Speaking of Psychology: Understanding the minds of champions, with Steve Portenga, PhD

Mental preparation can affect performance, whether you’re preparing for a big test at school or competing at the Olympics. In this episode, Steve Portenga, PhD, talks about the psychology behind performing at your best and how to help overachievers handle stress.

Steve Portenga, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Denver and founder of a sport and performance psychology consulting firm called iPerformance Consultantsopens in new window. He has consulted with Olympic athletes on the USA Track and Field team and is a founding member of APA’s Coalition for the Psychology of High Performance.

In his sport psychology practice, he brings together the theories of human performance, neuroscience, technology and behavior change to help athletes achieve at their highest levels. He has worked for franchises in every major professional sport and is a member of the National Association for Gifted Children’s Presidential Task Force on the Whole Gifted Child.

Audrey Hamilton: Yogi Berra once said “ninety percent of the game is half mental.” His quote was more philosophical than accurate but sport and performance psychologists exist because succeeding at an elite level is not just about athletics. Now chances are you aren’t an Olympian or a professional athlete but how many times has someone told you to just focus before a big presentation at work? Or, maybe a big test at school? In this episode, we speak with a psychologist about how the best of the best mentally prepare to perform and how psychology is helping them. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is Speaking of Psychology.

Steve Portenga is a founder of a sport and performance psychology consulting firm called iPerformance Consultantsopens in new window. He has consulted with Olympic athletes on the U.S. Track and Field team and is now taking his expertise beyond sports as a member of the American Psychological Association’s Coalition for Psychology of High Performance. Welcome, Dr. Portenga. 

Steve Portenga: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Audrey Hamilton: I think a lot of people have misconceptions about what sport psychologists do. So, you are one so can you tell us more about your work? I’m particularly interested in your work with the U.S.A. Track and Field team. What kind of mental preparation is required to perform at that highest level of sports? 

Steve Portenga: I had the distinct pleasure of working with the team in London in 2012 at the last Olympics and thought that I was incredibly prepared to get into that environment. I had a number of mentors that were there. And the environment of living in the village and being in the Olympics is absolutely unparalleled. The pressure is absolutely amazing. It would be the equivalent of having everyone in the Super Bowl – all of those teams living together throughout the duration – all of the teams in the NCAA tournament living together. You have over ten thousand athletes in a very small environment. Everyone is required to wear their national team gear – colors, logos all over the place. And so there’s constant reminder that this is something…

Audrey Hamilton:  A big deal, right?

Steve Portenga: Oh, absolutely. It would be fascinating to see the amount of money that the city of London has spent per signage. The Olympic rings were everywhere throughout the city. I mean, you could not miss at all what was going on.

And so the pressure there is really intense, really unique, nonstop. And so to be able to have the athletes and the team and the staff be prepared for that environment was my main job.

Audrey Hamilton:  Was it challenging to get athletes to focus in that kind of an environment?

Steve Portenga: Absolutely. It’s really an interesting process where for some sports it’s pretty easy to try and have this belief that nothing is different. The 100 meters is 100 meters whether you’re in the sixth grade or the Olympic finals. And yet the energy in that Olympic stadium is absolutely unreal. Even being in the stands, you can feel your hair stand on edge. It’s absolutely electric. So you have to be overprepared to be able to handle that. There’s so many different distractions that come up in the process of getting there. But to really be able to execute, you have to take advantage of that energy and know very specifically, very deliberately what you’re going to do with it – how you’re going to channel it. 

Audrey Hamilton: Is most of the preparation happening before they even get to London or is it happening while they’re getting to the Olympic village or wherever they are during the games?

Steve Portenga: Both. Whenever you’re talking about any kind of performance there’s a tremendous amount of preparation that has to go into that. To be able to rely on a sense of automaticity. And the more you have that learned, the easier it is to be able to perform in those environments.

Being in Denver, I have a fat head of Peyton Manning up on the wall for the high school kids that I work with this quote that says “pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And that applies mentally, as much as it does physically. And if we have time to prepare athletes to get to that point, fantastic. One of the interesting things with track and field, though, is we don’t have a national team until the plane leaves for whatever national trip we’re going on. So in the interim, the athletes are all over the country with different coaches. Many of them are at university – competing for those teams with those coaches and so to try and have consistent contact and interaction and work with them up until we get to the point of team travel is incredibly difficult. And there’s always a lot of athletes that will do fantastic until they get to an international trip, especially the Olympics and something unique will happen there. They start putting too much pressure on themselves. They start to have a little chink in their armor that they’ve never experienced with before. And so being on site to handle that as it comes up is really important, as well.

