With the golf world mesmerized by Rory McIlroy’s stunning resiliency after the Masters completed by the U.S. Open triumph, there are a lot of mental skills topics in the news the last few weeks. We’ve seen the Dallas Mavericks Sport Psychologist mentioned by head coach Rick Carlisle in the post game press conference, seen articles on McIlroy’s Masters foibles in the BBC, and U.S. Open runner-up Jason Day reflect on his previous (shall we say) less than flattering approach to mental training.
We we able to secure Josh Lifrak of IMG Academies to talk about…talk. Self-talk, to be specific. Josh has a list of 4 words that an athlete should never say to themselves, and we talk about how to eliminate them from your vocabulary.
Josh also took umbrage with the title of last weeks’ Athlete’s Audio interview ‘If your goal is to win, you’ve probably already lost’. Apologies to Dr. Rob Bell, and the entire Sport Psychology community if I’ve misrepresented your feelings on goal setting. Winning is important! Setting the right kind of goals is what we’re after.
Josh also gives us a small peek under the curtain at the IMG Academies, where elite, pro, amateur, and high school athletes go to better themselves, and to better their performance. It’s like seeing inside the ‘walled city of Oz’.
Josh is a senior member of the mental conditioning staff at IMG and is currently the heads up all team sports mental conditioning at the academy. His enthusiasm and passion for his students and teams is infectious and is evidence by their great successes. He uses a variety of team building exercises and mental skill building exercises to help athletes apply the tools they learn in workshops to the field of play.
Josh has a Masters degree in Exercise and Sport Sciences with an emphasis in Sport Psychology from Ithaca College. He is a member of the Association of Applied Sport Psychology. He has presented at many conferences and coach education seminars.
Josh is also available on twitter @jlifrak.
If you’d rather read than watch, a transcript of the interview is below. SpeechPad.com does it for us…you should have them transcribe for you, too. Quick, accurate, and a great value.
Bob: Welcome to the Athlete’s Audio Academy, where we put the elite minds of sports psychology on-screen and ask them questions to benefit athletes and make the whole world’s mental game better. We’ve got an expert today. His name is Josh Lifrak and he’s at the IMG Academies. There he is, right there. Josh, what’s happening?
Josh: Howdy. How’s it going? How are you doing today?
Bob: It’s great to have you here and to have IMG involved in the Athlete’s Audio Academy. It feels like it wouldn’t be complete without you. Tell us a little bit about your background, not only as an athlete but in sports psychology, and maybe give us a little commercial on IMG and what you guys do there.
Josh: Sure. I’m going to start off with IMG because I think it’s one of the coolest places in the world, to be honest with you. It’s been billed as ‘The Sport’s Utopia’ or as you like to call it, ‘The Walled City of Oz.’ Basically, we are a high school campus in Bradenton, Florida, about 60 miles south of Tampa. We have various sports. Tennis, basketball, baseball, golf, football, and lacrosse are the sports we offer here.
The Academy was started by Nick Bollettiere, legendary tennis coach, years ago and expanded into various arenas. It’s a high school, so the kids go to school from about 7:30, 8:00 in the morning until about noon, and then they’re out at the sport fields from about 1:00 to about 5:00 or 6:00 every day, training and trying to get better.
That’s what we’re all about; helping the athletes get better. We have a mental conditioning staff of seven people. I believe we’re the second largest mental conditioning staff in the States. Our whole focus is on trying to help the young athletes that are here to get as good as they can get in their sports.
Bob: When you say ‘second largest in the United States,’ who is number one? Just so we can be clear about the kind of organization that you’re number two to.
Josh: The United States Army.
Bob: A little bigger. A slightly bigger operation.
Josh: Yeah. They have a little bit of funding behind them.
Bob: As an athlete and a sports psychologist, tell me a little bit about your athletic background and the background that brought you to IMG as a mental conditioning coach.
Josh: In high school I was a distance runner. I ran cross-country for four years. I also rowed crew and played a little bit of basketball. I was really involved in sports. When I went to college I ended focused mostly on rowing. After college, I ran a couple of marathons, got into rock climbing, got into mountaineering type stuff and I did that for awhile.
