Why You Aren’t Getting What You Want: Intention, Self-Reflection, & Meditation at the APA Conference
This past weekend was spent down in beautiful Washington, D.C. with friends for the annual APA (American Psychological Association) Conference. As I went from session to session, a few themes stood out to me, one in particular. It seemed as though the sessions I chose to go to were forming a cohesive narrative and telling me that I need to do better at emphasizing intention, both while coaching and in my own personal practice.

At the Mindfulness Based Performance Enhancement talk, presenters emphasized that the biggest obstacle to athletes taking advantage of all of the performance-enhancing benefits of mindfulness is dropout — athletes simply do not continue a practice that benefits them. It is easy to continue lifting weights when you look in the mirror daily and look at your physical appearance in order to see the changes, however, the mental and emotional aspect of change is often harder to detect. The experts’ recommendation is to add intention-setting to the practice (they did not go into detail, though I will later) and self-reflection. In other words, you figure out what you want to achieve, and you check to see if you attained it, or if you didn’t attain what you wanted to, you reflect on how you could next time. Boom. Simple. Why didn’t I think of that? “Reflection”, so aptly named, is the mirror we are looking for, where you can see your mental and emotional muscles growing.

The second talk in which intention was brought up was by a talk delivered by Lama Orgyen Chowang, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author currently residing in the Bay Area. He offered what I would consider to be a bombshell of advice, especially in this day and age of the “everyone-gets-a-trophy mentality”: “Meditation should change your perception. If you are meditating, and your perceptions stay the same, then you are not achieving what you set out for.” His remedy for purposeless/ineffective meditation was to set a more concrete intention before practicing: be very clear and specific (and realistic) about what you’re planning to achieve, and reflect on it: am I actually gaining insight into my mind, or not? Intention and reflection make this esoteric-seeming discipline a lot more simple. Am I making progress or no?
The third, and by far most engaging presentation I went to was actually on research about Self-Reflection itself, particularly applied with high school aged inner city youth. The presenters from Boston University actually had the attendees set our own intention beforehand and reflect on it after the fact which further reinforced their point that this stuff is helpful! From the very beginning, you set out what you want to get out of the day, and at the end, you reflect (in writing personally and orally in a group) about what you got out of the day. You can get something out of the session that you did not intend, however without the initial intention setting, you are less likely to get something out of it — even unintended learnings. The presenters were working on Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility skills through sport, however this intention setting could be well applied to physical skills as well.

For example, since the conference I have begun to add specific intention-setting before my own workouts. It made giving self-feedback during the workout much simpler. When working on accelerations with an intention to focus on the initial angle of push out of a 3 point stance and getting my center of mass more over the stance (pushing) leg (specifically the left), I was able to accomplish these tasks, not to perfection, but to substantial improvements, and was able to stress less about other skills that are less important at the moment. Writing it down is hugely helpful. With a less clear intention, it is easy to walk away from a productive practice feeling like there is a whole world of improvements that you have not made (while true, not a recipe for keeping things in perspective).
It is also good practice for coaches and athletes to communicate about their intentions and goals for each session — for example, if a coach’s goal for a high jump session is purely on technique improvement and they do not care about bar height, the athlete may assume something like “coach is keeping the bar super low, do I look that bad today that she thinks I can only clear 5'9”?!?”. With communication, both are on the same page. On the other hand, if the athlete walks in the door with the intention of just finishing the session due to stress from finals/a breakup/other reason, the coach may have to adjust the technical goals for the session or even the session itself, as the athlete may not currently be in a psychological state to meet big challenges head on. Communication is key. If there is clarity in the intention, the reflection can be accurate. For example if the goal of an lifting session for an athlete is to adjust technique hit better, deeper positions, the reflection after the session should revolve around how the technique went. If the goal is to hit deeper squats with better technique, and the athlete is reflecting on the weight they were able to lift, it would be easy for them to become frustrated. Losing sight of their success at improving technique, focusing on something that was not the goal of the session at all, they lose confidence unnecessarily.

