What's Hot Right Now

Why body language is bullsh*t and more

Welcome to the first edition of our Top 10, where we’ll share what’s most important to us or driving our thinking right now. Let’s dive in!

An ecological approach to motor learning

This paradigm shift is challenging the way coaches typically run a practice. Oftentimes, you’ll see players “going through the motions” or repeating a specific action, with the goal of getting the action “right” or closer to perfect.

An ecological approach is focused on the relationship between the performer and their environment, and thus when it comes to motor learning, is about making sure the skill fits the circumstances, rather than making sure the skill fits the prescribed “ideal.” For example, it means that rather than focus on great shooting form, an ecological approach might focus on the shooting form necessary to get the ball in the basket, based on real actions that happen in a game.

We like this change because it switches the focus from an emphasis on ideal form and perfect execution to an emphasis on workability. “Does this movement work in this context under these conditions?” is a much more effective question to ask when teaching than “did this person do that right?”

Predictive processing

Psychology 101 teaches us that the brain is essentially comprised of an old, lizard brain and a modern, rational brain. The rational brain’s job is to control the animalistic instincts of the lizard brain, and in doing so, we achieve our full potential as a human. The goal is to be as rational and contained as possible.

Recent advancements in neuroscience have thoroughly debunked this idea.

What we now know is that people evolved large brains because we have complex bodies and that the main function of the brain is to regulate our body’s energy efficiency. There’s no lizard brain resting under a rational, evolved brain - it’s all one coordinated symphony, working together to maintain a balance in our body called allostasis.

The way our brain does this is via prediction. It models the world and then uses information from the world to adjust our body’s energy efficiency and internal systems.

Why does this matter?

Well, for one, it does away with the idea that our rational brain can control some lesser, more animalistic instincts within ourselves. Though it feels that way, the reality is that we are always operating with some sense of feeling and emotion in our decision-making. For coaches, that means that anything you do or say that might evoke even the smallest sense of pleasure or displeasure is going to have an impact on the brain functioning of your athletes - and it does away with the idea that other people can simply “control” their reactions to critical feedback, poor phrasing in coaching, casual cruelty, or anything else.

If you want to optimize for performance, you have to optimize for emotion, too.

“Effort is the master switch”

Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure is a brilliant dissection of the intersection between psychology and physiology. At the core of this book is the idea that we can control our effort, and this controlling of effort can allow us to persist longer, endure more difficult challenges, and perform better than what our minds (and sometimes our bodies) initially signal to us.

We’re evolved to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Sport naturally comes with some form of pain, whether it’s tackling or running until your legs burn, so it’s a natural testing ground for ideas about just what we can take. It turns out that we can often go much farther, much longer than we feel - but it takes practice and effort to condition ourselves to do that more automatically.

In some ways, this concept ties into the concept of a growth mindset. An emphasis on effort as the key to learning and improvement, as well as managing the limits of our performance, can help us get further, faster.

We’re more social than we realized

The research on the social nature of people continues to grow at an exponential rate. The more we learn, the more we find that people are remarkably social creatures. The idea that someone could achieve anything alone is becoming folklore.

That’s not to say that individual performance doesn’t matter. But it is to say that whenever an individual is performing well, we’re probably drastically underestimating the impact of the people around that person and how they’re contributing from everything ranging from that performer’s cognition to the hormones in their body and their brain’s neurochemistry.

As they say… with great power comes great responsibility. The implications for thinking of ourselves, especially leaders, as social creatures are massive. It means that every time we coach, we have to be even more cognizant of the words we choose. The language we use matters because the words we use can quite literally change the hormonal profile of the people we're talking to, which will impact performance downstream, because the words we use can coordinate the mental models and actions of the people we coach and lead, and because if we want elite performance from those we coach, they can’t do it alone.

Body language is bullsh*t

You’ll hear more about this on a future podcast with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, but the data continues to pour in: the idea that the way our bodies move is a “language” is, in a word, wrong.

That doesn’t mean our bodies don’t send signals and messages about our internal state. What it does mean is there’s no coordinated, universal set of body movement principles that constitute a “language” that can be “read” and used to determine anyone’s individual attitude.

The idea of body language is an evolution of the idea of universal human emotions - which, it turns out, is also bullsh*t. It’s likely that the way we currently are reading bodies is based on our own internal states and beliefs about another person. We can more effectively “read” another person by asking questions about how they’re doing, rather than inferring based on our own internal models of how someone else should behave.