5 March 2024
How to improve your curling mental strength
Well-being in sport has become a more significant talking point in recent years. Curling has the power to improve the mental health of its athletes and the wider public, but it is also important that you have that wellness when training and competing too.
Kyle Paquette, Paralympic Program Director at Curling Canada, is one of the leading experts in this field – providing support for wheelchair curlers in his nation. He has shared some of his most important tips for athletes aiming to be the best version of themselves.
He explains:
There’s three basic needs that motivate us: autonomy, competence and relation. For wheelchair athletes, sport and wheelchair curling provides them with an opportunity where they can regain some of that autonomy that, perhaps, they felt they lost.
We are motivated to pursue situations where we can demonstrate our competence, and we can be praised. When you see some of these athletes who are able to find a sport like wheelchair curling and find success, that’s going to be something that brings a significant amount of wellness and well-being to their life.
We’re motivated to connect with others, to find groups of people that we feel connected to and something bigger than just being on our own.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across a sport where community and connection is as strong as it is in wheelchair curling.
1. Teamwork will make the dream work
What sets those who are the best in the world apart from the rest is their ability to contribute to the success and performance of their teammates.
When you spend so much time focusing on your self-improvement, you start to develop habits of training, thinking and reacting that are all about protecting yourself and about optimising yourself, and sometimes those actually work against others. In some cases, those others are your teammates.
When I think about some of the best wheelchair curlers in the world, not only are they exceptional when they need to, but they also create an environment and an atmosphere for their teammates to thrive, whether that’s through understanding the specific needs and preferences of their teammates, understanding how to provide appropriate feedback, or understanding how to prime their thinking so they can approach a shot and manage a shot to the best of their ability.
2. Self-loving, not self-loathing
Great curlers, they learn to be great because when they make mistakes, they actually strive for perfection and sometimes that leads to a bunch of self-criticism. They think they should be self-critical when they make mistakes and then they realise at some point that that’s actually doing more harm than good.
The actual gateway to improve is not to be harder on themselves and to increase their degree of self-criticism. It’s actually to start to be more self-compassionate, to start to appreciate that they’re working their tail off and they need to give themselves a break.
Having some self-kindness, that’s actually going to help them become more resilient, increase their levels of satisfaction and find more fulfilment in what they’re doing, which at the same time is going to increase their wellness, but also increase their performance. They’re going to have more energy to devote to their training and their high-performance pursuit.
There are three ingredients to self-compassion from American researcher, Kristin Neff. Mindfulness, self-kindness and common humanity.
You have to first recognise the self-critical thoughts. A wheelchair curler has a fairly makeable shot and they miss it, well, it’s about being aware in that moment that I’m having this thought of “wow, you’re brutal, you should have made that, a better player would make that”. It’s about noticing it in the moment, so you can catch yourself in the act of being self-critical and change your inner narrative.
Then it’s about hearing that inner voice, being critical and then changing that voice to be more supportive and constructive. It would be no different than you telling yourself what you would probably tell your teammate or to a best friend.
Common humanity just means that you are not alone. You change it into saying, “well, actually, you don’t suck, you’re actually a really great athlete, in fact, you’re one of the best wheelchair curlers in the world. You’re not alone, you’re not the only person to flash a hit today. At this very moment on the other five sheets around you, there’s probably equally great athletes who are flashing shots, why? Because this is really hard, and we’re all doing our best.”
3. Get a life outside of sport
Athletes who typically have an identity that is almost solely wrapped up in their sports, those people are more likely to experience the pressure and the anxiety of those big games more than other athletes who have a more balanced sense of identity.
If you are a world-class wheelchair curler, but you also are a mother of three, and you also are a business owner, and you’re also a daughter and a sister and a respected member of your community, and you also happen to be a wheelchair curler, well, when you’re in that world championship moment, it’s not your full identity that’s being threatened, because that’s actually only a small piece of who you are as a person.
4. The future can be scary, so ignore it
People, when they’re feeling really nervous, they tend to allow feelings of anxiety to come from their thoughts being future-oriented, they’re thinking about what could happen in their next shot, rather than focusing on what’s within their control in that moment.
5. Good mental health matters to athletes and organisations
Even people who don’t suffer from mental illness, they are still going to have moments, especially high-performance athletes, where their mental well-being is actually quite low, and it could be quite low, because of either moderate to significant struggles with their training or their performance, or it could be a result of potentially overtraining, and they start to move towards an area of burnout.
What is really important, is to provide the appropriate education to athletes, so they can better understand what mental health is, so they can better determine what part of their mental health they are actually looking to manage and support, and what are some of the situations and triggers that can challenge their mental health.
At Curling Canada, within the National Wheelchair Curling Program, we prioritise mental health, in every decision we make. Everything from creating a yearly training plan, to creating a schedule for a training camp, to coming out here for world championships and scheduling in activities, all of these decisions are made with the athletes, so that we can ensure that their needs are being met and that they are actually helping to co-author the strategies and the protocols that we are putting in place because they know themselves best.
Creating an open, safe space where these conversations happen regularly is the best way to prevent any type of challenges or strains in an athlete’s mental health and wellness. I think as coaches and programme coordinators and directors, we need to spend more time reflecting on the impact that competition has on an athlete’s mental health.
The more that we can help athletes to identify those challenges, the more they are going to feel empowered to take charge and to take action to support themselves.
Engage with the World Curling Federation during the SD Biosensor World Wheelchair Curling Championship 2024 on TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook, and Weibo and by searching the hashtags #WWhCC and #wheelchaircurling
