Eating Your Own Dog Food 4

Eating one’s own dog food, also called dogfooding, is when a company uses the products that it makes. Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and hence a kind of testimonial advertising.

— Wikipedia

Yesterdays post was fairly general. Today, I would like to get more specific regarding one characteristic, composure/control (it seems to me that composure is what you get when you have control, not sure why these are separated, maybe 7 is a lucky number), and one way to develop control in an athletic situation.

First, let’s define control of an athletic situation as the ability to determine a finite set of outcomes, have a preference for a specific outcome, have contingency plans for the outcomes that are not preferred and, most importantly, comfort regarding your preparation.

I think we’ve all read a quote by Henry Ford that goes something like: “Whether you think you can, or you can’t, you’re probably right.” I consider self-talk for an athletic performance analogous to advertising for your performance. When you act (or perform) on your self-talk you are eating your own dog food. While it is always nice to be right, or to enact your self-talk, it is also important to understand both the short-term and long-term consequences of that action and how to change the self-talk to get what you want if you aren’t getting it.

A few days ago, I was doing heavy doubles of clean and press. On the last rep, I thought to myself, “if you can’t press it, just push jerk it.” The rep turned out pretty skanky but I ended up pressing it by staying on my heels as long as possible (at the last second, I was able to gather my wits and “say” something useful to myself). Setting up with “If you can’t…” shows a lack of control over the task at hand because of the focus on short-term rather than long term success. When I “eat my own dog food” or act on my self-talk that is oriented towards short-term success, I may have control of that moment (because I can change the rules when it suits me), but in new situations, that control is erased because I have only trained myself to perform successfully when I can make the rules up as I go along. More effective self-talk, i.e. self-talk that trains control over the long term, would be “shoulders first” for the clean and “heels” for the dip and “tight abs” for the press (these cues are appropriate for my own lifting, obviously, your cues may be different).

The test I use for effective self-talk is “what happens if I am right and what happens if I am wrong.” If what happens when I am right _and_ what happens when I am wrong matches up with with what I want, e.g. the plan for the training session or the plan for preparing for a competition, then it is effective self-talk that will enable control when I have to perform. For instance, when I set up with “If I can’t…” that assumes that the most important thing, what I am training for, is to get the weight over my head by any means necessary. Nothing could be further from the truth. The exercise, clean and press, was chosen for a specific reason, to train a certain physical characteristic and skill. What happens if “I am right” when I set up with “If I can’t…” and succeed, is that my ego is spared at the expense of my training plan. “Follow the training plan: however, if the perception could be that I am weak, do whatever you need to do to not appear weak,” is definitely NOT the plan for any training session. Short-term win, but long-term loss, “I” win temporarily, but my training isn’t any further along because I didn’t adhere to the training plan, so overall, a loss. What happens when “I am wrong,” is just as bad because then I can’t perform the lift even when I don’t adhere to any rules. Definitely, short-term loss and long-term loss.

When I say to myself, “shoulders first,” it is all about developing specific skills, adhering to the training plan and nothing else. If “I am right,” I complete the clean, that means I am doing the clean correctly (or at least that part of the clean) and I can reliably count on that cue to work my training plan. I now have control because I when I act on my self-talk, I have a good lift accruing to external criteria. i.e. I have a plan, when I follow the plan, I have objective success. Sounds much better so far. If “I am wrong,” I know that either, my cue doesn’t ensure success or, possibly, that I still need to work on doing what I was telling myself to do. Either way, I know what I have to work on to succeed. Win-win, in that “I” win because I know I didn’t complete the lift because of a skill deficiency, not because I am “weak,” and I now have a plan to succeed.

The key here is that both the “what happens if I am right” and “what happens if I am wrong” questions both have to align to a larger plan, to ensure effective self-talk and gain control. It is only when you are satisfied with either a “positive” or a “negative” outcome from eating your own dog food that you are truly in control.