My favorite mental preparation tools – Meditation

What are the different ways of dealing with the stress of competition?

It was just over 10 years ago now. A group mental preparation session for the French rifle shooting center.

The group would like to work on stress management in matches. I suggest they start by discussing the following questions: How does stress affect me? How does it affect my performance? What tips, if any, can help me manage it?

Trying to make stress disappear

The initial responses are fairly “classic”. All of them are troubled by stress and its manifestations, which are not only unpleasant to live with, but can also lead to small movements of the barrel of their rifle. All of them have tried to make their stress disappear, using strategies suggested by their sporting entourage or read in books on mental preparation. But none of them managed to achieve a satisfactory result. The discomfort associated with increased heart and breathing rates and hand tremors persists.

See stress as a friend

Then it’s Benoît’s turn. Like the others, he confides that for a very long time, stress prevented him from performing in competition. He always felt it building up at the end of warm-up, and then lost his nerve.

Until the day he said to himself: ” Anyway, the stress has always been there, and I think it always will be. So I’d better deal with it and learn to tame it. “He continues: ” From then on, something really clicked in the competition. My stress was still there, but I was no longer afraid of him. I saw him as a friend, rather than an enemy. “The others laugh, or smile. They find it hard to take him seriously, but their reactions show that they’re not indifferent.

The following year, Benoît earned a place on the podium at the World Championships. He was right to make peace with his stress, rather than fight against it.

Meditate to learn to “be with” rather than “fight against”.

Why am I telling you this story as part of my article on meditation? Because meditation leads to a calmer relationship with our thoughts, emotions and sensations, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Meditation leads us to accept without judgment what we think, feel and experience. Meditation is about developing our ability to accept and “be with” what’s happening in the moment, rather than trying to change it, or make it go away.

So, without realizing it, Benoît has naturally adopted a new posture in relation to his stress, one that is completely in line with mindfulness meditation: being with, rather than fighting against.

Be curious about what’s going on inside you “here and now”.

According to the results of psychological research, “ mindfulness-based approaches are based on a new conception of the relationship maintained with internal experiences (cognitions, emotions, bodily sensations) “.

John Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as ” focusing attention on one’s experience in the present moment “. Ultimately, meditation is about being curious about what’s going on inside you, here and now, without seeking to judge or analyze.

From a sports psychology perspective, the ability to be fully engaged and aware of the present moment is an important determinant of performance.

To perform, it’s more effective to accept than to control

For a very long time, the interventions deployed by sports psychologists to improve athletes’ mental skills were aimed solely at developing better control over internal processes such as thoughts and emotions. However, a number of studies in the last decade have highlighted the lack of evidence for this type of intervention, particularly in relation to sports performance.

On the other hand, the results of studies in which the aim is to develop the athlete’s acceptance of “internal events”, as opposed to the control of emotions and thoughts, are very encouraging in terms of sporting performance.

Today, it is assumed that optimal sporting performance is linked to the ability to adopt that ” state of consciousness that results from paying attention, intentionally, in the present moment, without judging, to the experience that unfolds moment after moment “.

Apolline or the application of meditation in competition

Apolline’s story illustrates this perfectly. Apolline also practises rifle shooting at a high level. A few months ago, she felt so much pressure to perform that she hesitated to stop. She’s 23 years old, and has been shooting since she was 8.

I suggested that she experiment with a month-long break and see how she felt.

She plucked up courage and asked for a meeting with the managers of the facility where she trains. Her request was granted, and she was finally able to take a break to try and get some clarity. I advise her not to think too much, and to take advantage of this time to live as she wishes.

A friend told her about the book ” The Power of the Present Moment ” by Eckhart Tolle. She immersed herself in it and, during the next session, told me: ” It’s incredible, I’m back to all the ideas we’ve been exchanging over the last two years. It’s as if everything suddenly makes sense and connects. It’s good for me to live more in the present, and I feel a lot less anxious. “

After a month, and a few constructive discussions with her family and coaches, the desire to shoot returned, and she began to enjoy training again.

She soon took part in a competition, where, much to her surprise, she smashed her record! Her feedback is as follows: ” I didn’t have any expectations, I just shot lead after lead, committing myself completely. I didn’t care about the score, it didn’t matter to me. I was free of the stakes, the affect, and I concentrated on the present moment. “

The next day, she broke the record again, shooting in the same way, in the state of full awareness that she had managed to transfer to her competitive practice.

Now it’s a matter of staying the course, and keeping up the daily habit of practicing mindfulness, or full ” presence “, as Christophe André puts it.

A practical exercise for experimentation

If you’re interested in this kind of mind training, I invite you to try this little experiment:

• Sit quietly in a quiet place, and focus on your breath, either through your nose or mouth, depending on how you breathe naturally.
• Observe all the sensations of this breath, with curiosity, and without judgment, exhalation after exhalation, each time, as if it were the first time.
• As soon as you notice your mind wandering off into your thoughts, quietly bring it back to the breath. It’s normal for thoughts to go round and round in your head. The job is to identify more and more easily and quickly the moments when the mind goes off into thoughts, and then to bring it back, without judgment. That, and only that, moment by moment, for 3 minutes, to start with. That’s the first step.

If you would like to go further, I invite you to take part in the discovery sessions of the Petit Bambou application, or to consult a sports psychologist trained in this approach. 😊