Interview: Corinne Mayhew (August 2015)
Interview 2: Jenny Jones - Olympic Bronze Medallist in slopestlye, 3x X Games Golds & many more accolades.
What have you found to be the most influential psychological factors that inhibit your performance and how have you dealt with them?
Coming back from injury definitely has its mind games and I have learnt the gradual approach definitely works best for me but being aware that gradual means a definite gradual incline and progression back to my previous standard. For example although I know I can do a 720 I may not bang this out first day back riding but I will make sure I get back to that level within a certain amount of days. I will build my confidence up each day with tricks that progress towards this. I have always made a conscious effort not to avoid the trick that I may have injured myself doing. I will constantly remind myself how many times I have successfully completed that trick in comparison to the amount I have fallen. If it's a brand new trick which I haven’t perfected yet I will remind myself how many times I attempted it without injury.
On that same thought, I constantly have people telling me "oh I don’t do that trick because that's how I injured myself last time." This is simply a barrier that the person has created all by themselves. No one else is saying that, no one else is telling you not to do that trick. You have basically convinced yourself through repeated negative thoughts that you should not do that tricks. I say….. why not change that thought process and create a new positive thought pattern?
Nerves can definitely inhibit my performance and I think it is very much about differentiating between being scared because you're genuinely not ready to do something and scared but you need to push through it. We all know that too much nervous energy can hinder performance so if I am far too nervous to attempt something then it may mean that I should take a step back and keep practicing the progression for that trick. If I need to push through, then this is when friends come in handy and words of encouragement are a real booster, specifically from those who know your riding level and capabilities. It is also a case of self belief and internal words of encouragement. A constant phrase that I have used through my career, "Just give it a go. If you don’t you will stand still and never progress and surely that is worse, never getting any better".
Fatigue definitely deserves a mention because in a roundabout way this really can affect you mentally, whether you realise it or not. Goals can seem harder to achieve, tricks can seem like more effort than normal, falling over can seem a much bigger deal etc. This can lead to a negative opinion of yourself and your abilities, when in actual fact you are simply just tired and need to rest or take a day off.
Other athletes and their negative talk about the course or the weather can definitely affect me. It is not often meant on purpose but their chat can cause you to doubt the jumps or spend time thinking about and worrying about factors that may have never even crossed your mind before hand. This results in less concentration on the job at hand and less positive input into your riding. To overcome this I have learnt which athletes create this atmosphere and now know to avoid them, surrounding myself instead with more positive or neutral athletes.
In my earlier years competing I would compare myself to the other competitors, watching them and comparing my tricks to theirs. I would constantly be worried that my tricks weren’t good enough and wonder if I should change my run because of what others were trying or doing. Eventually I learnt to switch off from this and focus on my own tricks, putting in place the run that I had been working towards over the previous days, weeks or months. This made competing so much more relaxed and streamline. As I have been taught and told numerous times by my sports physiologist, "you can’t change what someone else will do or wont do on their snowboard so why waste any energy on this? Only spend time and energy on what you can affect, which is your own actions your own riding". The same goes for a lot of other factors; weather, size of jumps, type of rail set up. They are all out of your control so there's no point in wasting time worrying about it!
