Tola Performance: Negative Bias

Jason coaches professionals to help and support them throughout their season, working with clients to help them maintain a good headspace and work on their personal development on and off the field.

Photograph by Emily Gordon

Negative Bias

How losing can affect your performance

This season I have worked with Matt Perry and Jack Richardson in their high goal campaigns, and with Ed Banner-Eve in the medium goal as well as others in varying levels and situations. Personal coaching creates a space for the athlete to discuss their life and performance on and off the field and helps them to gain clarity regarding how they can progress and develop. It’s not based on advice but questioning and exploring, the players I coach could probably give me better advice on how to play, but understanding life as a professional polo player does help a lot

Negative bias

The ‘negative bias’ is the reason humans have evolved over time. Without it we would be walking into fires and off cliffs all the time, which would be frustrating. The negative bias is what we use to remember danger, our brains naturally remember the negative elements of life more strongly than the positives so that we avoid the dangers. For example, if you remember where the bear cave is you will fear it and avoid it because it could mean death. Covid-19 might be something that we fear irrationally due to the affect it is having on the world. Fearing it helps us to avoid it. How can we use this to understand more about our mindset in sport?

Whether you win or lose will affect how you perceive your performance

One of the areas that came up this season when coaching players was that losing affected the perception of their performance. Professional sportspeople will naturally have a self-critical mindset or else they probably wouldn’t be professionals. If you don’t expect a lot and critique yourself effectively you won’t perform well and improve. But there is a downside to this, it means that individually you may be harder on yourself than you need to be, denting your confidence and playing form.

Let’s say you have what you might score a 7/10 game but end up losing by a goal in the last chukka. Suddenly that doesn’t feel like a 7/10 game anymore and instead becomes a 5/10 game, where you begin remembering the things you didn’t do well, like the goal you missed or the defensive back hand that didn’t have enough angle and resulted in a goal.

This loss diminishes your confidence and form, when in fact you performed well overall and if you had won you would have been much happier with your performance. In some extremes this can be a black and white feeling; if you take a step back, an individually bad performance might be closer to a good performance than you feel it is.

Of course, if you are winning it means you are playing well compared to the competition, but the score board could distort your actual performances and therefore confidence.

Photograph by ©www.imagesofpolo.com.

What can we learn from this?

How we perceive our performances can be largely influenced by the result rather than the performance. Of course, in sport we all want to win. But to protect your confidence and form, being aware of things that alter your perspective of performance is key to being mentally resilient. We’ve all heard the saying ‘you are only as good as your last performance’ but to stay consistent and mentally resilient we need to try to stay away from that view of how we play and keep in mind the bigger picture.

How to deal with this?

Writing things down after a game or talking to someone is always a good way to get things out of your head so you can process them with less of the negative bias. Here are some things you can do to help: • Writing down plays that you did well in the game • Talk the game through with an outsider to gain clarity • Be proactive about progressing after the game (get a coach, organise practices, improve the string, penalty practice etc) • Not taking it too seriously, don’t dwell on the game or polo • Score chart – after the game score different areas of your game (composure, defence, hitting etc)

Conclusion

Winning and performing well is what we strive for in sport, but there is power in being able to maintain a healthy perspective throughout a season so that we continue to play with good form, confidence and continue progressing.

Contact Jason on tolaperfomance@gmail.com

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