Self confidence and self criticism.
The relationship between your two selves and how it pertains to your practice, improvement and excellence.
The two selves.
Self criticism is a crippling habit that hinders the attainment and expression of high performance in almost all arenas. At some time or another I think most individuals can relate to this. Nowhere is this more true or observable than in sports performance. Learning to eliminate self criticism in your practice and performance will remove one of the biggest barriers to excellence.
In order to understand self criticism we must first understand the nature of self and the nature of criticism, and how together they constitute an enormous hinderance to the full expression of talent. When we say self criticism, we must observe that there seems to be a self that is the critic and a self that is the criticised. For the sake of clarity, it is helpful to visualise these two selves as two completely separate beings. This is actually more true than you may at first think. Even though the two selves we are referring to here inhabit the same vessel, they are much more separate than most appreciate.
The first self is the ego, the frontal cortex, the thinking, human part of your brain. This self is responsible for rational thought, strategic thinking, and analytical thought. It is a very useful part of the brain for long term planning, retrospective reflection and communicating complex ideas. For reasons I will try to elucidate later in this article, these abilities are actually a roadblock to effective learning and high performance. In essence, the thinking self is a melding armchair general when it is time to perform.
The second self is the doing self, the experiencing self, the body. This self is more ancient, lives only in the very present and speaks a language of intuition, tactile sensation and emotional experience. These characteristics make it awful at planning, communicating complex ideas and strategic thought, but incredible at reflexive and rapid action and reaction.
When we are performing physical skills, such as playing a game of basketball, we are relying heavily on the experiencing self to perform ingrained skills, free from the meddling of the thinking self. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, the thinking self processes events and rationalises decisions far too slowly to be of use. Plans are relatively useless in situations that require very rapid, real time adjustments to dynamic circumstances, that evolve constantly before your very eyes. Allow me to illustrate this with an example from basketball, a sport that I have coached extensively. All too often I have seen players pre determine a move that they will execute. Take for example a one on one situation against a talented defender. The offensive player thinks about which move might work, his attention here is in his own mind, not on the reality of the situation as it is here and now. He starts to execute the move he has planned, but the defender does not react as he thought he would and the play is ineffective. Meanwhile, he missed the open cutter. Because his conscious mind was controlling his actions, as opposed to the experiencing self, he was not fully present. It’s a kind of thinking about being present instead of actually being present. Reality does not conform to our plans in these situations. In order for peak performance to occur when the thinking self is in control, we need reality to conform to exactly what we planned. This happens exceptionally rarely and only by sheer chance, if at all.
Secondly, the thinking self does not speak the same language as the experiencing self. It is the experiencing self, who resides in our body, who must execute the skills in the moment. It speaks in imagery, tactile feeling and emotion, not spoken language. The thinking self uses mainly language to communicate complex ideas. Take a jump shot as an example. If you miss a shot and think to yourself, “that was flat, I need to lift my elbow higher on the next shot”. You are using language inside the thinking self to analyse a skill. You might feed that back to the experiencing self via a self talk command such as “ok, raise your elbow higher on the next shot”. In doing so, you will likely never see an improvement in end result. The command has caused the nervous system that is in charge of your body to become hindered by analysis. Instead of flowing freely through a skill and adapting the whole to accommodate a new technique, the muscles will now be under conscious control, slowing down adoption of the new skill, reducing accuracy of the skill and reducing attention and control over all other aspects of the skill and greater situation.
This is also where self criticism comes into play. The thinking self begins to criticise the experiencing self. Even though, residing in the brain this self cannot directly do the skills itself, it seems to think it knows better than the experiencing self and gets involved in the execution of skills in the moment. This leads to muscle tension, slow and inaccurate execution of learnt skills and an inhibition of the doing self to do freely what it does best.
@Self confidence.
The other path is one of self confidence. That is to say, the thinking self has enough confidence in the ability of the doing self to perform its best that it gets out of the way and lets the body do its thing. This is an exceptionally well researched tactic and actually one that leads to peak performance in almost every discipline known to humankind. This is because it leads to a state of flow. “Flow”, “the zone”, and all the other aliases of peak state are well known in the world of sports. And thanks to the work of the flow genome project are becoming much more widely appreciated in the world of business and creativity. (For a great wealth of information on this read Stephen Kotlers book The Rise of Superman).
During flow, a state of transient frontal hypoactivty is achieved. Transient meaning temporary, frontal, referring to the frontal lobe, where the thinking self resides, and hypoactivity, meaning reduced or inhibited activity. Quite literally this can be thought of as the quieting of the thinking self, during times requiring action and doing. Allowing the doing self to do its thing unhindered by the analytical, opinionated judgements of the thinking self. I refer to this as self confidence, because it is the thinking self showing that it has enough confidence in the doing self to let go in critical times.
One common question at this point is “OK that’s all well and good, but my skill is not good enough, how am I supposed to get better if I don’t analyse my technique and criticise my form”. A great question that deserves a much more detailed answer than the abbreviated one I am about to offer. My answer is that you also need to have confidence in your experiencing self’s ability to learn, far beyond the capacity of your thinking self to articulate that learning.
