The Mastering High Performance Podcast
The Mastering High Performance Podcast goes behind the scenes with high performers from sport and business to reveal stories, insights and strategies about what it really takes to master high performance.
The Mastering High Performance Podcast
11. Unlocking Sustainable Behaviour Change - Dr. Paul McCarthy
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode, we sit down with sports psychologist, academic, and prolific author Dr. Paul McCarthy. Dr. McCarthy is one of the researchers behind the theory of challenge and threat states, which explores how interpreting pressure as either a challenge or a threat influences the way we think, feel, behave and perform.
Together we explore the psychology and physiology of pressure, the importance of assessment before intervention, and why understanding the individual is key to supporting lasting behaviour change and improving performance.
Welcome to the Mastering High Performance Podcast with Nadine McCarthy and Paul Hammett, where we go behind the scenes with high performers from sport and business to reveal stories, insights, and strategies about what it really takes to master high performance.
SPEAKER_02What are the top tools that seem to yield the best results?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so so much of what we see is social media driven, but essentially it might be taking up to 90 days for somebody to change the behavioral pattern. And when you think about it, we just say, okay, so we'd like you to breathe or spend some time practicing your breathing or go through a routine. But the literature is very clear, adherence is low. We just don't do this for long enough or integrate it into our lives in a way that would bring the sustained benefits we know it can.
SPEAKER_02In this episode, we sit down with sports psychologist, academic, and prolific author Dr. Paul McCarthy. Dr. McCarthy is one of the researchers behind the theory of challenge and threat states, which explores how interpreting pressure as either a challenge or a threat influences the way we think, feel, behave and perform. The clip you've just heard is part of a longer conversation about why lasting behaviour change is about much more than simply applying a technique or tool. Together we explore the psychology and physiology of pressure, the importance of assessment before intervention, and why understanding the individual is key to supporting lasting behaviour change and improving performance. We hope you learn as much from it as we did. Welcome in and enjoy Falcius Jock, August Buin Sultas. So, Dr. Paul McCarthy, you are so welcome to the Mastering High Performance podcast with myself and Paul Hamill. How are you doing today?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, good thanks. How are you all doing?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we're great. We're great, delighted and excited to have you. Um let's start at the very beginning, I suppose, with an introduction from you. So, will you share a little bit with us about who you are and what you're up to in the world of sports psychology?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I'm Paul McCarthy. I am living and working in Glasgow. Um, my work is uh split between university and private practice. I probably spend a lot of my time in private practice, but the work at the university involves research and training psychologists to become chartered in sport and exercise. So that's kind of my working world and uh it's very enjoyable, very engaging.
SPEAKER_02Wow, brilliant. And of course, I know from having um looked at your website, you're a prolific writer as well. So you um are you working on a book at the moment?
SPEAKER_00Yes, I usually have one or two on the go, so that's what I'm working at at the moment. Um, most of the books I write now would be academic and they're intended really for masters to doctoral level students. A lot of them are practice-based, so psychologists in training and early career practitioners, hopefully, you get a lot out of the those books.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so we might come back to some of the books and the and that strategy around it in a while. Well, how I came across here was I was studying sports psychology and we were looking at one of the pieces of research that I was really taken by, really resonated with me, was your work around challenge and threat states. Um, and I wonder for our listeners, can you share the basics of what the challenge and threats are about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I guess there is uh quite a heavy science background to it, but really challenge and threat states are differentiating between how people perceive motivated environments. So, for example, something that might be in sport, and they are looking at the event and interpreting that event, and that interpretation leads them down either a challenge route or a threat route. But in the challenge route, they are seeing things more optimistically, whereas in the threat route they see things in a more threatened way, and that has an effect on their physiology in the way in which the heart pumps blood around the body, and the efficiency is greater in a challenge state compared with a threat state. I guess if we're just coming down to a bottom line, seeing things as a challenge is really beneficial, both psychologically and physiologically. And that's kind of a lot of how we try to orient the research into practice.