The Mental skills of Decision Making  – Tim Goodenough
2 March 2009

Quality decision making is a critical skill in sports where the quality of your decisions has a massive impact on your results. Rugby and hockey are two of those sports. In the search for skilled decision makers many people point to experienced athletes as usually being the ‘gold standard’ and that is completely understandable once we look a bit deeper at what experience is from a mental perspective.

"Experience” is arguably a combination of an athlete having two key mental skills.  Firstly better state management skills: “I have been here before so I won’t get too uncomfortable, become overawed or panic, and so I am more likely to be in the right mood to perform – and know how to get into the right mood if I am not”. Secondly better decision making skills: “I have got this wrong before and have had several years of trial and error and have learnt from those experiences and now will hopefully get it right”. So if experience is a function of state management and learning, why do people assume it’s a related to the number of years spent playing the sport?

The major reason for this is that athletes and especially athletes in team sports are generally very ineffective learners. It takes a long time for lessons to sink in; that time is often referred to as experience. This is due to a combination of factors:

1. A poor team or personal attitude to learning.
   
   Many athletes in team sports shun academics or anything related to formal learning. Gone are the days of professionals like lawyers, doctors and accountants playing high level sport, the majority of professional sports men and women these days haven’t had time (and sometimes the inclination) to get a higher education, their sport commitments don’t allow for it. During schooling some athletes were allowed to ignore academics due to their sporting excellence and so they never developed a positive attitude to learning. The athletes who enjoyed the learning element of their schooling often struggle when entering a team sports environment as their appetite and powerful attitude to learning are often blunted by their new team culture.
   
   
2.  Poor learning technique
   
   Tim Gallwey is one of the pioneers of mental coaching; He had a very simple performance equation.  Performance = your natural ability (body IQ) - the interference of your conscious (analytical/critical) mind. From our research from "In the Zone" we know that zoning is a flow state (a flow state is a state of full immersion that can be described as effortless mastery, athletes report how ‘easy and simple’ it was to perform above or beyond their previous capacity). A state where you are 100% in the present, you have no conscious analysis, you have no projected failures and you have no remembered errors: it is a place where instinct can guide your performance – your critical/analytical mind doesn’t come into play.
   
   So in sport the paradox is that we need to do some great thinking off the pitch, so we can do some great doing on it.  If too much (first time) thinking happens when you are playing, the analytical mind takes over and starts to interfere with performance.  One of the ways to make great decisions, to have effective doing on the pitch is to develop your decision making capacity so effectively that you can make instinctive decisions.  You don’t have to analyse, you just have to decide.
   
   There are two challenges with focusing on developing effective thinking off the pitch.  Firstly we need to use analytical thinking to learn, but being analytical is not an optimal performance state.  Secondly being analytical doesn't equal learning, it is just the first phase of learning.  *see more on learning how to learn here.
   
   For me, ideally, a well prepared athlete will never have to analyse something for the first time on the field, they will be making decisions based on what has already been considered, analysed, trained and prepared. Game scenarios have been trained in a piece-meal fashion, so that even if the exact game context has never been specifically mentioned in training or preparation, the fundamentals of that context have been developed sufficiently enough that the athlete can make a high quality decision – they can piece together what to do based on their preparation. In a similar way to a master chess player that knows what to do throughout a game of chess, as each chess scenario has several useful options which have been studied so effectively that the chess master can choose the best one for the context.
   
   
3. Poor mental preparation
   
   Some athletes imagine or visualise themselves failing at some level of their sport, as they are so concerned about not getting things right. This reinforces a self-fulfilling cycle.  Many athletes don’t mentally prepare for games, and most don’t mentally prepare for training, to get maximum value from every training minute. Visualisation is usually used to manage anxiety and create confidence for a big game, but is seldom used to develop and fine tune skills (especially skills that can usually only be developed effectively in match conditions – e.g. rugby's scrumming) and to boost confidence and accuracy in skills work, and very seldomly is proper visualisation technique taught or utilised.
   
   
4. Poor state management skills
   
   Many athletes do not have high quality state management skills.  They do not know how to change or enhance their mood or state at will. Their mood or state gets affected by environmental conditions: routines, rituals, crowds, “The Haka”, home atmosphere, coaches words, etc. Many athletes do now know how to create those moods without the environment, or even how to protect their existing mood if the environment doesn’t support their best performance moods.  They do not know how to increase or decrease their tension for match day as required. Many don’t have the self-understanding or self-insight to be certain of what their most effective state or mood is for game day, training, gyming, learning, team discussions or even to relax and unwind.  State affects performance and state affects decisions making skills. State management is one of the most critical sporting skills: To be able to design and enter your optimum states, and exit unhelpful states (like anger, frustration, extreme tension) takes time and patience to develop but can separate the good from the great, not only in decision making but in performance.

 The effective decision making recipe

1. Visually can I see all that I need to see to make a quality decision about it? Dr Sherylle Calder’s work is about specifically improving the quality and quantity of visual information coming into the brain, in order to make more effective decisions with the complete visual data available.  A poor visual system will limit high quality decisions.  The ability to consider all the visual data is not only a function of visual skills, but also of state.  When any emotions manifest in an extreme way (e.g. anger, tension or stress) it can create a form of literal tunnel vision for an athlete, their narrowed focus a by-product of an evolutionary fight/flight response.  Clive Woodward’s 2003 World cup wining mental guru Yehuda Shinar developed the acronym T-CUP or Thinking Correctly Under Pressure, as a way to describe the mental strategy developed by the team to ensure state didn’t negatively affect decision making.

 
2. Do I know what the best option to take is according to the game situation? If the best option hasn’t been taught to the athlete effectively, he will not be able to execute it well or with the correct timing, or at all.  If the option that has been conversationally reinforced by the coach hasn’t been developed into muscle memory, the conscious interference of “This is how I do this” will detract from a quality execution of the decision. Some athletes will only make the best decision according to their experience so far, and so whilst the execution may be good, the result is not.  This is a function of how effectively the athlete learns, if they are learning effectively from their experiences as well as from the other players around them and from the players on TV, their decision making skills will improve dramatically.

The culture of the team is also a factor here– does the team “play what’s in front of you” from anywhere? If so the best option will be different here than it would be for a very structured team.  How aligned is the decision makers thinking to the team norms? If they are misaligned, the required support for the decision may not be there.

Does the athlete have the technical nous (and mental aptitude) to know when to go for a possible chance, and when to go for something that is probable? And to know which is which and to trust themselves to go for it completely?

3. Do I own the option?  Athletes who talk about moves or options as the coaches, and not their own move that the coach suggested have a split second check mentally to consider what someone else wants them to do, that split second can affect the quality of the decision. Even if the move is stipulated by the coach, designed and created by the coach, the athlete needs to own it completely as if they created the move them self to improve the chance of a quality execution of that move.

4. Do I have permission to commit 100% to this decision? To commit 100% to a decision means to make it without worrying what the coach or teammates might say if things don’t go well.  The athlete doesn’t worry about repercussions; they are too busy executing their decision to worry about that. If a player is lacking in confidence often their permission to commit 100% to a decision is impacted, as they fear “giving it a go”

5. Have I trained my body what to do effectively and to "know/feel" the correct timing of the decision?
This is a function of physical training, theory and effective learning combing with mental preparation.

Instinctive players normally have high levels of most of these aspects, except for no 2. Their options are normally limited as they shun "learning/analysis" to play what's in front of them, and so often they get “found out.” Over a period of time they execute their one or two options well, but then become predictable which allows the opposition to manage them affectively which begins to effect their confidence which effects step No 4