Dr Eddie O’Connor is a sports psychologist and author of the popular Great Courses series, The Psychology of Performance. His latest venture, Success Stories, helps clients from a variety of fields develop a roadmap for top achievement. He talks to FEED about how the same principles applied by top athletes and performers can also be used to help businesses face and respond to their own challenges
FEED: First of all, how did you come to specialise in the psychology of performance?
EDDIE O’CONNOR: I was always interested in psychology.When I was in high school, I was reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams at night in bed! I was a runner in high school; I was passionate about it, but I was very average. I was doing the 800m and couldn’t break 2:10. It was weird, because I trained perfectly, and I didn’t figure it out until after I became a sports psychologist. Being a runner was my identity. It’s who I was, I wasn’t in the top tier, but breaking that number, 2:10, had this magical quality – if I could do it, then I would be ‘good’. In the last weeks of my final season I’d hit the finish line and it was 2:11 every time. And the thought I always had was ‘I just didn’t go out fast enough’, or ‘I’m not completely tired, so I can get it next time’. Later on, I discovered that ongoing hope I had was an unconscious sabotaging behaviour.The idea that I could do better ‘next time’ never let me fully engage failure. I could always say I didn’t give it my all and that, psychologically, protected me. The story ends, though, relatively well. My last race I ran around a 2:09. But could I have done 2:05? 2:03? Could I have even flirted with 1:59? I’ll never know, because my psychology held me back.Then I went to college and found sports psychology. I thought to myself, ‘I really could have used all of this stuff in high school,’ and I immediately fell in love with the subject. I chose clinical psychology. It wasn’t specifically a sports psychology programme, but my adviser was a sports psychologist and I did everything I could around sports. My master’s thesis was on self-efficacy according to belt rank; my disabilities class was on wheelchair athletes, and my behavioural analysis class was on overtraining and athletes. My dissertation was on the effect of competition on acute pain tolerance. After I graduated with my PhD in clinical psych, I did extra training in pain and injury rehabilitation, substance use and disordered eating, and anxiety and depression, because I knew these were the things that athletes would suffer from. For 16 years I worked in a chronic pain and headache population as a director and chief psychologist.Working with chronic pain was a great overlap of my skills. I got to see that, at the core, is the ability to accept the suffering you have in service of the things you value. The pain is chronic, there’s no longer a cure. People get caught up in the pain and their life shrinks as they try to fix something that they can’t fix. It was great to be able to apply all of that to my athletes, like endurance runners. And some of my pain patients appreciated the performance-enhancing aspects of focus skills, goal-setting and imagery.
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