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's really, really powerful. And I'm I'm I'm always listening to, and as often as I can, I listen to the post-match interviews for sports, any sports that I'm watching. And I I noticed the um Irish rugby team talk about pressure as a privilege. Um, and I know it's quite a mantra across sport and other sports as well, but you know, for our listeners, that's that's an interpretated or an interpreted even, is that the right word? The an interpreted um challenge state, really, is it? Is that an example of one?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it is. And post-match, we tend to have quite a lot of attributional reflection. So this is what happened, or this is my explanation of what happened. Much of that is counterfactual. It's an if only we had, things might have turned out differently. But also, as well, challenge and threat states are looking forward, they are about upcoming events, but in retrospect, they're also making sense of what happened. So we tend to have challenge and threat traits looking forward, attributions tend to be looking backwards. Attributions are just about how we go and explain events in our lives. But the way in which we explain those events influences things like confidence and motivation and commitment for the next or the upcoming challenges that we experience. So there's a rolling effect, and that's what's important is that we want to make sense of what happens to us, but also feel efficacious, a sense of agency, a sense of perceived control that the future will turn out the way we would like it to.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and that's so powerful in um pressure and in the kinds of high performance environments that the athletes are working in, but also have to prepare to uh perform in. So I think that's a that's a really vital part. And the the interpretation of a challenge state um in advance of it happening, what what exactly is happening, or what how can an athlete train or somebody in a high performance environment or demanding environment train for that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, there are two parts because at a physiological level there will be training, there will be recovery, cycles of what goes on in refining skills and so on that are typical. But from a psychological perspective, that's often the element that is maybe less well-tended. And what do I mean by that is that we will see going rugby, G, soccer, any level of performance involves a lot of training. So we might say the physical, the technical, and tactical work is held within that frame. But the psychological dimension is usually left headered to it in some way. Some people may pay attention to it, many do not. What we would argue is that without that psychological dimension, the other parts don't add up so well. So, for example, we might train well, feel that our training is going well, and yet at the same time be overwhelmed by upcoming challenges. So, quite far out from the event taking place, we may still feel that we are very uncertain about it. We would rather avoid rather than approach the task. We may feel we have some efficacy to perform, but not the level of efficacy we need specifically for that performance. So if we were to reorganize or reappraise, which is what we do in challenge and threat states, we're trying to reappraise the upcoming event in a way that allows us to have a sense of control, a sense of agency, um, a much more approach-motivated stance about what's coming. And when we look into the media or maybe, for example, what might be popularized about psychology or sports psychology is much more intervention-based, but they're often missing assessment and formulation or planning to make sure that what they're doing is uh best addressed with that intervention.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You see what I mean?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So what are the foundational components of it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so with any service delivery, there has to be an assessment, then a formulation, an intervention, or an evaluation, and you can communicate what has happened in there. But essentially those four steps means that what's being prescribed is based on the assessment and formulation. And a lot of what I would say would be psychology in general public is intervention without prescription. This'll work for you, but we don't know because we don't know who you are, what sense you make of yourself, others, and the world, the challenges you face, and how that might work for you in a sensible model or service provision that's tailored to you. And that's really important.
SPEAKER_02So is it that the assessment piece as the first step is absolutely fundamental?
