Sports Ethics: Focus on What you can Control—Yourself

Marcus Smart, an Oklahoma State All American was just suspended for three days after hitting fan who yelled an expletive at him in a game. His suspension will hurt his team badly and highlights an ever-present challenge in athletics and life--individuals have to focus upon what they can control-themselves. When they move beyond it like Marcus, they damage themselves and their team. Smart gets it in acknowledge his harm to his teammates and fans and does not duck the issue, “It’s something I’ll have to learn from, a lesson I’ll have to learn from. The consequences that are coming with it — I’m taking full responsibility. No fingers pointing — this is all upon me.”

Every competition produces a stream of stress, mistakes, accidents, and intentional and unintentional impacts, bad referee calls. The chaotic complexity of competition creates bad luck, good luck, and unanticipated and pathological consequences for even perfectly executed perfect execution. These endless challenges pound on the psychological integrity of athletes and professionals and make self-conscious self-mastery the ethical foundation of achievement.

Every young and old athlete has heard it from coaches and players a thousand times—focus on what you can control—yourself.

The moral bedlam of competition can lead athletes and professionals to become confused, angry, frustrated even lost. The confusion of competition can invite explosions and erratic behavior and deformed judgment all of which hurt the person and the person’s team. Good and successful professionals drive themselves to master skills and execute under pressure. This success depends upon developing self-mastery to control oneself. Good athletes and professionals cultivate a zone of control that integrates emotions, perception, mind, attitudes, body and intent.

Every successful athletes and professional faces this constant exhortation—control what you can control—yourself. It is the foundation upon which all other skills and the ability to succeed under stress and competition depend. It is also one of the hardest lessons for people to master; it also anchors personal responsibility of the athlete and professional.

The zone of control depends upon the athlete’s ability to master internal psychological control. Persons can educate their emotions. They can train themselves what to be angry about and what to ignore. They can channel intruding emotions into other actions or offset erupting emotions with prepared and integrated programs of integrated memory, emotions, perceptions and intention that enable them to counter program anger or frustration. Losing it is not preordained but a failure of internal self-mastery.

This means developing a form of full-bodied wisdom that lead the ancient Greeks to value sports so highly. One’s emotions become a form of pattern recognition that instantaneously recognize the rightness or wrongness of actions. They provide internal armor against loss of control and weakness of will by supporting disciplined intentional action under conditions that the emotional augments perception sees as appropriate. This pattern recognition embodies not just the knowledge of trained athletes and professionals but also the amalgamation of emotion and cognition.

This form of embodied wisdom and training takes time and effort. It requires constant self-effort by the young athlete encouraged by coaches and fellow teammates. Players working with coaches and fellow players can educate their emotions and train themselves about what to be angry about and how to channel that anger rather than either get angry over things they cannot control or let the anger control them and drive them to irrational or hurtful actions.

This self-mastery remains the key to building physical and emotional resilience in action. This resilience enables players to face failure and bad luck and intentional goading but rebound and continue forward. 

The emphasis upon controlling what you can control can focus inward--players cultivate their own deep values. A player can grow into a deeper commitment to their team and to winning and enduring rather than expressing their own individuality or paying back an slight. Self-control involves growing into an awareness of deep and abiding values and buttressing these values with the emotional coding to sustain them under stress.

Losing it is one of the great enemies of performance for any athlete or professional.

Young athletes often explode in frustration. It often is directed at themselves for failing to achieve their ideal outcome. But too often, especially with young male athletes, they explode at and blame referees, rancorous fans or opponents who showed them up, got in a hit or succeeded. They aim their anger and vexation to blame anyone but themselves.

Their past anger and acting out primes referees and other players to expect the worse. Players do not get the benefit of the doubt and will get called for fouls even if they did not commit them. Other teams target such players and goad them. They take cheap shots and talk trash and push and shove trying to goad the player into “losing it.” If the goading pulls a player of his or her game, this degrades his or her performance but also hurts the entire team.

This loss of control usually reflects a failure to take responsibility or remember the obligation to the team. The individual blames a failure on someone else. This often occurs in games when a foul is called and the player takes off on the referee. They yell and scream and get so caught up in blaming the referee that again their attention diffuses and they cannot collect themselves to be present and focused to what is going on. They play distracted and opponents take advantage of their distraction and lingering anger to provoke more distraction and anger. The same might occur when they are fouled or believe an opponent has fouled them or attempted to hurt them. 

