Being in Control
What do we mean by being in control?
If you are from this part of the world, you will have seen the viral video that is comes to mind when you hear ‘control’, or specifically “Control it, Travis!”. Jordan from the Shankill playing football with his friends results in him roaring at Travis to control the ball. A classic video but when we think about control in a skill sense like controlling a ball, it is easy to comprehend, the ball either stays with you or bounces away. Controlling our emotions or thoughts is a whole different challenge.
Emotional control in sport is a concept that many players and coaches strive for, but some fail to reach that, resulting in mistakes, red cards, lost matches, breaks in team cohesion. Richard Lazarus (1991) developed the cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion which has been used in various research papers to explore emotion and how it can be controlled in sport. Using this theory, Jones (2003) looked at using different strategies to develop a more appropriate emotional response or a suppression of emotional expression in sport. They found that arousal management strategies can be used to control emotional responses as they also impact the physiological responses which plays a key role in how we experience emotion (Jones, 2003). It’s important at this point to note that we don’t want an athlete or a coach to play without emotion. Showing emotion is important to overall general wellbeing, as well as performing well. However, balance is the key, channelling those emotions to positive action is the desirable path. This is shown in research by Stanger et al. (2018) who established that anxiety and dejection positively predicted cognitive interference (lose of emotional control), while excitement had the opposite effect. Emotions are needed, but choosing the right ones are key to it.
How can we start being in control?
If I told you that you had a match at the weekend, often the first responses are ‘who is it against?’, ‘who is the referee?’, ‘where is it?’, ‘what is the weather going to be like?’. All these things are out of our control, yet they impact our decision making. I suffer from this myself, especially around my own performance and the performance of the team. My focus is on the outcome, but like the weather, I can’t do anything about it. Performance psychology looks to have performers control the controllable factors. In our lives, one thing is in our control, ourselves. Within that, we control our actions, attitudes, and thoughts. We have no real control anything else after that, yet we give our time, focus and energy to the uncontrollable factors. Using the mantra, ‘control the controllable’, we can focus in on getting ourselves in the best place to perform by focusing on process over outcome, but also on keeping ourselves right.
Stoicism is a 2000-year-old philosophy made famous by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who is made famous by being the emperor at the start of the movie Gladiator. If you follow the OMAC Performance Instagram, you will see stoicism posted regularly in stories, often the work of Ryan Holiday and the Daily Stoic. A key stoic virtue is temperance, which can also be called discipline or self-control. Various philosophers within the field have written or spoken about temperance and I believe their work can be transferred to the sport performance environment. Look at these quotes below and see for yourself:
“Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about” – Marcus Aurelius
“Anger is the most savage of the emotions”- Epictetus
“Other people’s mistakes, leave them to their makers” – Marcus Aurelius
“We don’t control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens” – Ryan Holiday
An old saying my Granda Pat would have used a lot was ‘Eat what you can and can what you can’t’. We can reword that here in the context of this blog, ‘control what you can and can what you can’t.’ In other words, focus on the controllable, bin the uncontrollable. So many things in our life are out of our control, yet they impact us and influence how we act emotionally. By flicking that switch to focusing on our own controllable factors, leaving other factors and other people’s mistakes to themselves, we become a master of our own mind and not a slave to others.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you did, please share it on your social media platforms and tag @omacperformance. If you would like support for yourself or your team, please reach out via the Contact section.
Thanks,
Oisin
References:
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Cognition and motivation in emotion. American Psychologist, 46(4), 352–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.46.4.352
Jones, M. V. (2003). Controlling Emotions in Sport. The Sport Psychologist, 17(4), 471-486. https://doi.org/10.1123/tsp.17.4.471
Stanger, N., Chettle, R., Whittle, J., & Poolton, J. (2018). The Role of Preperformance and In-Game Emotions in Cognitive Interference During Sport Performance: The Moderating Role of Self-Confidence and Reappraisal. The Sport Psychologist, 32(2), 114-124. https://doi.org/10.1123/tsp.2017-0001