Audrey Hamilton: How much – and you’re touching on this a little bit but I want to keep going a little bit further. I mean, how much do athletes’ mental state affect their performance, even at the peak of their careers? I mean, they’ve been doing this pretty much, I’m sure at some point their whole life, right or more than half their life.

Steve Portenga: Absolutely. It’s very interesting. There’s a lot of sport psychologists that will try to go out there and try to put a number on the percentage of whatever sport is mental. And I find that a very interesting approach because I don’t know anyone who has gone to the Olympics with a master’s or a PhD in sport psychology and had gotten a medal. And if the mental side was truly that important you would see a lot of that representation. In sports and other performance settings, it’s physical. If you do not have the ability to get from point A to point B within a certain time, that mental piece is completely irrelevant. Except that the mental is a huge part of this planning and this preparation in developing the physical ability, the skills, the understanding and strategy that go into it and it’s really important to be able to get that out and be able to deliver that consistently. And if you aren’t going to be able to perform at your best, to be able to minimize how far off you are. And that is a huge part of it. And that’s where every athlete will go through different things in their career. That idea of pressure will change throughout their career. You go through different responsibilities within a team. You know you’re just one of the people on the bench. All of a sudden you’re a starter. Now you’re the team captain. Now you’re the person expected to carry the team. You’re going to your first Olympics and it would be great to get to the finals. If you get a medal, it’s wonderful. Then somewhere in your career, you’re going to your third Olympics and if you don’t get a medal it’s a failure. Oh, and actually if you don’t get a gold medal, you know, it will be a bit of a failure. And so as your career changes the expectations that are put on you or you put on yourself change. 

 Audrey Hamilton: A lot of your work now is focused on bringing out the best in children whether it’s in the classroom or sports. You’re on the APA’s Coalition for the Psychology of High Performance. Can you explain what this group is doing? You know psychologists are studying what makes kids more successful and what they have found.

Steve Portenga: I think the first part to answer that question is to kind of delve into the psychology of high performance a little bit.

Audrey Hamilton: Sure, yeah.

Steve Portenga: To begin with, and for me it goes back to that process of planning and preparing for an event where you are going to be judged, evaluated, held to a standard; which could be others or on your own and then being able to get out and deliver what you have put in. And so, there is a process of really understanding that performance context to make sure you’re really focused on the right things and there’s some truth to the idea that great performance happens when you’re not thinking. Except that even when were asleep were dreaming our brains are still working so it never really is the case that we’re not thinking. We’re thinking in a very qualitatively different way and so you put that together into a plan to be able to do that. And yet I know no athlete that can really stick to that consistently. We’re gonna get distracted by something in performance and usually the things that distract us most are things that are related to threat. It might be threat physically, if you are competing in the brain, it might be a threat to outcome in terms of the competition, the officials. And lots of times the biggest threat, the thing that distracts us most, is something that is a threat to our sense of self, self-worth, and identity. And especially as you see athletes put more of their identity on things they are doing and more expectations on themselves they end up putting more pressure on themselves

Audrey Hamilton:  They’re their own worst enemies

Steve Portenga: Absolutely, and it happens in a very positive way initially but sometimes we can just get unbalanced in our lives and certainly within the world of track and field there are athletes who judge themselves against others based on how they perform. If you run faster than me you’re a better person than me. And it would be easy for someone with a psychology training to come in and say, you know that’s just not true you should see yourself differently. Except in that environment there are plenty of people who do judge others based on that and the athletes see that, they know that and so it’s hard not to internalize that. And so from there I think that general approach to managing pressure is something that kids particularly today face all over the place pressure to get into college. Not just college, the right college. Pressure to do well on testing pressure to do well in all of the things that go on in their lives whether it’s interviews for college, interviews for jobs. And so I think helping them learn how to manage that is a wonderful skill set a wonderful mindset for them to develop. And I think my role is to take their interest in sport and use that as an opportunity to have discussion that they probably wouldn’t engage in otherwise and it’s amazing how a lot of people in sports psychology have focused on interventions and not sort of this underlying psychological examination of what’s going on to lead to pressure. And then there is a number of other areas that have really been exploring the psychology of high performance. But, because we have normally thought of that in respect to sports and they didn’t work with athletes you know, we just haven’t made that connection that it really is more than just sports. It’s performance settings across the board. So, this coalition is our initial attempt to really try and get different divisions, different people together, trying to talk about the things that are going on in our area. And ultimately our big project that we’re working towards is to really clarify a psychological understanding what needs to happen in performance settings and then work off of that to create a developmental model. So, as kids are developing you can have teachers in academic settings, parents, coaches understand there is some mental skills some mental characteristics that kids at this age level should learn, can learn, or in some cases are just not ready to learn yet. And if we can create that kind of heuristic checklist for people, I think it will really help bring an appreciation to this part of talented kids development. And I think that’s our ultimate goal is to really help performance at the very highest range of what we as people are capable and at the same time helping every person increase their performance even if that maximum protentional is just average. 

