Olympic psychologist Dr Kirsten Peterson on why grit is not enough
In her new book, Olympic sport psychologist Dr Kirsten Peterson examines how high performers can adapt in uncertain times. And it involves more than just trying to push through problems and obstacles.
Australians love sport. And more than that, we love the Olympics. As we gear up to Brisbane hosting the next Olympic games in 2032, an increasing focus will be on building our elite athletes so that we can represent us and bring home the bling.
Canberra – the home of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) – has a central role to play in developing and supporting our elite athletes. And one person who knows this well is the former head of Performance Psychology at the Australian Institute of Sport, Dr Kirsten Peterson, author of When Grit is Not Enough: Reworking Mindset and Purpose for Easier Effort in Hard Times.
An early interest in sports psychology
Peterson became interested in sport psychology at a young age after experiencing a mindset problem in sports. Growing up in the United States, she was seriously into softball at college. But then one day, she lost her ability to throw strikes.
“I really found it profoundly distressing that the best my coach could do was tell me to relax”
Not one to give up, Peterson tried harder and harder to regain her winning pitching technique. But the more she tried, the more she failed. This unfortunately meant her dream as a softball pitcher was over. But a new career had just begun.
“In losing that ability to pitch, and not really have any obvious physical reason for it, I really found it profoundly distressing that the best my coach could do was tell me to relax,” she said. “And I thought, there has to be more to it than that. I didn’t want anyone else to feel the way I did. A lot of my identity was wrapped up in being a softball pitcher when all of a sudden it was taken away from me.”
When she discovered the field of sport psychology and the idea that she could help other athletes with the mental side of their sport, she was drawn to it hook, line and sinker – and she never looked back.
Peterson studied psychology at Union College and went on to complete her Masters degree in Sport Psychology and a PhD in counselling psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Then in 1996, the head of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Dr Sean McCann, chose Peterson to serve as Senior Sport Psychologist with the committee. Peterson was his first hire and one that led to her working with top US athletes for fourteen years. In his foreword to Peterson’s book, he paid homage to her mindset approach. “I have seen her remind an athlete of specific strategies just before they won an Olympic medal and the athlete thanking her in tears afterwards,” he wrote.
Moving Downunder
Peterson and her family moved to Canberra in 2011 to take up her position at the AIS. And in this role, she has worked with many Australian Olympians including Scott Brennan, 2008 Olympic rowing double sculls gold medallist who is profiled in Peterson’s book where he shares his story of contracting septic arthritis as a teenager and how that shaped his philosophy about pain and effort as an elite rower.
Dr Kirsten Peterson
Along the way, Peterson also worked with other squads from the Australian Rowing Team, the Women’s Water Polo team, modern pentathlon, and individual athletes from a variety of Olympic and Paralympic sports.
And while Peterson is no longer working with the AIS, she has chosen to remain in Canberra as a performance psychologist and coach specialising in working with elite sport, medicine, defence, and other high-performance domains.
“After leaving the AIS, I had rather reflexively assumed I’d just return to the US Olympic Committee – as that was the logical next step in my career. I was interviewing for a high-performance director position that was more of a management role...when I had the realization that such a role would take me away from what I loved to do the most, which was working directly with people in that mindset coach space. And what better place to do that than in Canberra, home to both elite sport, and the national capital? So I pulled out of that interview process and started my own practice.”
Grit
Peterson’s book is in response to Angela Duckworth’s 2016 bestselling book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Duckworth’s book notes that, while talent is important to success, it’s one’s effort that makes the critical difference. Duckworth’s focus is on helping people, especially children, develop greater grit, or the ability to meld their interests and efforts to persevere in service to longer-term goals and outcomes.
In contrast, Peterson works with clients who don’t lack grit: rather, they are often highly driven and push themselves to the limit. These qualities can lead to them ‘over-indexing’ on grit, such as through inflexibility or overfocusing on gritty experiences. Her approach is to find practical skills and approaches to help people augment their grit to overcome things like uncertainty and setbacks with more ease and less struggle.
While writing her book, Peterson plucked up some courage and contacted Duckworth to discuss her views about the potential downfalls of grit in high performance. “We ended up having a great chat,” Peterson recounted in her book. Through that Peterson learnt that Duckworth welcomed her focus on examining where there could be limits to grit, and how best to unpack this.