I was in New York City in the restaurant business. I had a degree in Sociology so I immediately needed to go into the restaurant business to earn money. I was a little bit dissatisfied with the restaurant business and knew that athletics had always provided me with joy so I wanted to be around it.
It was on a mountain bike ride up in Pleasantville, New York – it’s about 30 to 40 minutes outside the city – and was coming down this trail. On the bottom of the trail was a tiny little bridge, probably about that wide. What would happen was I would come down the hill and I would get right to the foot of the bridge, and I would put on my brakes and jump off the bike. I was a little bit nervous about it. It was over a stream and if I fell I was going to get wet and I was going to get hurt. You had to be precise when you went across it. I had ridden across this bridge probably about 50, 60 times before, but on this given day, for whatever reason, I would stop and I would bail. I was stopping and I was bailing. The only thought that was going through my head was, “Don’t screw up. Don’t mess up.” All I could see in my mind was me falling off the bridge.
I carried the bike up the hill about two or three, four times, and then the last time I got up the hill I really looked at what I was thinking about. I wasn’t thinking about success and I wasn’t thinking about how to get across the bridge. I was thinking about falling. So I stopped myself and I got my head kind of straight and I got my head right and I said, “You know what, every time you’ve been across this bridge, you’ve been aggressive with you’re last couple of pedals, you’ve been set up straight and you just coasted across.” I went down the hill and boom, I was really aggressive right before I got across the bridge. I zipped across the bridge, got to the other side and was like, “Whoa. What just happened there? Why did that change?”
At that moment I went back to my apartment in New York on the Lower East Side, on Third Street between First and Second Avenue, a tiny little place, smaller than my office right now. I got on the Internet – at that time it took me about four hours to pull up anything on the Internet. I got on the Internet and I looked up sports psych programs. I was very interested in it. It turned out there used to be a sports psych program at Brooklyn College that was now defunct.
What I realized pretty quickly is that with a Sociology degree I needed to get a bunch of physical education requirements done. I went back to Brooklyn College and took about 20 credits of physical education. I had a great experience there. I ended up going to Ithaca College for my Master’s degree. While I was at Ithaca College my professor there, Greg Shelley, who’s fantastic – you’ve got to interview him, Bob, by the way. Get in touch with Greg. He’s a good interview.
Bob: Okay.
Josh: He encouraged us to, if you wanted to be in this field, you needed to do an internship. Probably about a month before I went to Ithaca College I had seen an HBO Sports special on IMG Academies and then across Greg’s desk, lo and behold, an internship possibility came up for IMG Academies. I applied. I came down here and lived with Dr. Mugford, Angus, for the summer. We were roommates, we had bunk beds. It was awesome. We did the internship here this summer. It was a fantastic experience.
I ended up going back up to New York. I wrote my thesis and finished up my Master’s degree, and when I finished my Master’s degree, strangely enough, IMG Academies’ Head of Mental Conditioning at that point, Chad Bowling, moved on. He’s now the Head of Optimal Performance for the New York Yankees. So his spot opened up and they called me and said, “Hey, you want to come down?” I said, “Absolutely.” That was six years ago, June 1st.
Bob: From the top of a hill to a bridge this wide on your mountain bike to Bradenton, Florida. Great story. There are so many elements of mental performance for all athletes that are embodied in that one story. You’ve got moving in the direction of your dominant thought, you’ve got some self-talk, you’ve got some overcoming fear or anxiety, you’ve got some goal setting, which is on the other side, to get across. It’s like a mini-story in sports psychology and all those different pieces of it that you put together right at the top of the hill on your own.
I think a lot of athletes probably get to the point where they’re at the bottom of the hill and they don’t know what to do. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m afraid.” They can’t put that self-awareness piece together to say, “Wow, look at all the stuff that’s going on in my mind.”
I’m drawn to the idea of an athlete asking themselves the question, “What’s my thinking right now?” You know what I mean? That seems to be almost half the game. “What’s in my mind right now and how is it helping or hurting what I’m shooting for?”
Josh: The awareness piece is massive. We had one major leaguer who was here training and he talked to us about how the thing that he got the most out of mental conditioning is that you have to catch yourself thinking bad. And when you catch yourself thinking bad, then you can change it around to the good stuff. A lot of guys are not even aware of the thought processes that they have. A lot of our job is, “Hey, what is going on in your mind when you are doing well or when you are doing poorly?”