Opponents take advantage of individuals who do not have self-mastery. A goaded player will get angry and yell and jaw and may even attempt to physically contact the opponent, which would simply elicit a foul against them. How many times have players who were hit gotten called for a foul for their retaliation while the initial “foul” is missed?

Losing control becomes a habit. People default to established patterns that reinforce future action. The longer an individual allows themselves to get angry and lose focus and act out, the more this becomes imbedded as a default action—they start to react that way out of habit and it takes conscious reflection and practice to break the habit. That habit can be exploited by opponents and distrusted by teammates and allies. Individuals excuse themselves as just being me or expressing myself or see it as an isolated incident when the reality grows into habitual responses that undermine their attention, discipline and expertise.

When a player loses self-control, she or he loses focus and s judgment. Their actions disrupt the scheme of their team, often draws penalties from referees. Angry and frustrated individuals try to do too much, free lance or seek revenge for a perceived slight.

The loss of control and focus can be contagious and infect other teammates. Fellow players are familiar with a player’s lack of responsibility and self-control. Referees are primed to look for them and penalize them. A player’s inability to stay focused and keep self-control throws off the fine tuned trust and reliance of the team. If fellow teammates expect someone to lose it, they will alter their behavior and undermine schemes because they do not trust the responsibility and maturity of a teammate.

Some players even internalize their own lack of self-control as a badge of honor. They prime themselves and become familiar with their own expected responses; sometimes making their own “explosiveness” a decoration rather than a sign of the selfish immaturity and selfishness. These actions reflect a form of egocentrism and ultra-individualism—individualism without responsibility.

The domain of self-control involves a person’s mind, perception, attitudes, emotions and body. Professional and sport excellence begins and ends with internal self-awareness and mastery. An individual must come to the moment of realization that “losing it” losing control, getting angry or blaming it on everybody else undermines effective performance and focus. This is the Archimedean point of sports ethics—the obligation to accept responsibility and control oneself. The individual learns to “let go” and get on with the game and their mission.

At the same time it requires the player to learn that they can educate their own emotions. The capacity to endure pain, the capacity to endure practice and loss and bounce back all require educating emotions to support intent and obligation to others. Players and professionals learn that emotions mark obligation but can be woven into sustained effort, endurance and resistance to mistakes and baiting. It takes emotional discipline and almost counter emotional constructs to deal with rancorous audiences, baiting players and mistakes or bad calls by referees.

The upside means that players can keep their focus upon the situational awareness around them. They do not get distracted and their focus and concentration do not stay anchored on the play before or anger at a referee or trying to make up for an unseen foul by the player earlier in the game. All of these diffuse concentration from being present to the situation before them. It distracts judgment and leads to slower decisions or decisions informed by ego driven needs rather than the requirements of the team and the play unfolding.  

The other upside means that a player then develops a reputation of self-control and focus. This reputation not only anchors performance by other team members but referees defer more to their actions—they can get the benefit of the doubt when they do slip because this is not the expected norm.

Players who internalize their ethics of self-control and focus upon what they can control—their own values, emotions, trained memories, trained perceptions and intent—model responsibility for themselves. It becomes self-reinforcing in life.

The player no longer externalizes their anger and frustration, but turns inward not in a destructive way but instructive way. He or she learns. This stance primes other teammates and models for other teammates how to go about their business. This control and learning drives them to get better. Individuals stop blaming others during the game and after the let go and focus upon getting better, improving their own self mastery, their own perception and pattern recognition through tape and their own technique through practice. Self-master leads to self-improvement and learning.

Remembering, “I can only control myself” depends upon self-aware responsibility. Like its opposite, it can be trained as a virtue and habit of response and action. This means retraining emotions to simply pause when the explosive adrenalin and cortisol unleash in the system.

This capacity to pause and conjure up counter emotions to offset the anger are critical to balance in the game At the same time the capacity to maintain a center of calm to understand that “I am losing it” and respond by reasserting control. This involves cognitive awareness and self-discipline to reign in anger but also pulling up alternative 

emotional/physical internal model to guide behavior. This alternative model resides in memory and practice and can become a practice and internalized response. The slow and steady extension of self-mastery to controlling emotions under stress permits individuals to intentionally channel self-expression rather than assume every action and emotions possesses legitimacy.

