MIND LAB
The psychology of high performance is not a new area. Previously dedicated mostly to the improvement and consideration of elite athletes, these days individuals across many fields work on these skills to be able to perform and improve at the rate and level that they want to.
Think about a professional basketballer that needs to take a free throw after the buzzer to win a game.
There’s only one chance.
Everybody’s watching. How does she stay calm, concentrate, figure out and execute the shot that she needs? As surgeons we relate to that sort of pressure. We understand that success relates to experience and that experience comes from dedicated practice, from mind training and from pre-shot or pre-operating routines.
Many of the same processes utilised in high level sporting competition apply to surgeons. It might be in relation to picking up a new technique or technology, in relation to coaching or teaching a young surgeon, or in relation to managing an unexpected complication. We know how to perform and we know that our performance needs to be constantly improving
In 2019, Eye and Ear broke new ground by incorporating mental or mind training for high performance into the official surgical training program. Through this program we work on high performance and adaptive expertise – a type of expertise that allows more innovative use of knowledge and its application in complex situations. We want to train our next GEN eye surgeons to be not as good as us, but WAY better than us. This type of training also helps the trainers to be continually improving and taking their performance to higher and better levels.
It’s the mind that separates excellent surgeons from good surgeons. Ask anybody with experience and they will give you that same answer.
Previously, it’s taken us our whole careers to figure this out….possibly a bit sooner for those of us lucky enough to have excellent mentors. We’re trying to change that at GENEYE. There’s no reason why we can’t all train and strive for this elite level of performance.
As well as psychologic flexibility we also consider health, wellbeing and other important skills that are not necessarily actual surgical skills. To truly excel in surgery, we need to think about all of these aspects, as well as things like creativity and innovation. We can’t even start to think about this level of performance without the personal resources that result from good health and wellbeing, as well as support from those around us, so we need to focus on those things too.
We look forward to further exploring these concepts at GENEYE 2023. We have a whole team of high performance, clinical and coaching psychologists coming to help us prepare to perform, to work on our game-day routines and …. our personal favourite …. Non sleep deep rest.