Mastering Your Inner Game: Part 3

By David R. Kauss, PhD

Even the most physically gifted athletes struggle in competition when they lose control over their thoughts and emotions. Mastering Your Inner Game arms you with the tools to understand, manage, and maximize your mental and emotional forces, factors that often determine whether you're an all-star and or an "also-ran."

Author David Kauss looks at how athletic performance fits into your own life experience. His "total athlete" system takes into account your internal strengths and weaknesses instead of applying a predefined set of mental training exercises.

A New Approach

To begin, I asked Rod to review his playing career, going back in age as far as he could remember, for occasions when he had played to the peak of his own aggressiveness--times when he was particularly excited, hurt, scared, or angry and when the emotion of the circumstance transformed itself into aggressiveness on the field. Rod recalled some games when he had been more aggressive than usual, but never in response to pain, fear, or anger. In fact, he sensed that these emotions typically interfered with his performance. Excitement, especially the importance of a particular game, seemed to hold some promise in our search for a pattern, but then this, too, proved of little use. No "psych-up" images or pep talks had ever been successful in convincing Rod that, as too many coaches like to say, the next game is a do-or-die situation. In truly important games, Rod had always performed well. It made little sense to tamper with this.

Rod tried imagery exploration, searching for Places of Power he had known. This exercise involves scanning one's experiences in and associations to actual physical locations that hold a sense of power for that person. Rod had little response to this exercise, other than to note that he had felt the power of his spiritual side in church on occasion, but he had never wanted to bring God into the business of knocking some guy's helmet off with supercharged tackling.

I encouraged Rod to explore imagery in a more general way, away from football, aggression, or competition of any kind. Perhaps we could find some source of energy in the themes he had always naturally daydreamed about. Rod tried several daydream-related exercises, and here we found drive that he had never before tried to tap. Music stirred him today as much as ever. Somewhat sheepishly, Rod described his rock star fantasies. He had long imagined himself up onstage, all lights on him, singing and playing to a sea of adoring fans. Fame, money, sexual partners of infinite desirability, pure gratification haven't many of us entertained our own secretly wonderful version of this fantasy at one time or another?

But for Rod, within this self-stroking reverie lay a powerfully distinct element. The more Rod talked about these fantasies, the more the music emerged as a primary force. Rod's fantasies were not confined to the rock stage. He conducted his own symphonies at Lincoln Center. He wrote movie sound tracks of stunning impact. He serenaded close friends and family members, who marveled at the purity and power of his sounds. In his fantasies, Rod was music. He possessed all the power music has to move us, magically, undeniably. Importantly for our purposes, Rod was able to communicate to me how, through the music of his imagination, he was able to touch others. Of course, it was Rod who had been so touched by the music of others. The raw power of this medium had impressed itself on him early and deeply.

He could barely keep his body still while describing these fantasies to me. The energy represented by this aspect of Rod's inner life was enormous. We would have to find a way to use it.

Find more information about the book Mastering Your Inner Game by clicking here.

David R. Kauss, PhD, has been practicing psychology since 1978, but he began his psychological consulting work with athletes and coaches--including the UCLA football and baseball teams--four years earlier. In his role as a consultant, Kauss has provided performance-enhancement training to athletes and coaches at the elite and professional levels. He wrote about his early work with athletes in his first book, Peak Performance.

A member of the American Psychological Association, Kauss is also an associate professor of psychology at UCLA. He received his BA from Harvard University and his doctorate in clinical psychology from UCLA.