Embracing Adversity & Preparing for Success: Published in Schutzhund USA Magazine, Jan 2015, pg. 26-27.
“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”
—Lou Holtz
Many of us participate in IPO simply because we have a love for dogs and a passion for the sport. Goals in the sport are highly individualized, and range from having a social environment to train for club level trials to the highly competitive endeavor of earning a place on a national team and competing internationally. Regardless of what your defined goals are, achieving success involves being mentally prepared.
Training and competing in IPO takes dedication and commitment. Handlers spend countless hours training their dogs, memorizing IPO rules, and practicing routines. When considering the amount of time you put toward your training, what percentage of this time involves practicing mental skills? Yes, mental skills take practice to develop and are an important part of performance! In fact, many top athletes will agree mental skills make up a larger percentage of their performances than their physical skills do!
As you think about your training in IPO, consider how you mentally prepare. More importantly, how do you handle the unexpected when a training session or competition does not go as planned? Do you fall apart or do you embrace the challenge and push through it? Unexpected things often come up in sports, especially when competing with an animal. These unexpected situations are where having effective mental skills really matters. Thus, the goal is to be mentally prepared to handle adversity so you can stay on your path to a successful, and enjoyable, performance. IPO is a unique sport. Most athletes only have themselves to worry about, however, in IPO you and your dog are a team. Preparing both yourself and another living creature for competition takes a special ability. Dogs have good and bad days just as people do! This reality makes it that much more important to be mentally prepared for the unexpected. Things do not always go as planned in sports or life. The question is; are you prepared to handle it?
Preparation for potential challenges you may encounter involves learning specific mental skills to rely on during training and competition. Fortunately, there are many mental skills that are helpful when facing adverse situations. Examples of essential mental skills that benefit performance include having the ability to concentrate, manage distractions, and regulate emotions (e.g., fear, anxiety) and thoughts (e.g., self-doubt, negative thinking). These skills must be practiced just as physical skills require practice, but once learned, you can use them to overcome adversity should it occur. As we all know, adverse situations always come up. Expect this and embrace it!
To identify the specific mental skills you might like to develop, you can make a comparison between your best and worst performances. Take a moment and recall your best performance. Athletes often describe their best performances as “natural and easy.” What do you remember experiencing in your best performance? What do you recall thinking and feeling? Were you focused, calm, and feeling confident? Did your routines flow easily and come together without thinking too much about them? These details are important so you can recreate this experience for future performances. It also gives you an idea of what skills are useful. When recalling your least successful performance, what do you remember thinking and feeling? Were you easily distracted or feeling anxious? Did you notice it was difficult to remember your routines? Did you doubt yourself or think about all the possible things that could go wrong? Although failure can be devastating, this experience is part of what helps us learn. In thinking back to your worst performance, what would you do differently? Are there mental skills that would have helped improve this performance? For example, if you identified you had trouble staying focused, then learning about improving concentration and managing distractions would be a good place to start your mental training.
So how do you improve concentration? In IPO there are multiple demands on a handler’s attention. You have to focus on yourself, the details of the routine you are doing, and on how your dog is reacting to everything. If you lose concentration, your physical state and timing is altered and impacts communication with your dog. Maintaining total concentration during your training and performance is essential. Good concentration is a skill, and you can develop it by first recognizing what disrupts it. Are you easily distracted by external distractions (e.g., people talking, a sound, etc.), does worry and anxiety distract you, does a lack confidence shift your attention to questioning yourself, or did your mind wander because you were doing something too easy or boring? These are the four concentration busters described by Laura King in her book, The Power to Win. To counteract these disruptions, tune your focus to your goal in that moment. For example, instead of trying to focus on your entire obedience routine at once, break it down into smaller parts such as a motion exercise, the jump, the wall, etc. Between each short-term goal, help yourself regain control and concentration by taking a few deep breaths. Diaphragmatic breathing, or tactile breathing, has long been used by elite athletes, military, and police to help focus during critical situations. With tactile breathing, you are breathing from your diaphragm and filling your stomach up with air like it is a balloon. As you exhale, that “balloon” deflates. Tactile breathing involves four counts of four: breathe in through your nose for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale through your mouth for four seconds, and hold for four seconds. You can repeat this cycle multiple times until you regain some of your focus and a sense of calmness. As you practice tactile breathing, you are training your body to relax, which is a very helpful skill during demanding, high stress situations.
The next step is making time to practice your mental skills. An IPO 3 is not accomplished after practicing for just a few days. Similarly, mental skills take time to develop and require regular practice as you integrate them into your training. As you develop your training plan and prepare for your next competition, consider adding time to practice specific mental skills. Consult with your peers, training directors, and mentors for help. Additional resources you can seek out to learn about mental skills include educational books, scholarly articles, and sport psychologists. If you love IPO and are working toward being more successful, these are the skills that will help you cope with the unexpected and stay on the path toward success.