Preparation
Chapter Three: Using a sports psychologist
Performance psychology principles used correctly enhance effectiveness. We know this from decades of research in several sports. Over the last 14 months, this column has described performance psychology techniques that can be applied to tournament fishing.
As we emphasized last month, skill development proceeds best under the guidance of a trained coach. Using that premise, let me recommend that you, the tournament fisherman, find a sports psychologist to help you build an individually tailored set of mental exercises to enhance your competitive fishing career.
Self-awareness
In my three decades of psychological practice, I have evaluated more than 15,000 individuals, and I have yet to meet the person who fully and accurately understands all his or her strengths and weaknesses. Each of us has tendencies, preferences, attitudes and behavior patterns we do not completely recognize or understand.
As a baseline, a sports psychologist can evaluate and describe your general personality, including the ways in which you learn, solve problems and deal with stress. Interviews, questionnaires and standardized tests can help create a full, comprehensive picture of your psychological makeup, a necessary foundation for making needed changes.
This is very similar to what you currently do when you study lake maps prior to a tournament. The more detailed and accurate the map, the more likely you are to make good decisions regarding fish location and bait presentation.
If you are reasonably self-aware, a good psychological evaluation will confirm for you ideas and impressions you already have about yourself. This, by itself, can be reassuring. However, a psychologist can also uncover things about you, you do not currently know or understand.
For example, you may see yourself as a fast-paced, intuitive fisherman. Many successful competitors are. However, a sports psychologist could help you recognize how and when you might carry these tendencies to extremes and show careless, impulsive, overly spontaneous behaviors that actually diminish effectiveness. Discussions on this topic could help you better understand when you are prone to crossing the line between intuition and impulsivity, and you can use that insight to your advantage in tournaments.
Stress management
None of us manages stress as well as we think we do. We all have hot buttons, triggers and certain kinds of people who frustrate and aggravate us; you probably know some of these already. However, I am willing to bet there are other things that cause you stress that you don’t recognize or understand. A good sports psychologist can help you catalog external as well as internal stressors and also give you new techniques for minimizing the emotional toll they exact from you.
Tournament fishing is an extremely complex sport. Even the smallest amount of anxiety, fear or apprehension can interfere with your ability to concentrate fully. Imagine how your fishing would improve if you could eliminate your two biggest worries or frustrations.
I recently witnessed a vivid example of frustration management in action. Two very energetic fishermen were casting into the wind to a school of bass in a brush pile. Fisherman A had a nasty backlash on his first cast. Muttering unprintable words under his breath, he picked out the backlash, reeled in the slack and, when he felt his jig snagged in the brush, yanked it free with the force of three men.
Fisherman B then made the same cast and got the same backlash. At that point he turned to me and said, “This is where I used to get really frustrated,” whereupon he did 30 seconds of relaxation exercises and then untangled his line. When Mr. B noticed his jig was stuck, however, he gently lifted his rod and a 4-pounder ate his lure. Same bait, same cast, same frustrating event, but different emotional reactions lead to significantly different outcomes. Sports psychology had made a difference; it had taught Mr. B a new way of dealing with adversity.
Systematic learning
Learning principles are part of the bedrock of the science of psychology. Even expert practitioners admit there is a certain amount of subjectivity and art involved in areas such as motivation and achievement drive. However, we have many well-documented learning principles that you, the competitive fisherman, could use to your advantage.
Under the guidance of a sports psychologist, you will learn how to set specific, measurable goals and how to monitor your progress. Most of us have used experimentation, trial and error, and random exposure to different techniques and people to accumulate competitive fishing knowledge. This process works, but it is not efficient. By employing standard learning techniques, a sports psychologist will teach you systematic, proven techniques for gaining, remembering and using new information.
Mental routines
Several tournament fishermen start the day by doing physical stretching exercises, a practice common in most athletic events. Top athletes in other sports also have an individualized set of mental exercises they use regularly. They believe, accurately, that psychological stretching or strengthening exercises work to their benefit over the long run. A competent sports psychologist can help you set up a personalized mental routine that might include visualization, mental rehearsal, relaxation techniques and stress-management or coping skills that you use as regularly as you do your physical exercises. Decades of research have shown that pre-competition mental routines provide a decided edge for athletes in several sports; you could join these ranks.
How to find a good sports psychologist is a topic for another column, though I encourage you to be a cautious, skeptical consumer of psychological services wherever you may find them. At this stage of our sport, however, help from a sports psychologist is like being among the first to discover a new bait; use one and you will be ahead of the curve.
Jay T. McNamara, Ph.D., L.P., is a psychologist, who is also an avid bass and walleye angler. With more than 25 years of professional experience complemented by participation in competitive fishing at local and national levels, he is uniquely qualified to illustrate how performance psychology principles apply to tournament fishing.