Olympians are vaulting, dashing and dueling their way to gold in Paris this summer, showing millions of viewers what 2024′s top athletes are capable of. It begs the question: What makes an Olympian such a world-class competitor? It comes down to, at least partially, the mindset.
“We call it a stress mindset, or your worldview of stress,” sports psychologist Dan Gould, who has consulted for the U.S. Olympic Committee, told CNN.
“Research on high-level swimmers in England, who were all capable, found the swimmers who performed best viewed stress as more facilitative versus debilitative,” he said.
It’s a lesson the former director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports and professor emeritus of kinesiology at Michigan State University said anyone can benefit from.
“Any elite athlete knows there’s going to be pressure, and top athletes have learned to view it as a challenge, either by trial and error or by working on mental training such as staying in the present,” Gould added. “That has a lot of implications for everybody.”
Putting yourself in the right perspective for success is a start, but an Olympian-level mindset doesn’t manifest overnight. According to sports psychologist Jeff Brown, co-author of “The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success,” it takes work.
“A winner’s brain is not about a quick fix,” he told CNN. “You have to nurture your brain and take care of it.”
“You have to feed it good fats, like omega-3′s. Your brain is the 3 pounds that you don’t want to lose,” the Harvard Medical School assistant clinical professor continued.
“You have to move it — brain function improves if you’re moving,” he said. “That’s one of the best things that you can do for your brain. And you have to sleep it — sleep is critical to memory consolidation and learning.”
So rewiring your brain to perceive stress as a positive can be a powerful tool, with enough practice and healthy brain habits. But what about when you fail?
“It’s really hard to build resilience unless you’ve been challenged,” Gould said. “If I protected you during your whole life and never let you figure things out for yourself, you’re bound to be stressed when you hit an obstacle.”
It’s about bouncing back. That’s why coaches say they use “pressure training” to keep their athletes in the competition to the end.
“With the athlete’s permission, the trainer ratchets up the pressure, almost like I’m giving you the disease of fear and then letting your antibodies build up psychologically,” Gould said. “The trainer then puts the athlete into increasingly more challenging situations where they need to trigger those antibodies.”
Failure is a part of life, so learning how to be comfortable with it can be a boon. but there is still more at play. To truly take on the mind of an Olympic athlete, the key is confidence.
“They have to believe they’re capable of performing well or they have already given the competition the advantage,” Gould said. “They have to go into the event with complete confidence.”
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