain that your code is too complex to understand, and even fall asleep when you start rambling :-) Not only will your thinking be clearer and your code/ideas better, but you'll also feel more comfortable discussing it, you won't get so offended (and will thus be more constructive) when someone points out a flaw. Anyway, the message is that daydreaming, talking to yourself and having your own little dream world where you're the best footballer, skateboarder, kite flier or Jedi Knight in the world, are all Good Things that are typically drummed out of us by school and society. Finally, to bring the whole rambling point back to where we began, you can't change all the people in a football team overnight. You need cultural architects (a rare breed) who understand the mission and can infiltrate the team, dragging them all up by example. Beckham is England's cultural architect, someone who is a great footballer physically and mentally and for that reason, Sven has quite rightly built the team around him. He probably can't make the England players play any better themselves, but he has a key role in making them play better as a team with a shared mental model. A
