Interview
Dr. Brian Shaw works at the Clinic on Dupont in Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Western Ontario in 1975 following a B.Sc. degree in physiology at the University of Toronto. He is a Professor at the University of Toronto. Scientifically, in the 1980’s, he was one of the 50 highest-impact authors in psychology. Over the past 15 years he has taken this research and adapted it to the everyday world where people strive for health, peace of mind, and exceptional performance.
Q: Why did you decide to go into sports psychology?
A: Originally I was actually in clinical psychology, where your looking after patients and clients and I was working in the area of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and addiction. Then I got into sports psychology at a later point after I was involved with players in the National Hockey League, and some Olympic athletes. I didn’t really choose it as much as I really did the skills that they needed. So it found me to be honest.
Q: What is sports psychology? What does a sports psychologist do?
A: There’s three different types of psychologists who work in sports, the first group are the ones who look at identifying talent and looking at how well young people will perform at a elite level or professional level or an Olympic level, and they are the ones who be involved in selecting players or helping teams with the draft. The second type of sports psychologists are, the ones who help performance and they are the ones who teach athletes how to perform at a high level, how to manage their emotions, how to make sure they keep focus even under the greatest stress. The third type of sports psychologist are the ones who look at the players and their families and they are the ones who help them when they have personal trouble, or difficulty cause they cant handle some of the pressures. So of those three types the most common is the second type who helps the athletes with their performance making sure they can compete at the highest level. I’m primarily the third type, I do a little bit of the second type.
Q: What’s the difference between a mental game / mental toughness coach and an athletic team coach?
A: The team coach is responsible for developing strategies that the team can implement and follow and they are responsible for building skills that are specific to a sport. They become very good at building sports related skills. A mental coach or the psychological coach is really there to help the athlete focus their attention and help them with their dedication and training which is really difficult because they have to give up a lot and have to stick to a pretty strict diet and they have to train mostly every day and they have to learn not to have burn out. The mental coach teaches them what we call cal resilliance or toughness how you can keep your focus despite the fact that they are working under stress or a lot of pressure.
Q: What kind of results can the typical athlete who receives sports psychology coaching expect to see?
A: So it depends on how much they work at it, but it’s usually viewed in the elite athlete, make a difference from 2-3% of their performance. That’s a statistic that is hard to prove, but it’s certainly not the main part of what they do, but as you get to the higher levels when people who have all outstanding athletic ability than its made more and more important about the skills. So for a sport like golf, some people say that the mental game is almost 30 or 40% of what it takes to win, because so many players are very close in competition.
Q: What makes an ideal mental game student?
A: Someone who is willing to push themselves so that they will understand that they are not perfect. So you don’t want someone who has to do things perfectly. You want someone who is going to be able to deal with failure and to be able to understand that as much as they want to win and as much as they love the sport, there an athlete, it’s not there whole person. The next is that in a way they are good learners, they like to learn and finally someone who is willing to practice.
Q: What is the importance of positive self-talk
A: Positive self-talk is important for maintaining your mood so that you don’t get to down or to depressed when bad things happen or when fail or when negative things happen. You don’t want to fool yourself so you want to try and be realistic, but most athletes at high levels have to believe that they can do what they are trying to do. If you are trying to go down a ski hill and you are trying for personal best, positive self-talk really keeps you focused on the fact that you believe in yourself and that you can do it and having that confidence to believe that you can make a shot or you can perform well under the great pressures is really quite important.
Q: What is it in the nerves?
A: When you’re under stress or fear, your body produces adrenaline, which is called a fight or flight response and that adrenaline is what gets you to have different reactions, like your going to sweat more and your stomach is probably going to turn and you may even feel a bit light headed. And so it has that adrenaline reaction that prepares you to run or to fight. In many sports a player needs to be calm and quiet when your performing a sport, and so it gets the affect that when a player says they have nerves they usually means that their anxiety is getting out of control and they have trouble managing it.
Q: What’s the toughest sport with people battling mental toughness?
A: Every sport has got its own challenges, so it is very tough to say what is the most difficult. Every sport has its own challenges, that’s what’s good about it. If I was going to try and be funny, I would say that the one that you have the least amount of talents.
Q: How do you keep yourself in the zone?
A: That’s a good question, but there’s two parts you can go out of the zone because you are not ready, your not mentally ready, your not ready to perform, because your distracted, or you have other issues, or you haven’t been sticking well to your training schedule, that’s at the low end. At the high end you start to feel this thing called stress or pressure and you try to fight against it as oppose to learning how to manage it. So you start to, once you start to feel that pressure and it spins because it gets worse and worse while staying in that mind set.