Let us use the best example provided to us all by nature: Learning to walk. When you learned how to walk, you didn’t learn using language and frontal lobe analysis of your technique. You used deep awareness centred in your experiencing self to improve with each practice step. Day by day you mastered the skill and internalised it to a point where it became unconscious. You practiced the skill, without judging your performance as good or bad, but simply with the end goal in mind. And you improved your technique using the language of the experiencing self. Deep immersion in feeling and experiencing the act of walking until you found equilibrium and confidence. You eventually became so versed in this skill that you were able to expand the skill to rough terrain, running and all manner of other variations, all without “trying” consciously, to change your foot placement or weight distribution.
If you are a parent, think about your most recent experience of watching your kids learn to walk. You didn’t teach them this skill. They simply observed that “this is how the adults move around and it seems faster and more advantageous than crawling, so I’ll give it a go” (which, again, emerged in their mind as a general concept, not a fully formed sentence). When they fell, you didn’t judge them for executing poor technique and when they did well, you didn’t encourage them with a hint of advice on the tail end of the compliment on how they can further improve. You simply were happy for them when they nailed it and saw each failing as a necessary stepping stone on the path to mastery. You watched them learn all by themselves. Any coaching would have been useless as they wouldn’t have been able to understand. This is a lesson for all those who are coaches or who are coached. Learning sometimes happens as a result of technical instruction, but ALWAYS happens as a result of awareness.
Each of us is born with this incredible, innate learning ability. So yes, your current technique will be imperfect and may well need to improve significantly before your levels of performance are equal to your goals. But getting the thinking self involved is not the answer to this. Firstly, your best current level of performance will only happen when the thinking self is quiet. Secondly, your best learning and development will only happen when you’re fully engaged in what you’re doing, non-judgmentally. Thirdly, in order to make the greatest gains in skill development, you will have to learn through the tactile, experiencing language of the doing self, more so than the analytical language of the thinking self. Have confidence in your doing self’s ability to perform and learn, and your progress will come much faster.
Letting yourself perform Is a far superior strategy to making yourself perform. Additionally, in the long run. By learning through the doing self and performing through the doing self, your execution of your skills becomes automatic. This actually frees up the thinking self to do what it’s good at and strategise or think ahead. Learning to drive is a prime example of this. To begin with, your brain is overloaded by coordinating the feet and hands operating independently to each other not only by group but also to one another. Your right foot is doing gas and brake, the left foot doing the clutch and the left hand the gear stick while the right hand does the steering. Your thinking self is so engaged in this new skill that it has no band width to focus on traffic on the road and pedestrians on the pavement. Gradually as you improve the doing self can handle the physical coordination of the limbs on autopilot and you’re now able to have the thinking self focus on the road. Transferring this to our basketball example, a point guard can now allow his doing self to play the game while his thinking self can use small punctuations in play, (ball is out of bounds or a time out) to make tactical decisions about how to guard is counterpart or who to get the ball to. But once the ball is in play, being present, aware and with unclouded attention on the reality of the game right now, will lead to best performance. This is the realm of the doing self.
Letting your doing self practice is also a favourable strategy. So often practice sessions are full of meddling from the thinking self, overanalysing and self coaching technique to the point where the degree of self consciousness forbids free flowing technique. I am not suggesting mindless practice. Quite the opposite. To learn you absolutely have to have your attention on task. You cannot daydream. So often skills reach a certain level and practice becomes an exercise in running through the motions. This will never lead to improvement. If you are practicing to try to get better, you must be fully immersed in what you are doing. But this is very different from practicing while analysing yourself. The art of learning is to quiet the analytical brain and fully experience your own experience, free from judgement, but constantly noticing how your technique is relative to how you desire it to be. This might be, for example, noticing where your hand finishes on the follow through of a jump shot and which feel gives the best results and feels most natural. Do not try to achieve a specific technique based on what’s supposedly “correct”, simply explore what works best for you and feel it, really feel it.
The practice of non judgement is a critical component of this. As soon as you start assigning values such as good or bad to specific techniques, you will not only limit your range of success, but will narrow your options and close yourself off to potential breakthroughs. Present state awareness without judgement is the optimal inner state for learning and skill development. If you are in fear of being judged by this ever present critic (thinking self) you will find it very difficult to let go and truly practice or perform your skills. Even positive judgement can be harmful to peak performance. Nothing can be good without its counterpart being bad. Therefore, when you praise yourself for “good” performances you increase pressure to not then perform “badly” and your focus becomes a little less pure and a little more tension can creep into your body and execution. To truly be in an optimal performance state your attention must be purely on the here and now and executing. Fear of failure, fear of poor performance and a nagging, back of the head thought of not doing it wrong or badly, dilutes this pure attention and distracts, even if just a little, from the here and now, and the execution itself. The player who is worried about missing the final shot to win the game will rarely make the final shot to win the game. The player who is focused on making the shot is slightly less likely to make it that the player fully immersed in the moment, with clarity.
By Pete Edwards. Founder, Edwards Performance