Winning and losing
“The thing about winning is that although athletes love to say they can control winning, unfortunately they can’t control the person they’re up against or whether they’re just having a better day than you”
Before meeting Peterson, I thought that sport psychology was about focusing on winning at any cost. And many athletes do come to sport wanting to win. But it’s a zero-sum game in sport: not everyone can be a winner.
“The thing about winning is that although athletes love to say they can control winning, unfortunately, they can’t control the person they’re up against or whether they’re just having a better day than you,” said Peterson. And the pressure to win can lead to high achievers experiencing the sort of mental block Peterson experienced with her pitching.
‘Losing’ is also an important part of any business culture. In start-up circles, it’s common to hear the mantra, ‘fail fast, fail early’. Start-ups often try out new ideas, and even if they don’t work, they learn from them, pivot and move on. At least, that’s the lean innovation theory. In practice, ‘failing’ is an emotional rollercoaster. And this has been especially evident during our pandemic years.
“Elite sport is an environment where, if we are doing things right, we are often living on the cusp of failure”
Like start-ups, elite athletes often ‘fail’. And as this is a totally normal part of the sports experience, much of Peterson’s approach is to develop tools such as mindfulness and self-compassion that deal directly with failure and the fear of failure.
Imagine having to learn a complex new gymnastic routine. Or finding a way to push beyond your personal best. Peterson says athletes working to master a new technique will not always get it right. And coaches don’t always get it right, either: often they are trying new ways to teach and this kind of innovation is rarely perfect.
Added to this is the reality that peak athletes operate at a level in which they are competing against the best, and even some of the best athletes in the world have off days. Or injuries. Or bad news such as the death of a loved one right before an event.
And yet, it’s losing that also needs to be recognised in sports. “Elite sport is an environment where, if we are doing things right, we are often living on the cusp of failure,” Peterson writes in her book. “Otherwise, how would coaches and athletes know where the current performance limits are?”
The fog of uncertain times
Ever experienced a period of uncertainty?
We all have in recent years, whether it’s the impact or fear of the 2019/2020 bushfires, sudden school closures affecting our kids (and our ability to go to work), or even whether our businesses can remain profitable. We have had to adapt, pivot and change. And then adapt and change even further. Even now that we are (mostly) through the pandemic, there is no real ‘back to normal’ as we face the highest rate of inflation since 1990 and uncertainty about the impact of that on business and consumer confidence.
Athletes have been especially impacted in recent years. Imagine spending years and years training for the Olympics – only for it to be postponed? That was the reality many athletes faced during our COVID years. Not only that, but home lockdown was hard on athletes who rely on structured discipline to maintain peak form. And with gyms and group training classes shut, this was not always possible.
Furthermore, the global impact of Covid meant that uncertainty was everywhere ... for months and even years at a time.
“In times of such uncertainty, it’s as if we are hiking along a mountain ridge, aiming for the yonder peak, but our immediate environment, as well as the peak, is blanked in fog,” Peterson wrote in her book. “We try to see where we are going, but the fog is too thick. We can’t see where we are going and worry about our footing. At this point, fear may set in, paralysing us, or we become angry, cursing the fog for standing between us and our goal. We may wonder if we will ever get to where we want to go or, worse, get wound up in 'what if?' thoughts of potential injury, hypothermia, or even death.”
Can you relate?
Yet not all is lost. Peterson suggests that even in the densest fog, it’s possible to move forward by focusing on the present and the possible. “Even in the densest fog, there may be the occasional wind-driven swirls and eddies that give us glimpses of what’s ahead,” she wrote. “At the same time, if we look straight down at our hiking boots and what’s in our immediate surroundings, we can usually make out the terrain at least a few yards ahead. By focusing on what we can see and attending to our footing, we can move a few feet forward … and repeat the process. We take a few careful steps and see where they lead us. We also keep in mind the pragmatic reality that no fog lasts forever.”
While Peterson’s book has been written with elite sportspeople in mind, her principles and insights are applicable to everyone – especially high achievers. It is especially relevant to those who strive hard to be their best, including in business start-ups.
When Grit is Not Enough is available at Canberra’s own Muse bookstore as well as on Amazon and Booktopia.
As a mindset coach, psychologist, educator, and now author!, Kirsten loves nothing more than to help individuals, teams, and organisations learn how to care for their inner performer so they can sustain their best outer performance. Her program, High Performance from the Inside Out, teaches these skills in 4 modules. Learn more about Kirsten and her programs on her website.