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But assessing isn't, you know, it isn't as much fun as I guess guiding or directing people to do things. So from a psychological perspective, assessment is foundational. If you don't have an assessment, it's very difficult to plan. If you don't have a plan, it's very difficult to intervene. But I guess more of the, what shall I say, the interest that people would have is about here's what you can do when. But that may not necessarily add up for what the person needs.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And in a really practical way, can you give us an example maybe of how that works with either an individual you've worked with or a team that you've worked with?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So if we take any presenting issue, let's just say it is uh a child age 12 and they're struggling with worry and anxiety about playing or competing. Now, from a CBT perspective, cognitive behavior therapy, we would begin with psychoeducation, which is teaching them about what they're experiencing and how their brain works and so on. Then we would be able to work at a somatic level about ways of dealing with the feelings they have in their body. After that, we would work on cognitive elements, the way in which they're thinking. And then finally, we might do some level of exposure therapy. But as a process, that's how we would intervene. We still need to know who the person is, how they make sense of their world, what they're experiencing to tailor uh those other parts that I just presented.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay. And have you got an example specifically of someone you worked with that you can share with us?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, um, I guess uh our chartered status, etc., precludes us from divulging all that information. But essentially, I can talk about the type of work that we would do. Um, and it it would be an assessment session would typically be 60 to 90 minutes. We would then follow that up with a series of sessions thereafter. But after the assessment, we would normally have formulation to work out based on all this information, working together with the person, what they feel might work best in the next stage of intervention. And the intervention might go on for four or six or eight sessions, and as we're going along, we're evaluating how well that work is working and change making changes as we need to, and we're hopefully getting to the end point where the changes have been made. So that would be a typical presentation. It might be over eight or ten sessions, and it does vary depending on the child, the presenting issue, or the athlete and presenting issue and how it comes together for that person.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I loved when I was reading the research and your work on challenge and threat was where, you know, at a simple level, um, I'm distilling it down to but where you actually, as the athlete or the performer, you perceive that the resources that you have can meet the demand or the challenge that you're facing. And I think that that internal piece is so powerful for somebody to actually know, even in the preparation phases you're talking about, um, that they have the resources within themselves to meet that.
SPEAKER_00How tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, so demands and resources, any if we look at stress, any event external to us, internal, but typically if we're in a competitive environment, there will be lots of stressors. And if somebody feels that they have the resources to cope with the demands, they feel capable in control, they approach the competition or the event feeling like they have what they need to do well. Sometimes either the demands are too great or the resources are too low, and in such situations, they feel the threat of competition and what it might mean for them and threats to our identity and so on. So part of it is about trying to understand one, how we make these appraisals and then how we adjust those appraisals. So here's where it becomes uh a little bit more tricky, where we take something like challenge and threat states, that theory of challenge and threat, and we would integrate it into a CBT model. So we would be taking our understanding of what happens at a theoretical level, and we would be putting that into a model of intervention like CBT. So part of it might be psychoeducation, teaching somebody about these states and gathering their reflections and whether these feel accurate or true to them, and then working with them perhaps on something called reappraisal. So reappraisal is prominent in lots of theoretical models. We're just trying to look at something and make sense of it. So a problem, depending on our perspective, will differ based on the resources, the things that we feel we have to cope with the demands of the situation. And over time, a lot of people benefit a lot from psychoeducation. They they benefit from the understanding of what's going on, and that might be enough for them to reappraise events in the future. For others, it's a little bit more complicated. They may need more help in the reappraisal process, understanding more about the distortions in the way they think, so that they can think better more often in the future. And some of the basic principles are very simple. We think things, feel things, and do things, but also we can do things that change how we feel and how we think. So in sport, we have a lot of behavioral intervention, which is about changing the things that we do that change how we feel and change how we think. So we come at it from both sides, either at a cognitive thinking level or over here at a behavior level.
SPEAKER_01Paul, can I ask you just that um that example you gave there of a young person, a young athlete, and and his intervention? Who who would decide that that intervention is required? Like is it typically the person themselves? Is it their parent or coach? And um what's that dynamic like, particularly if the person themselves hasn't decided?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So yeah, this is often the case of that we would have somebody who is referring the child to us, and that might be a parent, it might be a coach. So part of that initial session is trying to find out more about the child's position on attending, how they feel about it, and judging whether we can work together and whether the child feels comfortable in the presence of the psychologist and vice versa, whether the psychologist feels they have the skills, ability, experience to be able to deal with the presenting issue. There is a word or a phrase really called collaborative empiricism, which means that in CBT work, we work together with the client. So they are very much involved all the way through the process. In psychology and sport, perhaps historically, there tends to be this feeling that the psychologist will come in and say things and do things, and not to dismiss that part of it, but in real terms, it's much more collaborative and it's much more about the client leading themselves forward and the psychologist supporting where necessary. So when somebody says, What do you say to a client when? Well, it's much less about that. We're listening to what to the client's story and facilitating it, often with Socratic methods, which are really questions about the problem, their perspective, and their potential solutions.
