It takes 45 seconds for Jeff Christie to slide from the top of the luge run in Whistler, B.C. to the bottom. In that time, he can reach speeds up to 120km/h and plunge more than 100 vertical metres.
“I joined the luge program when I was 12,” Christie says. “Luge is my full-time job.”
Now, with the Olympics just around the corner, the Vancouver-born Calgarian is ramping things up in terms of his training — both mental and physical.
According to Peter Jensen, the mental race is as important as the physical one, and that counts for everyone, not just Olympians.
Jensen has been working with athletes for the past six Olympic Games. This year in Vancouver, his seventh set of Games, he’s going as the sports psychology trainer for Canada’s women’s hockey team.
“What high level athletes are learning how to do that makes them so successful is learning how to manage themselves,” he says.
But they’re not the only ones. On the side, Jensen teaches business people how to coach their employees to draw the best out of them, making Olympic coaches out of managers and bankers.
But rather than look to the gym, Jensen has his protégés look inward, and tame their inner demons first.
“The only reality as far as your body is concerned is the inner reality,” he says.
Jensen argues that your body’s perception of what’s going on is just as important as what is actual going on around it.
Jensen uses the example of worry to illustrate the point. If your child is late coming home from school, he says, you start to tell themselves stories in your head, form alternate realities and worry about what might have happened to them.
In response to this alternate reality that your mind has concocted, there are real-world changes in your body: Your heart rate quickens, your palms get sweaty, you become distracted and nervous and your productivity drops like a stone.
The same is true for performers in any capacity, even if it’s giving a speech at your nephew’s wedding.
“None of us perform well when we're the heckler in the crowd of our own performance,” he says. In sports, they call it choking.
Instead, using positive energy and visualizing your goal can produce some of the same physiological effects, but in a much more helpful way.
“The key skills are really grounded in awareness,” he says. “It's important to notice what you're thinking, what you're feeling and your body.”
You could learn the same things from Buddhist monks, by the way,” he chides.
And for Christie, who is getting ready to give it his all in Vancouver, these are lessons he’s had to learn long ago. For fifteen years he’s been
preparing for this moment, and he’s not going to let his mind get in the way of his performance.
“It starts about 30 minutes before my run, and ends just as my run begins,” he says about his mental workout. “That's when I shut the mind off and let the body do what it knows best: slide.”
Building your the third factor
Is it nature or nurture? Are high-level athletes like those who make up
Canada’s Olympic teams born with better DNA than the rest of us? Or are they raised in homes and schools that simply help them become the athletes they are today?
Or is it something more?
For Peter Jensen, becoming a high-level competitor in sports or business is all about uncovering an elusive third factor. His book, Igniting the Third Factor (Performance Coaching Inc.), helps people coach themselves to try and find that Olympic spirit.
He recommends: Manage yourself carefully, including diet, exercise and relationships; embrace adversity as a new challenge and opportunity; build trust with yourself and those around you; use imagery to focus on your goal and help you get there; and uncover blocks that you didn’t know were there, and help yourself work through them.
Pick your battles
“There isn't a pro golfer today that doesn't have a breathing technique, and I think we could all use a breathing technique. For airport security, or
delivering a speech at a wedding or just dealing with an annoying
co-worker,” says Peter Jensen.
For Jensen, the man in charge of helping Canada’s women’s Olympic hockey team prepare themselves mentally for the world stage, choosing which battles to fight is just as important as fighting them.
And so is channeling the appropriate energy to help fight them properly when the time comes.
“In any situation, act when you can make a difference and let go when you can't,” he says.
“Most of us are pretty good at the first one, but we spend a lot of time
spinning our wheels trying to change things we can't.”
“Choking in sport is when arousal level gets too high, we miss relevant information and don't respond to situations appropriately. That's what channeling energy is all about.”
