The Hook

Dave Creswell kept beating me at badminton and it was driving me insane.

I was sixteen, training 6+ hrs a day on the ice at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, in what I believed was the best shape of my life. Dave was a college student from Colorado College who our coach Pat had invited to be the team's resident sports psychology advisor. He'd moved into the dorms w/ us. The whole team thought he was a geek.

And he kept destroying me at badminton.

I'd finish a full day of skating, link up w/ Dave for a couple hrs of badminton, and just... lose. Over & over. Making the same mistakes, getting more frustrated, and not understanding how this guy -- this non-athlete, this college kid w/ no competitive credentials -- could possibly be outplaying someone in my kind of shape.

When my frustration would boil over, Dave wouldn't match it. He'd just quietly ask, "Do you know why you did that?" Or "How do you feel about that last shot?" Or "Tell me what you feel before you serve."

"Dave, shut the hell up," I'd say. "Let's play."

He was undeterred.

I didn't realize it at the time, but Dave was showing me something nobody on our team had ever been prompted to examine. For the first time in my life, someone was asking me to think consciously about what was happening between my ears while I competed. Not strategy, not technique, not physical output -- the conversation running underneath all of it.

And the conversation was brutal.

When lactic acid builds & fatigue sets in -- in any sport, but especially in short track where you're skating inches from other people at 30+ mph -- there's a voice that shows up. It says "that hurts" or "I can't" or sometimes pulls you back without words, like a hook latching onto whatever doubt is closest. It doesn't announce itself. Doesn't wait for permission. It starts running, and if you've never been taught to notice it, you don't even know it's there.

You think you're losing bc of your legs. You're losing bc of your head.

Dave started taking me on runs through Garden of the Gods, these canyons of red rock in the northern part of Colorado Springs, and while we ran he'd talk about things I'd never heard of: visualization, meditation, breathing exercises. I thought he was out of his mind. Breathing exercises? For an Olympic athlete?

"If you pay attention to your breathing," he told me, "not how often you breathe but whether those breaths are shallow or deep, you can teach yourself to be calm no matter what's going on around you."

I was skeptical. But I tried it. And what became obvious, pretty quickly, was this could be massive.

How do you train the thing between your ears?

Dave taught me to transfer those exercises from our runs to practice, then to travel, then to the heat box before races, and eventually to the start line itself. He turned me on to journaling -- writing down goals, thoughts, patterns, anything. He introduced me to books that rewired how I understood competition: Terry Orlick's In Pursuit of Excellence, Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis, Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are.

I wasn't ready to receive all of it at sixteen. But if Dave hadn't planted those seeds, I wouldn't have had any frame of reference when I met Doug Jowdy a couple yrs later & was finally ready to take the mental side of training seriously. Dave gave me vocabulary for something I'd been experiencing my entire career but had no language for.

That November, at a World Cup event in Hungary, I medaled in the 1000m against the fastest short-track skaters on the planet -- Kim Dong-Sung, Marc Gagnon, Fabio Carta. I was the massive underdog.

But bc of my work w/ Dave, my mind was ready. I could feel the rhythm of other skaters' movements, read their patterns, stay calm when the hook tried to pull me back. I wrote about this in Hard Pivot -- Dave is one of my Starting Five, the people without whom none of what followed would have happened.

I bring this up bc what Dave showed me at sixteen is something I see missing everywhere now (and not just in sport).

Every executive I work w/ has a version of this voice. The VP who goes quiet in a board meeting right when their idea is gaining traction. The founder who starts hedging on a deal the moment it gets real. The sales leader who unconsciously sabotages their own pipeline when numbers get too good, almost like they don't trust it.

The pattern is everywhere & it almost always follows the same shape: things go well, the hook kicks in, performance drops, and nobody can explain why bc nobody taught them to notice it in the first place.

When I speak to organizations about mental performance, this is usually the thing that lands hardest. Not the Olympic stories, not the medal count -- the idea there's an internal dialogue running during every high-stakes moment and most of us have never been trained to hear it, much less manage it.

The people who learn to catch the hook mid-sentence are the ones who perform when it counts. Not bc they've silenced it -- you can't silence it, it's always going to be there -- but bc they've learned to notice it, name it, and keep moving anyway.

Dave Creswell went on to become a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He still advises me to this day, close to 30 yrs later.

I owe him more than I've probably ever told him, bc what he gave me wasn't a technique or a framework. It was awareness. The brutal realization I'd been competing against something inside myself for yrs & didn't even know it existed.

Dave would probably tell you to start w/ your breathing. I'd tell you he's right.

I'm still working on it.

--AAO

More on the mental side of performance -- the stuff that doesn't make highlight reels -- in Hard Pivot. I write about it every week.