Audrey Hamilton: I think some of us have this idea that were born mentally tough too or that we just need to focus and we will succeed. But, I think what you’re saying is that’s not always the case. There are other factors coming into play when it comes to high performance. What sort of advice do you give to kids and their parents to help them face the pressures that they face and still be successful? 

Steve Portenga: I think a big thing is trying to find a sense of balance and perspective in where sport and performance fits in their lives. Usually starts conversations with kids in trying to get parents involved in that. I’ve worked with a number of athletes that because they are known as the golfer in high school, and that’s where they are at, any time something isn’t perfect in golf it’s just scary and threatening and at some point, it’s a lot easier to just leave golf than to continue to live with that. I think having them try and get a good sense of what is really important in performance so they know what to focus on. It’s amazing to me in London, at the games, talking to athletes that were on journalist lists of medal contenders, didn’t really have a very specific deliberate plan of what they should focus on while they were competing. If they came to the right thing they were gonna end up on the podium. And unfortunately for some of them they were thinking about the wrong thing and didn’t even get out of the first round. And so even at that level they don’t really have that clarified. It’s really easy to say focus and pay attention and I actually think that a lot of athletes are really good at it, they are just really good at focusing on the wrong things. And I think some of the things we really need to focus on, to learn, and develop and practice are different from what we need to do. And that’s where understanding motor learning, motor control, comes into play to be able to put that together. So those are the two big things that I start off with and then we get into this process of understanding those distractions and I think a part of that comes back to an appreciation of psychophysiology.

That in performance settings, and there’s a tremendous amount of emotion there’s a huge reaction in the body that comes with that emotion. And I think most psychologists conceptually get that and most people understand the mind body connection. But I don’t think we really fully understand the interconnection and the pathways from heart and lungs, in particular, that go up not just to control centers but to parts of the brain that are involved in responding to the environment. Deciding valence, what’s important, and what’s not, in the environment so we can make decisions, we can analyze how we want to respond, and then execute that. And if you have too much emotion and the wrong thing is going on in the body, it’s going to interfere with that process. And so, I think there’s some people that focus on the idea of toughness of sort of ignoring emotion and its great, it’s wonderful, it doesn’t affect them. Except that there are still things going on internally in the brain. So, they might not feel that emotion and yet it stills has an impact on their performance and what happens a lot of times is they are able to perform well but it comes at a tremendous cost in terms of energy and its exhausting and its unsustainable.

Audrey Hamilton:  And it’s not fun anymore. I think at some point it becomes just a burden as opposed to causing elation at the end of the day.

Steve Portenga: Absolutely. I have worked with many athletes that are incredibly mentally tough and yet they use that in a way where they’re beating their head against the wall. They’re able to take more pain. They’re able to suffer more than others and so I’m not sure it’s the right concept for what we’re ideally looking for.

Audrey Hamilton:  Switching gears a little bit, there are so many resources now at our finger tips. You know in our phones and online. How much is technology playing a role in the application of performance psychology. I know it’s something you’ve really been doing.

Steve Portenga: I think we’re just starting to see the advent of that and the integration of that. When you are talking about wearable devices, when you are looking at the integration of sport analytics in sports, looking mostly at statistics to begin with but now as we can look at all of these device that give us so much data. I think it’s inevitable. In addition, that most of the athletes growing up, that are going to be professional athletes, are wedded to technology. I think there’s a part of technology that, eventually, is going to have to come out of necessity because that’s what kids know. But, I think it allows us to do so much more. We can collect different kinds of data. We can look at what they are doing. we can reach them at times that don’t involve our office. I’m working on a project trying to get access to kids through online teaching. You know be a subset of what sports psychology can do, and it won’t replace people. But, for someone to have an economical access to this in their own home, instead of having to pay a lot of money to go talk to a stranger, and the stigma that might bring up, you know sound like a wonderful door opener. I have no doubt that we are going to have a lot of people who put the cart before the horse, so to speak, that there is definitely going to be some things out there that promise more than they can deliver.

Audrey Hamilton:  All right, well Doctor Portenga thank you so much for joining us it’s been a real pleasure.

Steve Portenga: : It’s been my pleasure Audrey. I appreciate it.

Audrey Hamilton: Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on the topics we discussed or if you would like to hear more episodes, please go to our website. With the American Psychological Association’s Speaking of Psychology, I’m Audrey Hamilton.