Build Your Capacity

One of the most popular episodes of Talking Performance was with Australian sports psychologist Jonah Oliver (Episode 85), Jonah is a great storyteller and has a wonderful knack of simplifying complex situations.

There were many great takeaways from this episode but one thing in particular is Jonah says “Its not about reducing stress or pressure, its about building capacity to embrace more”

This really resonated with me as I spent most of my golfing life trying to reduce stress or pressure, whether that was through avoidance or even techniques with the best intention, such as breathing, positive thinking, visualisation, all good things but I was doing them in the hope that they would reduce the pressure. If I had my time again I would love to go back and look at those opportunities differently, see those situations that I actively avoided as opportunities to build my capacity.

If I was to be completely honest I still have this tendency, it is a work in progress, I will often find myself wanting to avoid situations and having to remind myself that it is most likely an opportunity to grow.

So awareness is one thing, and it is a good start but how do we move forward with this and build our capacity? I think it is about taking on those tough conversations, saying yes to speaking opportunities when you get butterflies just from being asked and we can even seek opportunities in our daily environment.

Jonah refers to this as “eustress”, which can be defined as "beneficial stress". The word was introduced by endocrinologist Hans Selye in 1976; he combined the Greek prefix eu- meaning "good", and the English word stress, to give the literal meaning "good stress". Anyway Jonah goes on to say that eustress can be things like a cold shower or a cold plunge pool, but most likely you have chosen to put yourself through this beneficial stress. However if someone picked you up and threw you in a pool against your will, this would likely be called “distress”, and not overly beneficial!

I think we need eustress in our lives, it is beneficial and helps us grow, it builds our capacity to handle more, but even just having this mindset allows us to re frame the way we see situations and our willingness to meet them head on. We have plenty of options to build our capacity through eustress, one of the obvious options is cold showers, but another is exercise, lifting weights is hard, causes stress but we get growth from it and we accept that we have to push ourselves to failure to get the biggest gains. Our mind is no different, we just need to find ways to exercise our minds or as DG would say create “mind gyms” throughout your week.