We kind of flow off of a success model here at IMG. We like to look at what makes an athlete great and then we just try to repeat that over and over again. A baseball player might be in a 0 for 30 slump, but there’s certainly a time where they’ve gotten a hit or they’ve had hits.
We were just dealing with a major league baseball pitcher who hadn’t won a game this year. We went back and looked at video of him and we showed him video of himself doing really, really well. Lo and behold, his next two starts, he’s won.
It’s an interesting thing. When you look at the success model, when you go back to what you’re doing well, over and over again, typically, then you’re going to have repeated success. That’s really what we look at.
Bob: Here’s a question, then. Since all of us are not blessed with the level of self-awareness it sounds like you had at the head of the little trail bridge, what kinds of things would an athlete be looking for in their own thinking to say, “Whoa, wait a minute. It’s time for me to back out of this mentality?” What kind of things do you hear them say to themselves, as an athlete that’s watching our interview, the next time they get on the court or the floor or the track and they hear themselves think that and it’s like, “Oh, man. This is what Josh was talking about. I’m now thinking badly. Let me turn that around.”
Josh: It’s funny. I mentioned earlier that I lived in New York City, so I’ve heard every foul word or phrase you can imagine, in probably about 40 to 60 different languages. But one thing we always talk about here at IMG is that there are really just four words that you’re not allowed to say in my office. You can drop “F” bombs left and right if you want in my office, I don’t really care. It doesn’t affect me and I probably use them way too much myself.
Bob: Me, too.
Josh: But the four words that we call our bad words of mental conditioning are ‘can’t', ‘try’, ‘shouldn’t have to’. We look at those, and ‘can’t’ is obvious. “Hey, I can’t do this” Well, guess what, you’re right. So we’re not going to go there. We’re not going to say, “I can’t,” we’re going to say, “I’ll get there eventually. I’m going to work at this. I’m going to strive to be better at this aspect. I’m going to claw my way to it.”
We feel like ‘try’ is already rooted in failure. You’re giving yourself an out. We don’t let our athletes use that. So if you hear yourself saying, “I’ll try,” or “I can’t,” boom. Those are red flags.
And then ‘shouldn’t have to,’ the way I always equate those is it’s almost like with the kids here that we have, the high school athletes, I say, “Well, what do you have to and what do you should do?” You should do your laundry, you should do the dishes. You have to do your homework. Are those things fun? No, not really. So one of the things is that we want to eliminate those, because those are stressful words.
We really want to replace those with “will” statements. “I will be successful here. I will attack the basket. I will get my pitch and my at-bats. I will pound the strike zone,” things of that nature. You if get those into a positive, powerful statement, you’re going to be a little bit better.
So the big four words; ‘can’t', ‘try’, ‘shouldn’t have to’. We get rid of those and if you catch yourself saying those types of things, those will set off alarm bells and then you can really work to change them.
Bob: Thanks for that list. That’s a good one. As Josh and I were preparing for our interview, he said, “I noticed something in that interview with Rob Bell, or at least in the headline, in last week’s interview. That was “If Your Goal is to Win, You’ve Probably Already Lost.” I want to give Josh an opportunity to express another and maybe a more correct perspective, because that headline came from me. That didn’t come from Dr. Bell. So hit me. What was your response to last week’s interview with Rob, or at least the headline, anyway?
Josh: It’s funny. There are a couple of things. First of all, I know Rob and respect Rob a lot. He does some great work, first and foremost. Secondly, in terms of the winning piece, one of the things that we get hit with as mental conditioning coaches and sports psychology coaches, and the area that we’re trying to break out of, is that we’re touchy-feely and that we don’t care about winning. That’s completely false. I’ve worked with the University of Southern California men’s tennis team for the last four years. In that time, we’ve won one doubles NCA championship, one singles NCA championship, and three back-to- back titles.
