The Mental Skill That Separates Average, Good, and Great Athletes
There is one mental skill that rarely gets recognition when it comes to identifying what makes an elite athlete an elite athlete. Research from renowned psychology professor, author, and “expert on experts” Anders Ericsson highlights this mental skill but doesn’t call it out specifically. In addition, sports psychology researchers and the authors of the ground breaking book “Flow in Sports“, Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, mention it repeatedly in their research, but also fail to give enough credit to this mental skill.
Unquestionably, this mental skill is critical for helping athletes go from good to great. Yet, this mental skill gets almost no fanfare for how important it is to developing elite athletes. Why is that? I would say it’s just the nature of what this mental skill represents.
By now you must be scratching your head trying to figure out what mental skill I could be talking about. It’s not dealing with pressure, it’s not confidence, and it’s not mental toughness. These are all important mental skills that lead to elite performances. But these skills are only secondary to the mental skill I like to call mastering mental monotony.
Mastering mental monotony is the ability to stimulate and maintain intense focus while toiling through tedious work. To put it another way, this is the mental skill that deals with overcoming boredom. As Geoff Colvin writes in his book Talent Is Overrated which confirms the research of Anders Ericsson:
It seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun.
This “most important thing” is what both Colvin and Ericsson call deliberate practice.
Deliberate Practice Requires Having the Mental Skill of Mastering Mental Monotony
Ericsson’s research, most notably documented in his seminal book on expertise, Peak, identifies deliberate practice as one of the most important things that makes experts, experts. Ericsson describes deliberate practice as many hours of solo practice on specific things that drive greatness. Without investing hours and hours of solo practice into very specific skills that drive greatness, you can’t be great. Furthermore, as Colvin points out, this is no fun. In fact, it’s boring.
This is why mastering mental monotony is so important. If you have ever played a sport, you know how monotonous it can be to do repetitive drills at a consistently high level of correctness. This monotony increases when you must do these repetitive drills alone.
What’s more, if you allow the boredom to cause a decrease in the quality of your repetitive drilling, instead of getting better you may actually get worse. This is because you will create bad habits by doing the right thing the wrong way over and over. The only way for practice to be deliberate practice is to do the right thing the right way, over and over regardless of how boring it becomes. Correspondingly, the research suggests there is no way to go from good to great without this deliberate practice.
Simply stated, if you don’t have a plan to help yourself overcome boredom, then you aren’t planning to be great.