This habit of self-mastery helps professional address another reality of life--aging. In athletics the body reaches a peak in mid twenties to early thirties at the latest. As it ages capacity declines in certain areas and younger players with greater innate capacity enter as competitors. Players who understand what they can control adapt to their own physical changes. They do not give up, but develop technique to compensate or knowledge such as greater study of tendencies or even develop new approaches such as a pitcher developing new pitchers or strong armed quarterback learning to be more precise in midrange and short passes. 

Team cultures and coach modeling build up the social capital that supports young and old players achieving and sustaining self-mastery under stress and facing stress. Team leaders reinforce an ethic of keeping calm. Team members share a supportive ethics of not giving opponents an edge by handing them easy fouls or unfocused action. Teammates rush to each other to calm down and defuse anger and conflicts before they flare.

 Coaches model this and team leaders practice it. Too many coaches scream and yell and lose it on the sidelines and then wonder why their players play out of control and get unnecessary fouls. Show me an out of control coach on the sideline and I’ll show you an undisciplined team.

At the end of playoff game a Seahawk player put it best. Their opponents had spent a lot of time “taking cheap shots” to throw the players off. He got it right, “they tried to get me out of my zone, but we stayed in the zone.”

Sports Ethics: Get Your Act Together

A couple months ago I read a story where Maria Sharapova at the U.S. Open (please don’t ask why I follow stories about Maria Sharapova). She had fallen behind in a match and during a break, her coach told her to  “get your act together.” We've all had moments when we have to tell ourselves this, and we’ve all had moments when coaches, bosses and friends look at us and simply say or scream “get your act together.” It’s good advice, foundational really. So what does it mean and why is it so ethically important?

This is an imperative phrase, an order to oneself. Like much sports oriented ethics urgency drives it.

The key when we use this phrase is that:

Things are NOT going well.

I may be losing or I may be ahead but losing momentum, or the momentum is shifting and my performance has become erratic enabling the opponent to take advantage of my weaknesses and flawed execution.

Things are not going well with my performance and the flow of the game. This might also mean that I am not playing at my highest level. More possibly my performance has devolved into inconsistent execution and decision-making.  This requires pulling oneself together and getting your act together.

In my case I usually use it when I am having a discussion with myself or among several selves with me/myself/I all disagreeing or pulling in different ways.  This internal disagreement implies two things. First, our internal self has fragmented and is pulling against itself. I, as a person, do not have a coherent and stable approach to the challenge before me and my performance suffers.

Second, this internal division undercuts my focus and stability of execution. One time I may focus upon one tactic, then another or I may lose aggressiveness and let my opponent dominate the tone of the play. Or the next moment I may be overly aggressive and not wait for the game to come to me. So I force bad plays rather than waiting for the right opening and pouncing much like Suz Tzu would suggest.

Operationally this means that my game and bahiavior become inconsistent and fighting each other. Consistency goes down leading to more inconsistency as I experiment with different options or different parts of my brain suggest different solutions. Cognitive efficiency decline as does cognitive unity of purpose and integration of perception, decision and action.

Now the language gives us a way out.

Get your act—orders the person to take responsibility for the situation. In sports and life the “get” is a bossy little word that demands attention and action. But the critical words here are ACT TOGETHER.

The word ACT means that the situation requires a person take on a role.

Being an elite athlete involves taking on and mastering a role. Mastering the skills and character and demands of the sport require that people take on a Role an Act—this act involves having a script and role.  We PLAY games just like we go to PLAYS.

Athletes play a part and take on a role. The role involves a strong level of scripting and practice to refine the skills and character. Good athletes like good actors invest their heart and soul and skills into the role they act out. They read, study and practice the character and role over and over.

Being an athlete is not the total identity of the person. It can become that just like being a lawyer or scientist or police officer can fill up a person’s entire identity. But the fact that it is a professional role and an act with a strong script enables a player to say “get your act together, Pat.”

This cognitive moment permits the athlete so recall the trained script, to remember the planned actions and the cues that other actors/players give out. More important the act requires, as in a play, constant annotations to address changes in the opponent or audience.

The athlete, like any good professional, takes a script and role—an ACT—but they must improvise within the role and go off script given the surprises and interactive nature of competition. They draw upon the character and the skills but as in improvisation respond to the cues and actions around them. During a time out, the coach an athlete may literally rewrite a script or add a new scene on the run.

