Mark Nesti interviews Steve Peters, medical doctor and psychiatrist for Team GB Cycling
In this interview we have a chance to hear from one of the most well received presenters at this year’s Leaders conference about his thoughts on psychology and sport performance. Dr Steve Peters is a medical doctor and psychiatrist by training, who has been a University teacher at Sheffield Medical School for many years. Although Dr Peters has carried out lots of consultancy work in a range of sports during his career, it is his involvement in British cycling that has really propelled him into the public eye. As we heard at Leaders, Steve works very closely with British cycling performance director Dave Brailsford and with the coaching teams and individual athletes in what is currently one of our most successful sports. But what does he actually do with them and why? Some of the answers to this can be gleaned from his views on a range of key topics in sport psychology.
I started by asking him about anxiety in sport – often one of the big issues facing sport performers.
MN: Would you say that it’s mostly or always oriented towards the upcoming performance and how well you’ve done in previous performances, or is it sometimes related to broader issues?
SP: I think it’s varied and you need to maintain focus on the individual. I think you’ve got to look very carefully at each individual. So for example if somebody was saying, “I’m terrified about competing” it might be because their dad’s in the audience and they don’t want to let them down. That is a scenario that I have often met. However, if dad’s actually saying, “well actually, I’m not bothered as long as you’re happy” then that anxiety disappears, and now it would be valuable to start going down the route where you say let’s get you calm and let’s get you focused on what you’re doing. In my experience though, anxiety can be caused from a very wide range of factors – performance based, personal and social – so I tend to do an analysis of all the angles of where it might be coming from to find out what the problem is.
MN: In general terms do you go beyond individual work, do you get into the system as it were, try and affect the culture, or do you leave that to performance directors and others? Do you think that your role is really the one-to-one work, irrespective of whether the culture is conducive to what you’re doing or not?
SP: I think I need to work on both these levels. If I get asked to come into a sport where somebody’s asked me to remove anxiety from an athlete where I don’t know the system, I don’t know any of the cultures, I don’t know the staff, then I’m being asked to do a job where you’ve got to be careful and be very respectful of the fact that it’s not my domain. So, I try and engage with the people around the person so that I can actually find out what the setting and culture is. And if the culture itself doesn’t lend itself to getting this player in the right place, then yes, I would address it. It is easier to do this, gets less resistance, if you approach this by suggesting why and how the culture can be modified. I can’t implement it though. Really my role here is that of an expert offering an opinion- I rarely go in and tell people what to do, that’s not my remit. Even within cycling, somewhere I understand quite well now, I don’t come in and tell people what to do; they might call on my expertise and then we might jointly come to a decision. All I do is contribute expertise on how the team can function better or what environment is best for athletes or coaches.
MN: That’s interesting to hear you say this, Steve, because during my time at Bolton Wanderers we tried to divide these roles where I did some of the one-to-one stuff with the first team guys and Mike Forde did more of an organisational psychologist type role to manage the environment and affect the culture. And with him being able to do that sometimes allowed certain types of issues to disappear and made it easier to do the individually focused sport psych work. Do you agree that there often seems to be a lot of misunderstanding out there about what value psychologists can have in elite sport, and their precise role?
SP: I think the biggest misunderstanding is that sometimes we are expected to produce miracles! Look, I’m a mental skills coach, and so if you throw somebody at me and say this is their problem I’ve got to say okay, hang on, first of all I’ve got to know what their natural ability is to deal with life in general and this problem specifically. Then I’ve got to know what headroom they’ve got, how much they can improve, will they get this as a skill rather than as some clever tricks to learn. I think people will see it as a trick that once you’ve learnt it they have it for ever. But that’s a ridiculous thing to think! It’s a skill base which needs to be acquired and maintained. I think that the biggest misunderstanding a psych encounters is this erroneous belief that we have some mystical ability to do tricks with people and get them to a place where they’ll always remain, and therefore if they don’t, it’s something we’ve done that’s wrong! But this is nonsense since it rests on the ability of the athlete too.
MN: Steve, I fully agree with you here, not least because circumstances change and the demands placed upon elite sport performers vary day in day out, week by week, season by season. To change tack a little, given your background as a psychiatrist who’s trained essentially to work with clients who’ve got serious mental health issues and illness, how do you feel able to work in performance sport? You’re not a sport psychologist by traditional training and development so does this cause you any difficulties?
SP: From my perspective I have a generic skills base to look at the brain and the mind, that’s my expertise. I’ve gone down the route of a doctor treating mental illness; you’ve got a mind that is not functioning correctly and it’s hugely based in my world around chemical imbalance or structures not functioning, so that’s where I’m coming from roughly. However, when we do get a mind to start functioning well sometimes there’s dysfunction so it doesn’t operate in the right way, and the person doesn’t use their mind for advantage – that is what I call dysfunction rather than malfunction. So, there are lots of elements of psychological and clinical areas that I would touch on. However, I have to keep saying to people, you know I’m not trained in sport at all. I’m trained in the human mind and it doesn’t matter where you put me, all I can do is put the mind into an optimal place and then work alongside experts in that field such as the coaches, to say what is it you have to achieve and then I’ll have to explain why the mind isn’t going there. But I don’t get involved in coaching as such.
Dr Mark Nesti CPsychol., is Reader: Psychology in sport at Liverpool John Moores University. His most recent book, Psychology in Football, is based on work inside Premiership clubs over 9 seasons.
THIS MONTH’S ARTICLES:
DAVID HORROCKS: EXPERT PERFORMANCE – THE DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE OF SUCH STATUS, THE TRUE EXPERTS VIEW
PROZONE ANALYSIS: FIFA TURF STUDY
KEVIN GOODFELLOW: SPORTS DATA MANAGEMENT – A KEY TO ANALYTIC ADVANTAGES
