Consider these questions:
- Do you feel as if your work, sport or life doesn’t offer you a sense of agency, choice or feel your decision-making is ineffective?
- Do you feel as if you don’t have purpose and that your actions lack meaning or alignment with what’s important to you?
- Do you struggle to believe in your abilities to deal with the demands of your work, sport and life?
- Do you feel as if you don’t have control of your actions and can’t determine the outcomes you want?
- Do you feel that no matter what effort you put in, it doesn’t seem to have any impact on your work, sport and life?
If you found that one or some of these resonated and reflected how you feel, then you may be feeling a bit out of sorts. It may be that you are lacking a sense of psychological empowerment.
Psychological empowerment describes a cognitive state that encompasses your attitude and belief that you feel competent, effective, and have agency to perform as you want. With the elite athletes and corporate executives I deal with we talk about performance empowerment.
Training & research
Over a 6 month period, I trained elite athletes and corporate executives in performance empowerment mental skills and then conducted research interviews them to evaluate the impact.
The training involved develop my 4-A’s skills of Awareness, managing Attention, helpful Attitude response, and skilful Action – being able to choose responses to experience. Of course, these skills offer the ability to develop change, however, the research I conducted was aimed at helping the participants make change through using these skills to better activate powerful mechanisms of change.
- Self-efficacy – building belief in abilities to perform actions and achieve outcomes
- Decentering/disidentifying – ability to observe thought content and view it objectively
- Compassionate responding – the ability to respond to ourselves and others in a way that alleviates distress through thought and action
- Equanimity – the ability to have composure even within demanding experience
- Reappraisals – the ability to step away from immediate responses and view what is going on to offer accurate assessments and more effective ways of responding
- Reflection – the ability to reflect on experience to offer accurate updates, adapt and learn so that unhelpful conditioned responses change over time
- Approach orientation – developing the ability to approach difficult and demanding experiences, building tolerance and resilience qualities, as opposed to habitual avoidance
The outcomes
Interviews are terrific ways of doing research to garner the rich details of someone’s experience and the impactful outcomes that they feel it has led to. What I was able to discover from the research is that the 4A’s training and developing of the mechanisms of change above, led to various impactful outcomes.
- Psychological empowerment
- Self-awareness
- Resilience
- Self-regulation
- Emotional intelligence
- Developmental learning and change
The ripple effects of the outcomes
These outcomes have to be described separately, however, the fascinating thing about the research was how interwoven they were in participants’ accounts. The stories they shared demonstrated that they didn’t act in isolation, and in fact, they offered a ripple effect, where outcomes had reciprocal and interweaving effects.
Psychological empowerment is described above, however, participants described feeling more empowerment to perform. They all had to function in high performance environments, and their new sense of being able to bring to mind their skills, abilities and strengths, enabled them to manage inevitable high performance demands more easily.
Accounts of a highly developed sense Self-awareness was reported. Noticing intrusive and dysfunctional thoughts and narratives, but then being able to respond to that effectively. Their self-awareness offered them a self-therapeutical way of understanding themselves. They expressed being able to notice where limiting self-concepts that had been around for years were coming from, and now being able to respond in ways that empowered them to challenge those limiting concepts.
Resilience was a significant outcome change, where participants shared an interesting and insightful outcome. They told stories of having resilience to the anticipation of important events. That they developed a resiliency to the thoughts and emotions days leading up to presentations, meetings or competitions, that would have affected them badly in the past. This resulted in them feeling more resilient in the moment of performing and having a greater sense of being able to adapt and learn from their experiences – even if they performed poorly. Hence, resilience was a quality they had before, during and after demanding events. An interesting feature of the research showed accounts from participants where they felt more resilient to themselves, their narratives, and thought processes that were perhaps dysfunctional for performance in the past.
Self-regulation – encompassed reports that participants felt better able to manage their minds, emotions and actions. This had massive ripple effects to other outcomes and was a significant factor in helping the participants feel more empowered for performance.
Emotional intelligence is, of course, strongly linked with emotion regulation, however this evoked other outcome effects where participants described interpersonal awareness, competency and efficacy. They felt that their interpersonal skills had massively improved. Not only did they feel able to manage their own emotions, but described a sense of being able to manage the emotions of those that they were engaging with more effectively.
Developmental learning and change represents how participants felt that they were developing in their understanding of the tools and psychological principles that can help them, being able to apply them, and through this, create effective change.
The Program
The program has been the culmination of 7 years of research, integrating performance psychology and mindfulness psychology into a unique format that delivers beneficial outcomes. The mental skills training involved 8-sessions of 90 minutes, with additional video and audio material to supplement the sessions. It was delivered individually, but can be delivered for groups.
The program has been skilfully crafted by the author, drawing from extensive work with elite athletes and corporate executives, who all perform in high performance environments. If you want to be able build your capacity to deal with the demands of high performance environments, and overcome the biggest obstacle to performance excellence (YOU), then this may be something looking into.
Contact Stuart Munro for further details: [email protected]
Stuart Munro is a performance psychologist and founder of the Munro Performance Empowerment Program™, which is an evidence-based skills training program offering benefits for performance and wellbeing. With research at two major UK universities (Loughborough and Staffordshire) the program has been able to show that elite athletes and corporate executives can train to develop mental skills hat leads to beneficial outcomes of psychological empowerment, self-awareness, self-regulation, resilience and emotional intelligence. Stuart’s work involves supporting the Canadian Paralympic Alpine Ski Team, various elite athletes and an expanding client base of corporate executives.