When I was growing up there used to be a view that it was either brains or brawn. You were either a jock or a geek. Now, new scientific evidence suggests what many of us have believed for years: It’s brain AND brawn. The latest research has demonstrated with children and older adults that some degree of physical activity (e.g., 40 minutes three times a week) increase cognitive performance. Other studies have gone further and demonstrated that exercise actually increases the neural projections (the number of nerve cell branches) in the memory center of the brain (hippocampus). However, don’t take this information to extremes. It turns out that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Excessive exercise may reverse the positive effects we see with moderate exercise. The bottom line is this: For all those schools who are cutting out PE because it is too expensive, perhaps you should rethink. If PE is too expensive, consider the cost of ignorance?
Once again, it is the story of what got you to this level may be holding you back from getting to the next level. This time, we are talking about the subtle but important difference between observation and judgment. I work with a lot of high achievers who routinely judge themselves negatively after every little failure. A missed putt on the course or a misspoken word in the boardroom will be noticed and punished most severely by the high achiever that made the mistake. This type of self evaluation may have been exactly what was needed at one point to motivate the person to achieve, but now this self-deprecation is holding them back from the next level. Judgment, in this case, is when you take an event (like missing a putt) and evaluate yourself as a failure because of it. Saying things like “That sucks” or “I suck” is a judgment. It’s absolutely normal to judge yourself in these situations, and if you want to be absolutely normal you can stop reading now. However, if normal isn’t good enough the next section is for you.
When we judge an outcome it emotionally charges the observation by activating a specific area in the brain designed to respond to emotion (amygdale). This emotional charge signals the brain to automatically store the memory. The problem is that we charge negative judgments much more than positive ones. The reason for this is that the negative outcome is a surprise, and surprise focuses our attention and sharpens our memory. The other problem is that this emotional charge sets in motion a cascade of events that ultimately can create more negative behavior, especially with precision movements like golf. The cascade of events includes releasing stress hormones that increase muscle tension and decrease our ability to think rationally. On the other hand, observation is more cerebral. It is simply an objective evaluation of what happened. It helps us to stay calm, understand the cause and effect of the event, and get better because of it. With observation, that same missed putt becomes a source of information rather than a source of punishment. The bottom line is this: A single event can work for you or against you. The great ones make these events work for them by observing what happened and getting better because of it.