Q: Why did you decide to go into sports psychology?
A: Originally I was actually in clinical psychology, where your looking after patients and clients and I was working in the area of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and addiction. Then I got into sports psychology at a later point after I was involved with players in the National Hockey League, and some Olympic athletes. I didn’t really choose it as much as I really did the skills that they needed. So it found me to be honest.
Q: What is sports psychology? What does a sports psychologist do?
A: There’s three different types of psychologists who work in sports, the first group are the ones who look at identifying talent and looking at how well young people will perform at a elite level or professional level or an Olympic level, and they are the ones who be involved in selecting players or helping teams with the draft. The second type of sports psychologists are, the ones who help performance and they are the ones who teach athletes how to perform at a high level, how to manage their emotions, how to make sure they keep focus even under the greatest stress. The third type of sports psychologist are the ones who look at the players and their families and they are the ones who help them when they have personal trouble, or difficulty cause they cant handle some of the pressures. So of those three types the most common is the second type who helps the athletes with their performance making sure they can compete at the highest level. I’m primarily the third type, I do a little bit of the second type.
Q: What’s the difference between a mental game / mental toughness coach and an athletic team coach?
A: The team coach is responsible for developing strategies that the team can implement and follow and they are responsible for building skills that are specific to a sport. They become very good at building sports related skills. A mental coach or the psychological coach is really there to help the athlete focus their attention and help them with their dedication and training which is really difficult because they have to give up a lot and have to stick to a pretty strict diet and they have to train mostly every day and they have to learn not to have burn out. The mental coach teaches them what we call cal resilliance or toughness how you can keep your focus despite the fact that they are working under stress or a lot of pressure.
Q: What kind of results can the typical athlete who receives sports psychology coaching expect to see?
A: So it depends on how much they work at it, but it’s usually viewed in the elite athlete, make a difference from 2-3% of their performance. That’s a statistic that is hard to prove, but it’s certainly not the main part of what they do, but as you get to the higher levels when people who have all outstanding athletic ability than its made more and more important about the skills. So for a sport like golf, some people say that the mental game is almost 30 or 40% of what it takes to win, because so many players are very close in competition.
Q: What makes an ideal mental game student?
A: Someone who is willing to push themselves so that they will understand that they are not perfect. So you don’t want someone who has to do things perfectly. You want someone who is going to be able to deal with failure and to be able to understand that as much as they want to win and as much as they love the sport, there an athlete, it’s not there whole person. The next is that in a way they are good learners, they like to learn and finally someone who is willing to practice.
Q: What is the importance of positive self-talk
A: Positive self-talk is important for maintaining your mood so that you don’t get to down or to depressed when bad things happen or when fail or when negative things happen. You don’t want to fool yourself so you want to try and be realistic, but most athletes at high levels have to believe that they can do what they are trying to do. If you are trying to go down a ski hill and you are trying for personal best, positive self-talk really keeps you focused on the fact that you believe in yourself and that you can do it and having that confidence to believe that you can make a shot or you can perform well under the great pressures is really quite important.
Q: What is it in the nerves?
A: When you’re under stress or fear, your body produces adrenaline, which is called a fight or flight response and that adrenaline is what gets you to have different reactions, like your going to sweat more and your stomach is probably going to turn and you may even feel a bit light headed. And so it has that adrenaline reaction that prepares you to run or to fight. In many sports a player needs to be calm and quiet when your performing a sport, and so it gets the affect that when a player says they have nerves they usually means that their anxiety is getting out of control and they have trouble managing it.
Q: What’s the toughest sport with people battling mental toughness?
A: Every sport has got its own challenges, so it is very tough to say what is the most difficult. Every sport has its own challenges, that’s what’s good about it. If I was going to try and be funny, I would say that the one that you have the least amount of talents.
Q: How do you keep yourself in the zone?
A: That’s a good question, but there’s two parts you can go out of the zone because you are not ready, your not mentally ready, your not ready to perform, because your distracted, or you have other issues, or you haven’t been sticking well to your training schedule, that’s at the low end. At the high end you start to feel this thing called stress or pressure and you try to fight against it as oppose to learning how to manage it. So you start to, once you start to feel that pressure and it spins because it gets worse and worse while staying in that mind set.
