All Blacks: Why mental skills techniques used by Gilbert Enoka can apply to sport, business and everyday life
The All Blacks and the Springboks are level with one victory each in the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series. Mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka must make sure the players have their heads in the game for this weekend’s clash. Jane Phare looks at why mental skills coaching is an essential part of a winning formula, and why it can be used in everyday life.
Watch closely during a Blues game and you just might notice the team’s big lock Cameron Christie doing something a little odd. He knocks his wrists together.
Former All Black Dan Carter used to whack himself on the leg. It’s a technique highly trained sportspeople use to bring themselves back to the moment, focus on the now, not what was. The idea is to forget about what went wrong on the field or court, or board or council meeting, and concentrate on what needs to happen next.
Christie, 22, who also plays for North Harbour, has come up through the ranks since leaving Ōrewa College, playing in age-grade rugby and the New Zealand Under-20s. Throughout that journey, he’s had access to sports psychologists and is now a firm believer in the power of the mind.
He’s picked up “bits of gold”, he says, and added them to his toolbox to cope with pressure and perform better on the field.
Christie’s taken inspiration from role models like Sam Whitelock, Carter and, in particular, English rugby legend Jonny Wilkinson, who worked extensively with a mind coach and a psychiatrist throughout his career to visualise success and handle pressure.
Like Carter, Christie uses a physical reset to bring himself back to the present, to stop thinking about a mistake or a play that went wrong and focus on what to do next.
“So, I just tap my wrists together from over the top and then underneath. It just kind of brings you back to where your feet are.”
On Instagram, Carter talks about going into a state of “red head”, an unhelpful mindset when the brain is locked into a mistake that happened minutes ago. Mental skills coaching helps players to focus, get back into a calm “blue” state and get on with the game.
Carter describes three types of reaction in a state of red head – freeze, fight or flight – and how he would react when under pressure as playmaker for the All Blacks.
“I would freeze, I would go quiet. My teammates are looking at me going, ‘well, what’s the move, what’s the call?’ And I was like, ‘man, I’m still thinking about that mistake I made sort of 10 minutes ago’.”
Whereas his teammate Ma’a Nonu would go into a state of fight when things went wrong, Carter says.
“Like he was trying to take out the opponents, he was yelling at the referee, he was yelling at his teammates, he was trying to shoulder charge or physically trying to fight the opposition.”
The third reaction is flight, a state of mind where players “just want to get the hell out of there”.
Players might want to get substituted off or, in a work situation, people might call in sick.
“You just don’t want to be in that moment.”
Recognising that “red head” state early and having the tools to get out of it is the key, Carter says.
“If I made a mistake, I would whack myself on my leg ... recognising that I had made a mistake or recognising that I’d frozen and it’s like, right, now, next task, what do I need to do right now in this moment? And just catch the ball, just communicate to my half, whatever it was, that would get me back into the present and on task in that moment and I’m back in the state of blue.”
It’s a win-win
Auckland sports psychologist and mental skills coach Iain Saunders, a former police officer, uses a “win-win” model: what’s important now and what’s important next. The idea is not to ruminate on the past, things that can’t be changed, he says.
“It’s making sure that you’re living in the moment.”
Saunders, who has a masters degree in psychology, draws on years of experience with the Armed Offenders Squad and assessing candidates for New Zealand’s elite special tactics group to make sure they are the right fit under pressure. At the same time, he worked part-time as a sports psychologist, leaving the police two years ago to become a fulltime mental skills coach.
He’s worked with the Blues, Auckland Rugby, the Black Ferns and Pulse Netball and also has business and career clients who need help to manage stress and get past setbacks. Saunders says the same techniques apply both in professional sport and in everyday life and business.
Part of his job is to create the right culture, an environment that allows athletes, or people in business, to perform at their best.
Team members need to be connected by a common purpose and understand the team’s direction and values. There needs to be a clear vision about what they, and the team, need to do. And they need to know how to manage relationships, how to lead, how to be a good communicator and how to achieve goals together.
