As many athletes transition from their regular season and into off-season training, they’ll likely come face to face with one of the biggest mental barriers to high-performance: learning how to live with delayed gratification.

Difficult tasks (like high performance athletic training) usually require a tough trade-off of having to do the work now, for a reward that may or may not come later. For many young athletes this trade-off is particularly difficult, especially because technology has designed most of our world to provide instant gratification – one click solutions to whatever our heart desires.

Psychology points to Present Bias as major contributor to shortcomings in long-term planning.

Present Bias is the tendency to settle for a smaller present reward rather than to wait for a larger future reward. It describes the trend of overvaluing immediate rewards, while putting less worth in long-term consequences.

Another name for it would be: impulsivity.

So how do we overcome this bias? Well, a growing body of research suggests that if we can build some fun (like a reward) into our process we can increase our likelihood of seeing difficult tasks through. By designing instant gratification activities into tasks that don’t naturally yield them we can increase enjoyment and the likelihood of repeating positive activities.

This type of design can take a number of forms including:

• Listening to a book or podcast while you train
• Bundling the workout with a temptation – ex. riding a stationary bike while binge-watching watching Netflix
• Giving your Instagram password to your Trainer and having it shared back only after completing a work-out
• Rewarding a week’s worth of hard training with an indulgent meal
• Using one of the many “gamified” work-out apps (https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/6-fitness-apps-that-make-working-out-too-fun-skip.html)

Whatever it is you design, the important thing that research points to is that the athlete must be involved in building the reward system. Study after study show that when a reward system is imposed on a person, rather than designed by them, they’re more likely to give up on the task.

If we need to see proof of this idea in action – check out this great video of a company in Sweden who designed fun into taking the stairs versus taking the escalator:

Enjoy designing “fun” into your training plans!

Led by their world-class goaltender, Carey Price, the Montreal Canadiens just completed a 4-game series sweep of the Winnipeg Jets in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Price and his calm demeanor have been the subject of much discussion in the hockey world. Over the team’s last 7 wins, including 2 series clinching performances, Price has looked calm, stoic, some would even say “bored” as he congregated with his teammates in the moments after the final horn.

Lots of coaches instruct their players to “act like they’ve won before and will again soon”, but for Price, I would argue that his conduct is not an act, but a measured and trained performance skill.

We all know what it feels like to be over-activated, nervous, anxious, or so worked up that we can’t perform to our capabilities. We also know that high-performance happens in the present moment and it’s a skill to find the right level of activation – not too relaxed and not too fired up.

Learning how to regulate their internal activation helps athletes stay present and perform their best. I’ll bet that Carey Price has studied the Yerkes-Dodson Law – the concept of the Arousal Curve and the role of the sympathetic nervous system. This law states that our performance will increase as we activate our minds and bodies, but that after a certain point, too much activation will result in a decrease in performance.

Our natural responses to danger and stress include: fight, flight, freeze, or submit. The first two responses happen in an over-activated state (where the “nervous wreck” lives), while the latter two occur in an under-activated state (we call this the “drone zone”).

For a Stanley Cup playoff game, most athletes would be over-activated – with their hearts pounding and their legs shaking. Athletes like Carey Price learn to love this sate and work hard at training themselves to use to use their mind to control their internal system so it can operate optimally – at the perfect arousal level.

Coaches and athletes should pay attention to and keep the Yerkes-Dodson Law in mind as they build pre-performance routines – aiming to find that perfect level of activation – not too high and not too low.

To do extraordinary things, you will encounter and need to manage stress – this is an inescapable reality of high-performance. One of (if not the best way) to help manage stress, is to understand what is inside and outside of our control. To me, there are 4 things that are always inside of our control:

Understanding and accepting what is inside and outside of our control is a consistent trait of high-performance. Studies show that people who focus on what is inside their control are more motivated and focused on their pursuits. This makes sense when we think about it – High Performers are masters at getting the most out of their seconds, minutes, and hours – so they don’t have time to focus on things that they can’t control.

The best news is that control is a skill, and we can train ourselves to become great at focusing on the inputs that actually make a difference. High Performers understand that life is 10% what happens to them and 90% how they respond to it. They realize that life can generally be broken down as:

We cannot control what happens to us, only our response to it. As athletes and people we often overestimate the impact bad events will have on us, when in fact the outcome is almost entirely influenced by our response.

While what we can control is limited … we should remember that there is also a ton of stuff we can influence. High Performers don’t shy away from things they cannot control, instead they focus on influencing them in ways they can control. For example, we cannot control whether or not we make the team, get drafted, or receive a scholarship, but we can influence those outcomes through elements within our control, like a great attitude and effort. Therefore, a great way to attack your pursuits is to focus on what you can control as a means for influencing what you cannot.

Summary:

• High Performers are notorious for focusing on what is inside their control.
• What we can control boils down to our thoughts, actions, attitude, and effort.
• We can train our control response by applying the E+R=O formula to any and all challenging situations in our lives.
• A great approach for big goals is to focus on what we can control as a means for influencing what we cannot.