Sport psychology
The Destructive Power of Negative Training By Laura King, CHt, NLP & Life Coach
Hazing includes intentional humiliation, ridicule, and other kinds of endangerment to the mental, physical and emotional safety of the student. Hazing is usually couched in the intention of helping the student become part of the in-group. • Bullying. Bullying, on the other hand, might involve similar behavior as hazing, but the intention is to single out and exclude the person. This abusive strategy is repetitive and relentless. • Reverse psychology. Reverse psychology attempts to get someone to do something by pretending to want the opposite. The premise is an expectation that the person is fairly dedicated to resisting advice, or maybe the advice of a specific person. Reverse psychology is, at its very core, dishonest. It is a strategy designed to provoke the other person to resist your stated recommendation, and do what you really want them to do. • Hazing.
For example, you want your student to increase their difficulty
level in their jumping and you know that they are full of fear. You might use reverse psychology and say, “I don’t think you should try for anything higher—you might get too scared.” Your student doesn’t like being called a scaredy cat, and will then increase their difficulty just to prove you wrong. This is literally the opposite of straightforward.
In all of my years as a hypnotherapist and coach, and also as a parent, there’s one thing I just don’t understand—why adults continue to use negative training such as hazing, bullying, and reverse psychology with those in their care.
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s a trainer, you know that there is a power imbalance with student and teacher or coach. And when you have the upper hand, and essentially have someone vulnerable in your care, you should take that position seriously. Trainers must accept that the psyche—the self-esteem and confidence of their students—is largely in their hands. And because of that, they have a duty to build-up their students, to inspire them, to collaborate with them. Any strategy or behavior that tears down or abuses the student is entirely unethical and needs to be called out. For instance:
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Winter 2019–20 | Riding Instructor
What’s more, it doesn’t work. Neither does hazing or bullying. If your goal is the improved mental and athletic performance of your students, you are working at cross purposes when you do it by negative training. Let me explain. Students come to you at various points in their journey to unconscious competence (i.e., they intuitively do what they need to do for their best performance, and don’t even think about it). You may recall that people begin unconscious of their lack of competence, and then become aware of their incompetence. That’s usually the point when they seek (more) help because they realize they need it. The bulk of training takes place when the student is moving from conscious incompetence to conscious competence, and then to unconscious competence. Here’s what happens in the brain of the student during this time: • They are creating visualizations of what they want to do (e.g., what their personal best will look like) • They are creating muscle memory, through repetition, of certain movements. • They are attaching emotions and thoughts to their learning environment and the mechanics of their bodies during their training. • They are developing their self-talk. As the popular social media meme says: “What could go wrong?” Humans being humans, while their brain is doing all of this stuff with its ultimate goal of peak performance and personal bests, it needs an optimal environment. Optimal means support from the outside world, including encouragement, love, and positive reinforcement from trainers. It needs positive training. Unfortunately for us humans, our brains are like Teflon for the positive, and Velcro for the negative. This does not bode well
