NLP in Sports, The Lizard Brain and Fear of Failure
There’s never any love lost between Scotland and England when it comes to football or any sport for that matter! - but even though I’m Scottish, I’m still left wondering why England are playing so poorly in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. What has caused the England team - the cream of England’s club players - to perform so poorly? From a sports psychology point of view, the big question is, why do they appear to be cracking under pressure?
Ever heard of the lizard brain? It’s a term used to describe the part of your brain concerned with basic survival. Your lizard brain doesn’t want you to take any chances or do anything risky, it wants you to play it safe and just stay alive - no matter how dull that life may be! Writer Steven Pressfield describes the lizard brain as ‘the resistance.’ It’s the voice in the back of your head telling you to be careful, to go slow, to back off. In writing terms, the resistance can result in writer’s block, and in sporting terms, the resistance can result in under-achieving. Ringing any bells?
The lizard brain doesn’t like change. It fears change, and fear sabotages success.
Could it be that England manager Fabio Capello’s lizard brain is preventing him from changing his managing methods? Could it be that the lizard brains of the players are sending warning signals, subconsciously reminding them to play it safe and not to take chances? In sports psychology terms, are the entire England squad experiencing a fear of failure?
The tricky thing is, without our lizard brains, we’d be reckless in everything we did. A reckless soccer team probably wouldn’t have qualified for the World Cup at all but now, a sports psychologist, would see a team paralyzed by fear. The fear factor stops players from playing to their full ability.
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2010 World Cup. Great teams rise to the top.
It’s well known that negative feedback can affect a players performance. Brazil weren’t favourites to win in 1970. They hadn’t played well in 1966 and it seemed the majority of their supporters doubted the teams ability to improve on that performance. Even their coach questioned their abilities to form an effective team because he considered the top players to be too similar in their abilities. In sports psychology terms, the players were subject to a great deal of negative external feedback.
So how did they prevent that negativity from affecting their performance? A change of coach in the last few months before the start of the 1970 World Cup gave players the opportunity to make decisions - decisions that provided a powerful source of positive internal feedback, and in effect defined the team. Adjustments were made and playing positions changed to create a team that made the very most of its strengths.
That’s the key right there, the team made decisions. The players - that powerful mix of seasoned professionals with top level experience and youthful talent with boundless energy - worked with their coach to develop a team in which everyone could play to the best of their ability; a team that they, the players and their coach, could believe in. They knew their strengths, they believed in their abilities, and they went out there knowing what they had to do as a team. Sports psychology wasn’t a common practice in 1970 but what they achieved is now known in sports psychology terms as team spirit.
If you’re a coach hoping to produce a winning team, understanding the importance of developing the sort of team spirit seen in the World Cup winning team of 1970 is crucial. Sports psychology 2 can show you how.
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