Can You Manipulate Your Beliefs?

I’ve been reading the fascinating new book Bounce, by Matthew Syed, which investigates the science behind the success of people who have achieved mastery in their fields. Focusing particularly on world-class athletes at the peak of their games, Syed explores the physical and mental preparation that goes into the making of champions – both in the world of sport and in non-sporting contexts.

I was particularly struck by the chapter on the mental self-manipulation that top athletes engage in when preparing for key matches. Syed (himself an Olympic table tennis player) notes that no athlete can achieve the pinnacle of success without “surgically removing doubt from the mind.” To elaborate, he cites the words of Arsene Wenger, a top soccer club manager:

“To perform to your maximum, you have to teach yourself to believe with an intensity that goes way beyond logical justification. No top performer has lacked this capacity for irrational optimism; no sportsman has played to his potential without the ability to remove doubt from his mind.”

But how can a performer improve his game and make necessary adjustments if he ignores weaknesses and “irrationally” focuses on nothing but positives – which, as Wenger notes, are often amplified in the performer’s mind “beyond logical justification”?

What happens, says Syed, is that top athletes are able to “wield different beliefs as part of a cycle.”

“In stage one, the athlete ‘takes the positives’ to protect self-belief; later, when training, he incorporates the insights gained from the negative aspect of the previous match to strengthen weaknesses; then, when the next match is looming, the focus returns to building self-belief once again, so that doubt is eliminated at the point of performance.”

Syed then quotes an extraordinary observation by Wenger:

“Unless you have the ability to manipulate your beliefs over the performance cycle, it is difficult to perform well at anything, sport or otherwise.” (emphasis added)

In sum, Syed and Wenger are saying that a top performer must be able to control his thinking in order to entertain two seemingly contradictory mindsets at the same time: An unshakeable confidence in his own abilities to succeed and an objective evaluation of his actual current situation so that he can course-correct as needed. It’s the type of attitude that leads a champion golfer to feel dead certain about making a putt – while also making sure he hits it so that it won’t roll too far from the hole if he misses.

It’s also the type of attitude that the Daily Improviser needs to adopt in order to resolve the (seeming) contradictions that continually confront her in life! Throughout this blog, I’ve noted several examples of situations where the performance improvisers and Daily Improvisers must keep paradoxical thoughts in simultaneous suspension, including:

• The Stockdale Paradox – “Confront the brutal facts, yet never lose hope!”
• The And Stance – “I’m right and you’re right!”
• The Yogi Berra Paradox – “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”

And next time, I hope to apply this concept of “manipulating beliefs over the performance cycle” to resolve the paradox I posed last time: In times of change, how can we focus on both the problem and the solution?