When I ask performance and race drivers of all levels what percentage of our sport is mental versus physical, the answers typically range between 75 and 95 percent mental. In other words, practically all drivers know that driving is a mental game.
Of course, I always point out that this does not take anything away from the physical strength and endurance demands our sport puts on us. Anyone who has spent any time driving fast around a track knows that it’s a tough physical challenge, and by the end of a day on track our bodies can be worn out and used up!
The skill of using the brake and throttle pedals, and turning the steering wheel in all the fine, subtle ways — but often with heavy effort — seems like it’s all physical. But it’s your brain that tells your feet to make minute, quick but smooth movements on the pedals, and your hands and arms winding in and out rotation of the steering at the just right time, at the right rate. Even those physical skills are part of the mental game.
The mental game is my sweet spot as a coach, as someone driven to bring out the best performance in people. Beyond driving, I’ve coached tennis and racquetball players, golfers, a lacrosse team, and individuals in the workplace. Performance is performance, no matter the activity, and it’s mostly driven by what’s going on in our heads. And my focus is on one thing: drivers.
Despite drivers knowing that the mental game is critical to their performance, most do next to nothing to improve it. Why? Primarily because they don’t know how. I’ve found that by giving drivers even a small taste of mental game training, they jump on it and make huge improvements. They just needed some direction and practical strategies and practice drills to make the difference.
I’m not a sports psychologist. But between my own self-study and experience, I probably have the equivalent of most degreed sports psychologists. How did that happen?
My mental game journey.
Necessity is the mother of invention, right? My necessity was a need to fulfill my competitive nature (winning in everything I did), my love of playing sports, my burning need to be the best I could be behind the wheel of a race car, and ultimately to be the best coach. And I had to do all of that with very few resources, such as the thing motorsport usually requires a lot of: money.
Finding myself in underfunded and less-than-competitive cars throughout most of my career, I needed to find something to give me an edge. Knowing I wasn’t going to have the best car, that I wasn’t born with a body that was naturally stronger than others, I wasn’t the smartest in terms of engineering and developing a car… I had to find something that would give me a chance to be at least on equal footing. I did have a burning desire, but all drivers who make it to the top have that. I could outwork most, but not the very best who would also work as hard as I would. My best option was to be mentally better, and learn more in less time than others. The fact that most drivers paid little to no attention to the mental game was my opportunity.
I was determined to learn more about the mental game, and some of that was sparked by “stumbling” onto an article in a magazine about how elite athletes were using visualization to improve their performance (I wrote about how I “stumbled” onto that magazine in The Heist). I was serious about going places as a tennis player at the time, in my teens, and began a daily ritual of using visualization to improve my game. It worked, and inspired me to do more with it, and my mind.
My next mental challenge was my single biggest fear in life: public speaking. With success in Formula Ford and Formula Atlantic, I found myself either having to speak on camera for TV interviews, or talking to a group of guests of a sponsor. You know those really bad crashes that Hollywood creates in racing movies, where the car bursts into flames as it flies through the air (the worst case of this being in Sylvester Stallone’s Driven)? If they were real, they would be the worst, scariest, mostly deadly crashes ever. Well, I’d rather be in any one of them than to have to stand in front of a group of people (or an even larger audience through TV)!
To be a professional race driver, I had to learn to manage this fear, and the use of mental imagery — usually referred to as visualization — was the tool. For months and years, I would spend time each evening closing my eyes and imagining being in different situations where I had to speak to large groups of people, or do an interview on TV. Each time I did this, I imagined my state of mind going from fear and anxiety to calm and confident. It changed my mental programming. I can’t say that public speaking is my favorite thing to do now, but I do enjoy it, all because I embraced the mental game.
Over the following decade, I read a lot about how to improve the part of driving and racing that was mostly deep inside my helmet, and I found that I was using the ultimate laboratory: the race track. Where else can you experiment with something, and find out in a matter of minutes whether it worked or not? Okay, sometimes a new way of thinking, or how I’d programmed my mind to do something took an entire race weekend to see the result, but still, the feedback was almost immediate. Some of that feedback was confirming (do more of that and you’ll win even more), and some was corrective (do less of that, because it didn’t work).
