Disrupting Your Softball Routines
This is the second installment of the mental flex series. In this series of articles, we will flex your brain by learning strategies that will help you shift your perspective quickly, change your thinking between different topics more efficiently, and get more comfortable with new information and change. This is also known as mental agility.
If you missed the first strategy, go back and read "Winning In Mindset: Why "What If" Always Beats "If Only" for some tips on playing with words to shift your perspective.
In this article, we'll focus on causing disruption to get your brain to become more flexible on the field. Where will we create this disruption? Let's pick something that, when done effectively, should bring you comfort and enhance your ability to focus. Yeah, let's disrupt that!
To work on mental agility with this strategy, we're going to target your performance routines. Get ready to get uncomfortable!
What's A Performance Routine & Why Is It Useful?
To get us started, let's define what a performance routine should be and do to make sure you have at least one. If you don't, work on creating one (or some)!
A performance routine is an intentional sequence of mental thoughts and physical actions that athletes use to help prepare them to perform a skill, task, or action optimally. These thoughts and actions are carried out consistently before a performance. These thoughts and actions, if used appropriately, can help you manage pressure by reducing anxiety, managing emotions, heightening focus, building productive levels of energy, and building confidence (Orbach & Blumenstein, 2022; Rupprecht et al., 2024).
Performance routines can help prepare you for the performance of a task, skill, or even game because repeating productive thoughts and actions consistently gives you a sense of control through repetition. Your brain likes to predict what will happen or how you can successfully get through a presented task. Routines help your brain predict what may be coming next, so it can activate and "show you" the best strategies to use to be successful.
There are two keys to performance routines: 1) Actions and thoughts should help you feel more confident, calm, or prepared for your performance or next action, and 2) You do not attach your ability to perform to doing these actions or thoughts. That would be a superstition, and we don't want to convince ourselves that we cannot perform well if we aren't able to do the actions or have the thoughts in our routine.
Our routine is there to help prepare us when and if we can execute the routine, and we need to learn how to be flexible so we can perform well even if we are not able to execute all or any of our preferred performance routine. While our brain likes the comfort and predictability of routines, we want to be able to perform even when our routine is missed or changed.
How Can I Work On Mental Agility With My Routines?
As mentioned above, your brain likes the comfort of a routine because your brain is a prediction machine. Your brain uses your previous experiences to formulate strategies that will help you be successful in situations you encounter. When this happens, it sends signals to your body to calm you, lock in your focus, and manage your emotions when it can predict with greater accuracy what is about to happen to you, or what you're about to do (Bubic et al., 2010).
To practice mental flexibility, we can disrupt our routines. Think about what you feel when your routine is shaken up. Have you ever gone on vacation and suddenly you're sleeping in later? Or eating meals at different times, or going to sleep at different times? It feels different than when you're at home, going to school or work, and practices, doesn't it? You feel "off" because your normal routines have changed, and you may find you don't really get much done (which isn't a bad thing on vacation!).
When you get back home from vacation, you want to get back to your school/work schedule, and the quickest way to do that is to go back to moving through your "normal" routines as soon as possible (e.g., meal times, bed times, morning/evening tasks). Soon, you feel more settled, more productive, and like you're "getting back into the swing of things." This is because you've gotten back into a routine and your brain probably knows those routines well. And, the vacation disruption is actually you practicing how to be more mentally flexible.
This is very similar to how you can practice mental agility with your performance routines. Take some time to observe yourself to make sure you have a performance routine. If you don't, create one. If you do, change the routine up or try skipping it altogether the next time you go to perform—start in a practice session, then work up to a game to increase the difficulty level.
Take note of how you feel, how you perform, and see if you can perform just as well as you would with the routine you like. It's a challenge! So get busy causing disruption and watch yourself work through it, knowing you've just made yourself more mentally flexible.
Dr. Megan Buning is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (C.M.P.C.) with over a decade of experience training the mental game.
References
Bubic, A., von Cramon, D. Y., & Schubotz, R. I. (2010). Prediction, cognition and the brain. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 4, 25. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00025
Orbach, I., & Blumenstein, B. (2022). Preparatory routines for emotional regulation in performance enhancement. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 948512. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.948512
Rupprecht, A. G., Tran, U. S., & Groepel, P. (2024). The effectiveness of pre-performance routines in sports: a meta-analysis. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 17(1), 39-64.
