Winning Performance

John Eliot’s holy grail is a better mousetrap. He is not really looking for a contraption to catch pesky vermin, though—he’s expressing his relentless desire to find ways to do things better.

A professor of sports management and performance enhancement at Rice, Eliot researches and teaches what it takes to succeed from a psychological perspective. He studies how the mind and body can work together to achieve peak performance and why people run into obstacles, hit a slump, or fail to attain a goal.

“I study the upper end of human performance, the little window that really captures the best 1 percent in any field,” he explains. Eliot is writing a book on the subject titled Overachievement, scheduled for publication September 2004.

When Eliot is not teaching or doing research, he devotes much of his time to helping athletes and people in other professions perform at their full potential.

“Finding a better mousetrap” is a phrase Eliot picked up from his father, Rick, a former U.S. Olympic ski coach who trained such great athletes as Bill Koch, the first American to win a cross-country Olympic medal. Under the guidance of his father, Eliot was only 10 when he won the junior championship in Nordic combined at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York.

“My dad was always trying to figure out a way for people to perform better,” Eliot says. “That was the culture I grew up in, that was the lens that I viewed the world through.”

With that idea rooted deeply in him, Eliot, standing only 5' 9" and weighing 180 pounds, competed in a variety of high school sports: soccer, skiing, baseball, football, and track. At Dartmouth, he played baseball and started on the nationally ranked rugby team. After graduating, he played center field in the minor leagues for the Montreal Expos.

“I always wanted to be competing at something, anything, and that led me to questions about human performance,” he says. His curiosity took him to the University of Virginia, where he received a doctorate in sport psychology.

In recent years, Eliot has expanded his field of study to include surgeons, business executives, and musicians. Eliot has found that some of the same psychological issues of performance can be applied to many different careers.

“Interestingly enough, most careers don’t depend on high IQs or the ability to run the 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds,” he says. “Most careers rely on the ability to work with people and the ability to handle yourself through ups and downs.”

Eliot has managed to distill his teachings on achieving success into a few tenets:

First is to maintain self-confidence. To attain self-confidence, people must find a balance between a training mindset and a trusting mindset. In training for any type of performance, the mind is active and analytical and works very hard. “But under extraordinary pressure, we found that the human system works better in the trusting mindset, which is loose, patient, rhythmic, and reactive,” Eliot explains. “The mind must be quiet and instinctive, so when you are playing for a national championship or you have a life-and-death situation in an operating room, all those years of preparation can do the work on their own.” Trying too hard, in other words, can actually impede performance.

Second, have psychological hardiness. This consists of three components: control, commitment, and challenge. A person must know what he or she can and can’t control. For example, Eliot says, a baseball player can’t control the weather or the wind, elements that can be detrimental to his performance. He should accept those conditions and play without worrying about outcome.

Having a sense of commitment helps during stressful situations. “To know that what you do has value, a purpose in life, that there is good reason to do it, is all the motivation you need,” says Eliot. Too many people get caught up in meeting daily goals and forget the bigger vision of their dreams. They forget their sense of purpose.

One also must look at each problem as a challenge that will provide an opportunity for growth, Eliot says. “When you suffer a setback or obstacle or face a tough moment, you want to have a perspective that all kinds of good stuff are going to come out of it.”

Among the many who have sought Eliot’s help is Rice sophomore Jeff Niemann, a dominant pitcher for the Owls. Niemann sought Eliot’s advice as a freshman because he felt insecure about pitching at the division-one level. “We talked about confidence, building confidence, and keeping your confidence up when things don’t go right,” Niemann says. The right-hander helped bring home the 2003 College World Series championship and won numerous awards for his playing and contributions to the team.

Eliot instructed Niemann on the virtues of staying in the mindset of trusting yourself. “I told him that he will not pitch up to his ability if he worries too much about the outcome of each pitch,” Eliot says. “When he throws and every pitch is independent of the other, he is loose, he is relaxed, he is having a good time, and he allows his natural skill to do its thing.”

Staying in the trusting mindset, Eliot says, can stop the opposing team from gaining momentum. “Momentum only happens when you get out of the mindset you want to be in and the other team gets into the mindset that they want to be in.”

Tennis player William Barker also has benefited from Eliot’s advice. During his freshman year, Barker says, he was not playing for the love of game and consequently was not enjoying tennis. “I was thinking about the mistakes I had made or that I had to win three points in the next shot. I was not taking care of the present,” says Barker, now a senior. “Dr. Eliot helped me take one shot at a time. That was not the main thing, though. What I have been learning over the past several years is to go out there and have fun.” In his freshman year, Barker was 10–10 in dual matches; last year he and his brother, Richard, won the national championship in doubles. This year they finished 38–2.

With those kinds of assists, it certainly looks as if Eliot’s better mousetrap is helping keep at bay those pesky rodents who gnaw at a performer’s confidence.

—David D. Medina