SPEAKER_01And Paul, typically the young person in this case is probably has been identified as a high-performing athlete of some kind.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, often there is that, you know, from my private practice, they would be high performing at some level and they have come to realize things like the presence of anxiety, a reluctance to train, it might be true injury, that there are lots of, I guess, predisposing factors of about why they might show up in our clinic. And part of that is to try and understand more about where they are in their sport and why they're there. Those pictures are often quite complicated, and we need to know a lot about child psychology. We need to know a lot about parents and parenting, and we need to be able to put those pieces together in a way that fits for both for the parent and for the child. That in itself is complicated because there are usually several different motives floating around there in that sporting domain.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, I was just thinking there about the, you know, the I loved what you talked about there about the behavior, you know, the think, feel, and do.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Those kind of three components and how they kind of work together and intertwine, I suppose, with each other. Like the none of those is independent in a way. They do work um alongside each other as well. Is there when you talked about the behavioral impacting the thinking? I thought that was really interesting. How does that work in practice? Are there tools, are there specific tools that enable that?
SPEAKER_00There are lots. So we would normally divide, and I'm just taking CBT as one modality, one way of working here, but interventions are usually cognitive, behavioral, they can be what I would put in the emotional category and interpersonal. Now, we tend to do a lot of work cognitively in our thinking, our ways of thinking, acknowledging kind of cognitive distortions and what we call habits of mind. They're just the ways that we are used to thinking, and we can do a lot of intervention at that level. On the other side, the behavioral interventions might be behavioral activation to get somebody going into exercise. But the behavioral interventions are often that we're doing lots of stuff in sport, but we might do things that are also beneficial that are hooked on to what we're already doing or the way in which we do something. Like simple interventions, somebody might want to exercise a little bit more. And part of that might be realigning their environment. They might put their running shoes by the front door so that they are not just reminded, but prompted in a way of behavior change. That's a let's just say there's a long list of interventions, or sorry, there's a long list of components in behavior change. Uh, one of our PhD students is working in MS in uh in exercise, and uh, I think the list was somewhere like 283 identifiable elements of a change process. So if you're ever struggling with behavior change, maybe you shouldn't be so hard on yourself. There's a lot to it. But in terms of what we would do in sport, one of the things we often do is an as if intervention. So we act as if we are thinking or feeling in a particular way. And the research on this is quite strong.
unknownOne
SPEAKER_00The reasons is that we can create conditions for ourselves. Like, for example, we can change our feelings through simple manipulations. It might be listening to music, it might be through encouraging statements. We can we can change or manage our mood. So we might have a mood level intervention that influences behavior and influences cognitions thereafter. So there's yeah, there's quite a list on both sides, but a lot of what we tend to do in the initial stages is kind of safety and stabilization, helping somebody to feel safe, stabilize mood, and then thereafter work on more elements of how they are thinking, feeling, and behaving.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And again, just for emphasis, you're or just for clarity, I suppose, in a way, for me and for the listeners, you're looking at that both from a pre-perfor, like you know, post sorry, pre-the-game or pre-the competitive environment, and also during, and then sometimes afterwards, but then afterwards is more attribution theory and looking at how the attribute makes sense.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Yeah. So the beforehand, there's a lot of prep beforehand, as we would say, about what's coming. It might be decision making, attentional cues. It might be that they are working on things like their attitude, their perspective, and their effort. Those would be manageable or controllable aspects pre-performance. And afterwards, we would use those same components to judge how well they did, rather than always looking at these objective outcomes that they may or may not have a level of control over. Somebody else just might play better on the day. And we want to be able to acknowledge what we did well and what we can improve for the future. When we look at most sports, 99% of the time is spent in practice. There is probably 1% in competition time. And because of that, we want to scale things properly. So, how can people take a training load across 12 months of the year? It might be that competition requires more specific preparation and evaluation so that we can say what exactly about competition is happening here. And we know a lot about that. So, but those tailored interventions they do require quite a bit of time for an individual to be able to adjust their thinking, their feeling, their behaviors for competition. In a kind of a reductionist view, we would like to think that we'll go into a dressing room and we will shout at people and they'll come out in the second half and win. And we might have examples of that, but we don't necessarily know that that was the change that was, you know, the cause bringing that effect. So a lot of our research and practice is trying to find out what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what the outcomes are.