The Mental Skill Elite Athletes Use to Train Better Than Everyone Else
It’s a fact that elite athletes are a product of both nurture and nature. However, science so far cannot tell us which is more important. Intuitively, we assume sports that require more skill and technique depend more on nurture. While sports that depend more on size and speed depend more on nature.
Yet, there are far too many examples of athletes who have elite skills and/or physical gifts who never reach elite status for it to be this simple. Therefore, instead of focusing on the nature vs. nurture debate, it’s best to just focus on nurture, since that is the only thing a parent, coach, and athlete can control anyway.
With that said, one of the most important things to control in the process of nurturing an athlete is the athlete’s mental skills. While there are many mental skills an athlete can practice to improve performance, there is one in particular that separates how elite athletes train better than everyone else.
How Elite Athletes Train Better than Everyone Else
If you are familiar with the research of Anders Ericsson, then you know a little something about the 10,000 hours rule of thumb. This rule of thumb is an oversimplification of Ericsson’s research. But it’s still a nice little reminder of what it takes to be elite… An absurd amount of time.
What’s more, this extreme amount of time investment must not be on developing random skills. Instead, it must be spent on what experts call deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a specialized form of practice to improve a very particular aspect of performance. Correspondingly, that aspect of performance must be a key ingredient to the process of improving.
This requires a tremendous amount of patience doing what looks like boring, repetitive drilling by an outside observer. However, this drilling is not boring to an elite athlete on a quest to improve. This is the mental skill that separates how elite athlete’s train.
Elite athletes have a deep fascination about the process of improving. This fascination is so strong that they don’t get bored when the process of improving requires repetitive drilling tasks that bore others. This is a mental skill I call mastering mental monotony.
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.
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 consistently deliver elite performances without this type of deliberate practice.
In short, if an athlete does not have the mental skills to overcome monotony while training, then that athlete will never be elite.