One of the things that we learned since we’ve been there and we’ve been working with that group is that they care about winning. It’s everywhere on their campus. If you go to the University of Southern California men’s tennis team, there’s a massive amount of trophies. The first time I went out there they didn’t even have a trophy case. There was just NCA trophies lying all over their locker room and lying all over their office. Since then, they’ve gotten one. They have 19 team titles. Their tradition is all about winning. They have sayings, though, that really encapsulate what it’s all about in terms of that winning. Their mentality is to practice like a champion. There are signs all over the place. Practice like a champion. Practice like a champion.
In addition, they care about winning so they have it involved in all of their practices that there’s some sort of outcome and there’s some sort of way to win the practice. They get that understanding day in and day out that it’s important to win.
Within that, though, they teach them how to win. So it’s not so much about, “We gotta win. We gotta win. We gotta win.” Yeah, that’s all there, but it’s also about the process of doing that. “Hey, we’ve got to be focused, we have to bring intensity, we have to bring energy, and we have to bring passion.”
If anybody watched USC’s third title, which was just this year, they beat the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia was 34 and 0 going into that championship. The University of Virginia played completely and totally tight through their doubles. They did a great job. They came back, USC ended up winning 4 – 3, but USC was up 3 – 0 in a heartbeat.
One of the things that you saw was that USC went and they took it. The guy who ended up clinching the title was diving along the baseline, willing to scrape his body, willing to give his whole body for the victory. That’s what you have to do. You look at the Mavs and you look at the Heat here, it’s the same kind of thing. You have to be willing just to give completely. Dirk Nowitzki was completely gassed. You watched him at the end there, you watched him being interviewed after it was all over by Hannah Storm, and the guy looked like he just wanted to go to sleep.
Bob: Yeah. He was all back in his chair and could barely hold the trophy up.
Josh: He’s just done. And that’s what it takes to win, but you do have to have that understanding that winning is important and that mental conditioning is really about winning. If we do our job right, we’re going to be helping teams do that.
And believe me, I’m held accountable. If the baseball teams I’m working with don’t win, they’re going to look at me as well, as part of that facet. “Well, why not? What was wrong with our mentality? Things of that nature. Our basketball team here at IMG, if we’re not winning, one of the aspects we’re going to look at is mentality .and I’m going to be held accountable for that, too. So we care about it. It’s just not our sole 100% focus, but believe me, we’re focused on it.
Bob: You know the components. You know some other pieces that go into that. Thanks for giving a different viewpoint. As I say, I don’t think Rob ever said he wasn’t focused on winning. It was my cheap headline, maybe, that got your attention.
Josh: Stir up the pot, Bob. You’re stirring up the pot.
Bob: I hope so. What’s the best way I could promote you or IMG? Do you want to give out your Twitter stuff; do you want to give out your Facebook stuff? Do you want to give out your email?
Josh: My Twitter is JLifrak@twitter.com. I’m going to throw up posts here and there about good mentality type stuff, good quotes, and those types of things that will go out. I do have a lot of former athletes that follow me on that so, every once in awhile I’ll give them a shout out and give them some love, too. But typically it’s going to be pretty much some good, solid mental conditioning quotes and things of that nature.
IMG Academies, www.imgacademies.com, gives you the ins and outs. We have a good PR Department and a good Marketing Department. They’ve put up a really great website. You can go and take a look at that and get a good understanding of what IMG is all about.
Bob: The blog is really good, too. If you’re an athlete and you’re looking for a quick story or a quick tip to get your mental game together, the IMG Academies blog is really effective for that, too.
Josh: Yeah. Definitely. We regularly will throw up articles and posts and different things. Like I said, we have seven here at the IMG Academies, myself, Christian Smith, David DaSilva, D.J. Andreoli, Alison Le Vine, Dr. Tara Morgan and Dr. Angus ‘Esteemed’ Mugford.
Bob: Your former roommate.
Josh: Yeah, my former roommate. I don’t want to talk to you about his brushing teeth habits. We’re not going to get into that. But yeah, the whole team is here and we love what we do. I think the biggest thing for us as mental conditioning coaches we know we’re so lucky to have this job and we’re so lucky to be a part of a team and it’s just a great environment. If you ever get a chance, come on down.
Bob: Thanks for visiting with us and athletes on the Athlete’s Audio Academy. Josh Lifrak, everybody, from the IMG Academies. Thanks a lot, Josh.
Josh: Thanks a lot, Bob. Have a great day.
We’re pretty friendly…