I’m a self-learner. I was a very average student in school because I do better when I’m figuring things out for myself, especially if it’s something that I’m really interested in. How humans, particularly drivers, learn and perform is interesting-times-infinity to me! Reading dozens and dozens of books, from textbooks to simple stories about psychology, human performance factors, skill development, coaching techniques, and even quantum physics (believe me, it relates to the mental game of driving) became a daily ritual (it mostly still is, but I’ve added some other disciplines and interests).
Perhaps the most impactful event along my mental journey was meeting and working with Ronn Langford (who eventually co-authored the Inner Speed Secrets book and conducted workshops around the country with me for years). In an almost Zen-like way (“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”), the timing was perfect. I had competed in one Indy car race, and then was going to do my second, but that was the only race I was going to drive all year (due to lack of budget). Certainly, driving once a year is not ideal, especially when you’re trying to show the motorsport world that you belong in a top Indy car drive. With no physical practice, all I could do was practice in my head. I had to learn faster, with essentially no classroom or teacher.
Ronn introduced me to new disciplines (educational kinesiology, martial arts techniques, and a few other “woo-woo” things), and helped me refine what I had already been doing with my mental training. I was the lab rat as we experimented with new strategies, and I learned from the inside-out what worked and what didn’t work.
It was an interesting period in my racing career. I was driving Indy cars, something I had strived to do since I was a little kid, but I was in uncompetitive cars. To add to the pressure, I had sponsors that I had worked really hard to acquire who had big expectations for my results — possibly even unrealistic expectations. Managing these expectations, focusing on what was most important, dealing with a state of mind that was as worried about having enough money to pay the rent and eat for another month as dialing up the confidence to turn into Turn 1 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 230 MPH with my right foot flat to the floor, controlling nerves when speaking to a couple of thousand people at a sponsor event, sitting between Mario Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi in a drivers meeting and not feeling intimidated, juggling engineering feedback and travel plans for the next race, questioning my own abilities when the results sucked, and dialing up and down the pressure to perform was a mental roller coaster. With the tools I’d been using and made a way of life over the previous decade, along with Ronn’s support, I was compacting years of mental challenges and learnings into each race weekend.
There’s nothing like being a lab rat for something that I would then put to the test with other drivers I’d coach in the future. And that’s what I did: use all of what I’d learned myself when coaching others.
What really took my mental game journey to another level was teaching it. It’s only when you teach something that you fully and deeply understand it. Processing everything that I had studied on my own, what I’d learned from others, and mostly what I had experienced, and then putting that into a package, a program, that others could use was the most valuable step along the journey. For that, I’m so thankful to all the drivers (and other performers) whom I’ve worked with, for I would not have learned as much without them. I’ve learned as much from them as they ever did from me. And the fun thing is that I’m learning something new every day. What I use to coach or teach a driver tomorrow will be different and better than what I did yesterday.
When I’m coaching drivers, sometimes the primary focus is on the mental game because their skills and techniques are already finely honed. Other times the primary focus is developing those skills and techniques because that’s where the driver is on their learning journey. Still, that’s a mental game, too. After all, where do you store your skills and techniques? Not in the pocket of your driving suit, or the tool box sitting in the paddock. No, they’re in your head. My job as a coach is to help drivers learn and improve faster than if they were on their own — to either put those mental skills and techniques in their head or draw them out — and all of that happens in the brain.
What a long, strange trip it’s been! I can’t wait to see where I’m at in the next month, year, or decade. More importantly, where you and the other drivers I get to share what I’ve learned on my journey are at. Have fun on your own trip!
My mental game journey is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I prepare for a training program that starts on June 25th. I’m sharing what I’ve learned about the mental game in an upcoming 3-part Inner Speed Secrets Masterclass — everything that I’ve used to train Indy 500, Daytona 500, Le Mans, IMSA, club racing champions, and every level and type of track/performance driver. I’d love to have you join in so I can prove how it improves your performance. To learn more about the Masterclass, and to reserve one of the limited spots in it, go to SpeedSecrets.com/ISS-Masterclass.
Love this post so much.
You may recall that it is because of Ronn, that I met you, Ross.
For that, I’m eternally grateful - not to mention what I too learned from him directly.
I tell students mental/physical is like entry and exit; distinct yet wholly intertwined, working on one begets the other.