Gray Matter is part one of a six-story series, which will explore how Ohio State athletes think. Dr. Jamey Houle is the Ohio State’s lead sports psychologist. Photo credit: Jamey Houle. Graphic credit: Molly Goheen | Managing Editor for Digital Content
This is the first piece of a six-part sports psychology series, “Gray Matter,” which will explore how Ohio State athletes think. The following piece provides a framework for the challenges these athletes face and critical principles that underlie the psychology of sport, as provided by Jamey Houle, lead sports psychologist in the Ohio State athletic department.
One of the key tenets of Urban Meyer’s football program was a simple formula: event plus response equals outcome.
With an eye to the end result, Meyer instilled in his players the importance of individual and collective action in the face of the “uncontrollables.” One equation unlocked the pinnacle of sporting success: a winning outcome, a concept alluded to in Meyer’s book, “Above the Line: Lessons in Leadership and Life from a Championship Season.”
Indeed, the collective consciousness of athletics is outcome-driven. The numbers in a team’s record, like years on a tombstone, communicate the full story of a season, the details reduced to a dash in between them.
But the hasty discard of those details brings error. And so may be Meyer’s formula. For Jamey Houle, Ohio State’s lead sports psychologist, focusing on an outcome might actually assure the absence of success, rather than the achievement of it.
“Say my goal is to win a Big Ten championship. I’m telling myself every day, ‘OK, let’s win a Big Ten championship;’ that actually causes an anxiety,” Houle said. “That’s more focused on the outcome than the process. So yes, I want to win a national championship, but what are the 87 steps I have to take in order to do that?”
Breaking things down and focusing on the process helps alleviate a lot of stress, as well, Houle said.
“That’s something you can do. I can’t do anything right now about a [competition] that’s in five months,” Houle said. “So, what am I doing today? That makes it feel a little more tangible.”
Houle said some days that process surrounds peace and patience more than physical progress. Athletes are allowed to have bad days, and a failure to recognize that reality causes nothing more than a spiral.
Houle said he knows this not from a teacher or textbook, but from experience. It was actually during his own years as an athlete, competing in gymnastics at the collegiate and junior Olympic level, that he earned his first professional degree – “a Ph.D. in catastrophizing,” he said.
For Houle, it went something like this: a bad turn on a particular piece of equipment meant a bad practice on that equipment. That meant a bad practice overall. All those bad practices in a row translated into a failure to meet his goals. All of a sudden, “I’m the worst gymnast that ever lived. Woah. Back it way up,” he said.
Instead of forcing it, Houle said he learned to let himself move on from a piece of equipment if it wasn’t coming together. That peace and patience caused an “upward cycle,” which led to far more progress than relentless pressure, he said.
Houle has now translated that reality into his work at Ohio State, where he finds one of the most important pieces of the process of athletics is not the absence of failure, but the presence of forgiveness. Only when athletes accept who and where they are, forgiving themselves for any misgivings about either of those realities, can they reach the next level, he said.
“If I’m OK as I am, I can do anything,” Houle said. “Because my floor is very solid, I can jump really high to do what I need to do because I know that regardless, I’m OK. When our identity is so very focused and solely attributed to the sport – if I perform well, I’m well; I perform bad I’m bad — [it’s] dangerous. That’s risky.”
Even for the most prolific college athletes, limits are a part of life. Indeed, at the height of their athletic careers, players often face the most significant limits they ever have. But the stability of that floor, not the height of the ceiling, is more important in propelling these athletes to new levels, Houle said.
“One of the number one predictive variables of outcome is your ability to believe that you can do it,” Houle said.
Like anything else, creating that foundational belief just takes practice. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. At a school like Ohio State, Houle said athletes expect so much of themselves.
“A lot of what the work is about [is] can we forgive ourselves and make a correction?” Houle said. “Do we have to beat ourselves up? I don’t think so. But that happens a lot with them.”
A poor performance is “just data,” which “doesn’t mean anything inherently,” Houle said. He said he works hard to help athletes internalize this mindset – which is no small task for those who have never been anything less than the best.
As counterintuitive as it seems, athletes actually find their best performance when they reject lofty expectations and center themselves on tangible goals that they’ve already achieved in the past, Houle said.
Underlying that principle is another unexpected tenant of sports psychology — kindness.
“I would go into competitions, and I would try to do more than I usually do in practice, which is not fair,” Houle said. “If you fall in practice, you’re probably going [to] fall at the meet. You’re not going to all [of a] sudden be Superman and do something so different.”
Houle said the approach took the pressure off. Aiming for what he had achieved before was not complacency — it was kindness. The difference is transformative, he said.
