W6d

Real-World Self-Leadership Case

U.S. Olympic Athletes, Mental Imagery, and Performance Stress

Olympic athletes face tremendous pressure and scrutiny as they compete for medals, often resulting in high levels of stress and anxiety. Two-time Olympic gold medalist alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin is not immune to battling nerves and has been known to become physically ill before her races. This is why Shiffrin and other Olympic athletes are spending increasing amounts of time on mental preparation. “I think it’s something that’s undervalued,” Shiffrin explains. “I’ve experienced a lot more mental stress these last two years than I ever had. I don’t know what it was about last season, but I … felt a lot more anxiety.”

One of the primary self-leadership strategies that has become increasingly popular among world-class athletes is mental practice (see  Chapter 5 ), sometimes referred to as “visualization” or “imagery.” Imagery is preferred by some because of the multisensory nature of the technique. “Visualization, for me, doesn’t take in all the senses,” said former Olympic skiing aerialist Emily Cook. “You have to smell it. You have to hear it. You have to feel it, everything.” Cook first began using mental imagery while working with sport psychologist Nicole Detling of the University of Utah after breaking bones in both her feet during a crash. While recovering, she couldn’t physically practice, so she mentally practiced using imagery strategies involving writing and making recordings of detailed scripts that explained every minute component of the competition process. “I would say into the recorder: ‘I’m standing on the top of the hill. I can feel the wind on the back of my neck. I can hear the crowd,’” Cook said. “Kind of going through all those different senses and then actually going through what I wanted to do for the perfect jump. I turn down the in-run. I stand up. I engage my core. I look at the top of the jump. I was going through every little step of how I wanted that jump to turn out.” She would then play back the recording while she closed her eyes and focused on the feeling of her muscles firing as she imagined the jump. If fear or negative thoughts invaded her imagery, she would instantly switch to imagining a red balloon being popped with a pin. “That sound and that immediate switch would kind of snap me out of it,” she explained. “The last couple years, I’ve definitely gotten to a point where when I’m on the hill, it’s very quick for me to switch from a negative thought to a positive one.” Detling stresses the importance of positive imagery: “It’s absolutely crucial that you don’t fail. You are training those muscles, and if you are training those muscles to fail, that is not really where you want to be. So one of the things I’ll do is if they fail in an image, we stop, rewind and we replay again and again and again.”

Shiffrin uses imagery and visualization techniques too. Prior to a race, she usually visualizes the course once after her inspection and again just before the start of her run when she can often be seen with her hands thrust forward, moving back and forth, as she simulates the race course in her mind. “Sometimes eyes closed, sometimes eyes open, but I’m always kind of zoned out,” Shiffrin notes. Although some elite athletes warn that too much visualization can lead to “paralysis by analysis,” most Olympic athletes find mental imagery techniques to be both helpful and reassuring. “I don’t think I could possibly do a jump, or especially a new trick, without having this imagery process,” Cook stated near the end of her successful Olympic career. “For me, this is so very key to the athlete I have become.”