Saunders prefers creating an optimistic environment rather than teaching positive psychology.
“So if you’re in a game of rugby and you’re 20 behind after 10 minutes, there’s nothing positive about that, but you’ve got to be optimistic, right?”
Working with Pulse Netball, he gets the players to work on moving forward.
“It’s like a belief system.”
“The last centre pass in a game of netball has absolutely no bearing on how the next centre pass will go unless you allow it to occupy a part of your brain where you’re thinking about it. And then that makes you slower, it makes you more cluttered in your head.”
Forget the last goal, he’ll tell players.
“We don’t even want you to know what the score is really. It just doesn’t affect how much effort or how much skill you apply to the next centre pass. It’s got nothing to do with it.”
Don’t worry about the things you can’t change; concentrate on the next play, he tells them.
Christie says his mental skills are “a work in progress”, that he still catches himself ruminating over a mistake he’s made which distracts his focus.
“I want to be really instinctive when I’m on the field so I want to have an absence of [that] thought.”
He uses the physical reset method, the wrist tapping, but also uses visualisation and repeats “power phrases” in his head like “I back myself” to counter negative thoughts.
Learning those mental-skills techniques has become increasingly important in team sports, he says.
“It’s massive. I put a huge importance on it.”
So do his teammates.
“In the warm-up you’ll see boys meditating, potentially visualising ... ”
The goal is to quieten down the inner critic, or thoughts that the day’s performance will fall short.
“So then the innate skill you have within you can come out and you can just play freely.”
Christie says he uses the same techniques to get back into the “blue” mode of calmness in his personal life.
“[I can] use those techniques to get back into that state where I can make clear and rational decisions, where you can communicate and lead better.“
‘Prepare, prepare, prepare’
Former All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick, currently in South Africa for the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour, says mental skills coaching by specialists wasn’t available in his day.
“So we basically learned through experience how to handle pressure. Whereas now it’s absolutely paramount because it’s the one thing that you can do to make a difference without the opposition knowing what you’re doing, how you prepare.”
The best-prepared team usually win, he says.
“So we used to just drum that into ourselves, ‘We need to prepare, prepare, prepare’, put pressure on each other and that was our mental coaching. We didn’t have a Gilbert Enoka telling us how to prepare. We just learned.”
The same pressures happen off the field in business, careers and family life, he says. Preparation is the key whether it’s to be the best golfer in the world or successful in business.
Fitzpatrick is chairman of the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, a London-based global charity that raises millions to support sport-based projects for under-privileged youth around the world.
“It teaches you so many values, resilience, dealing with failure, getting on with a team, getting on with people.”
Saunders says back in the Fitzpatrick era and the early rugby sevens tournaments, it was more about surviving the training to create resilient individuals. Rugby clubs had a larger pool of talent from which to choose, because so many youngsters were playing the game back then.
“They could afford that attritional sort of selection of the fittest approach. But we’re probably trying to be a bit more broad than that now and realise there’s a scarcity of good athletes.”
Gilbert Enoka has been incredibly successful helping athletes to perform at a high level by creating an environment in which they can thrive and understanding what individuals need, Saunders says.
“He’s fairly famous for that.”
That builds confidence and trust, enabling people to stay calm in the face of big decisions.
A stress response, getting in the red, makes thinking foggy.
“That’s true of life as it is of sport,” Saunders says.
Getting out of that state and into a calm head space might mean taking some breaths, repeating a phrase or doing a physical movement.
“A common one in sport is just counting things you can see just to get you out of your head and pay attention to the external environment.”
In rugby, he says, stressed players are often told to just move.
“When you start moving, take five steps, it forces your brain to navigate within the game and then you’re back into the environment.”
Jane Phare is a senior journalist based in Auckland. Her roles at the Herald have included assistant editor of NZ Herald, editor of the Weekend Herald, founding editor of Viva, features editor and deputy print editor.
Sign up to The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.