This approach to life sets true athletics apart from the totally scripted and predictable world of professional wrestling with its scripted outcomes or the world of fixed athletics with its fixed outcomes. Athletes enter a competition with a script but no guaranteed outcome.

Athletic competition like professional life starts with learned skills and character that prepares us to play within the rules. But innovation occurs, situations change and opponents prove to be better or have developed new skills or to be more cognitively present and beat us.

So when Maria Sharapovo or any of us tells ourselves, Get your act together, this pushes us to remember the physical gestures and mental mind sets and perceptual pattern recognition that we rely upon to success. We need to take back on the role and unite our warring selves into one role, one person and one ACT where mind, perception and body engage the context.

Sports Ethics: Put on a Game Face

"Put your game face on" is one of the many sports expressions that pervade American English. It's an odd expression. I mean how do you put on a new face? Much as I'd like to do it, it seems very hard. Of course in LA plastic surgeons will do it for you.

Putting on a game face means something quite important, plastic surgery aside. Have you ever stood in front of a mirror and practiced different faces, no, not guitar gyrations, but different faces? It turns out that something important happens when we change our facial expression.

The human face is so powerful and human perception is so face dependent, that faces not only communicate immense amount of information, but they influence our cognitive and emotional states. Changing your face can  literally change our brain activity. Smiling can be an exercise to become more happy; frowning can make you more sad, scowling more angry. The face is an exquisite monitor of our emotions but it is also a generator. So putting on a game face can involve changing your internal emotional and cognitive balance.

When an athlete prepares for his or her game, he or she attempts to develop a focus for the game that is appropriate to how they carry themselves best in the game. Some players play best angry or fierce. Others take on a role of care free but focused players. Still others develop an eerie calm that helps them persevere with an even temper amid the chaotic emotions and emotional momentum of a game. Others manifest a preternatural concentration that unites their body, mind and emotions into a flowing zen like movement. Putting on a game face reminds us athletes perform just like Greek tragedy actors who donned masks to play their roles.

The game face focuses and carries the player into combat. Putting on a game face also implies an element of choice and control. If someone "loses it" in competition, they lost their focus and their face reflects it first. They lose the tuned balance of emotion, focus and skill deployment that enables them to perform at their best. Many game plans are built around trying to get players out of their game face and to lose it. Losing it can be contagious neurologically and socially. Whole teams can lose their composure and you see it in their faces. Teams often know when they've won long before they take the lead by the faces or body carriage of an opponent.

Last weekend I watched the University of Washington team have what their coach called a "melt down." In the third quarter of the game the players clearly lost focus, and their faces and body language showed it. They lost some bad calls and could not let go of the calls. Their anger and frustration kept them from complete focus upon the play at hand, instead they were resenting or replaying what they lost. The team imploded with sloppy play and penalties. But the issue here covers not just players but coaching accountability. If you watched the bench, the coaches yelled and rattled around. They contorted and yelled and shouted at the ref. Several had to be restrained from running on the field.

The coaches are leaders. Their demeanor models what the students expect and live up to. If coaches lose it and yell, how are the twenty year olds supposed to keep focused on the game?

Coaches must also put on game faces. Players take their cues from coaches, and as Sun Tzu and his followers emphasized in the Art of War, a leader must be tranquil and clear thinking at all times. Coachers may think they are firing up their players, but their bulging faces and angry strutting only model losing it to their players. Their own contorted faces give permission to players to remain upset.

The coaches' faces create contagion and pass on to the players the anger and lost focus, not just energy and intensity. Coaches need game faces too and having seen enough coaches lose it and not help their teams, I am becoming more comfortable with the Bill Bellichick or Tom Landry school of keep it intense but keep it controlled. Game faces matter for coaches and players. The Washington Husky's young coach Steve Sarkesian admitted as much in a post mortem, ""I am a passionate guy," he said. "I want to do everything I can for our kids to give them the best chance to win. And I felt like there was a point there that maybe my emotions got the best of me because I didn't feel like it was right. But I've got to show more composure, if I want our kids to show more composure." Motivating athletes is one thing; leading them off the edge is another.

Putting on a game face is fundamental to being an athlete or a coach, or for that matter being a professional of any sort. Like the Greek insight into play, when we "play ball' we put on masks that help us perform but also change and reflect whom we are.