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And maybe it's too reductionist to ask this or to answer this question, but I'm wondering across your experience working with athletes for a few decades, what are the top tools? I mean, you see breathing as such a powerful um, like visible on the on the kind of global stage. Um when you're looking at something like the Olympics, you can see, or world rummy, you can see breathing happening, you can see journaling happening, you can see people talking to themselves. There's so many different interventions that you can see out there. What, if it's not too reductionist to answer the question, what are the top tools that seem to yield the best results?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so so much of what we see is social media driven. It's not necessarily what's in the journal article, but it gets popularized so it gets translated and transformed quickly. And some of those, like those somatic sensory responses, breathing, using our senses, muscle relaxation, of course, but they've been around for a long time. Part of it is trying to understand that I might do this work, but really what we're looking at is its longevity, is how often will somebody stay committed to maybe a breathing exercise or breathing regime? And one of the greatest difficulties we have is with our commitment to change and commitment to change interventions. So people start, they don't necessarily continue. So interventions are often short-lived. So we want to understand much more about what's going on for the person, to understand what change is best made in their lives, and then using that information to be able to tack it on in a way that brings that change holistically and long term. Lots of literature on behavior change, and we might estimate and the range from the literature somewhere between 21 days and 225. But it does depend on the activity, it does depend on reinforcement, lots of factors are in there. But essentially, it might be taking up to 90 days for somebody to change the behavioral pattern. And when you think about it, we just say, okay, so we'd like you to breathe or spend some time practicing your breathing or go through a routine. But the literature is very clear, adherence is low. We we just don't do this for long enough or integrate it into our lives in a way that would bring the sustained benefits we know it can. But those interventions are often missing steps in there because it's not tailored or it's not understanding the person or the motives for it. So getting good behavior change takes really good skill in the assessment and formulation as well as the intervention.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I'm gonna hand over to Paul now in a moment, but I just leave it on because there's so many other things I want to ask that I've got to hand over, which I just want to leave it on this note, or just like kind of ask you on this piece. I think like that's the gold, isn't it? It's the like the actual integration of change of behavior, is what we're all about. Because we, you know, if you're whether you're in high performance or not, we we're aspirational and we do want to improve, we do want to grow, we want to expand, we want to improve. And in business, and this is like the Mastering High Performance podcast, and you know, but we're looking across audiences in life, sport, and business as for the listeners, and I'm really curious about how complex you've described, you know, the complexity to behavioral change. And what did you say the the the the PhD student is 285 components, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, of of elements that influence behavior change in in the behavior change literature. The list is long. Now, what you'll see popularized in the media is a very simple, you know, presentation, or as simple as it can be, for people to feel it's palatable and workable. And the trouble with that is that it's sensible in a way, and yet what is left is that most people say you can change your life, you just need to do this. And if you don't, well, it must be your fault. And unfortunately, that's missing so much of the environmental influences, physiological, psychological, emotional, and social, that we're not considering in there, we're just saying, somehow I failed at this. It's not true at all. But there's often that presentation that if you haven't changed, it's your fault, which couldn't be further from the truth. We need to see things holistically.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and and holistically is by your de well, like by what you've described there, so multi-dimensional. Correct. And yet we're looking at it one-dimensionally and expecting results, and respecting and expecting results immediately.