What The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Can Teach Us About Sport Psychology
I have watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers more times than I can reasonably count.
When I was younger, I mostly watched it for the obvious reasons: giant battles, swords, Ents, Legolas doing Legolas things, and Gimli making inappropriate comments about dwarf women.
These days, because I am apparently incapable of watching anything without thinking about psychology, I notice something else.
The Two Towers has a lot to say about what happens when things get really, really hard.
And that is something athletes understand.
For this episode of Movie House Sport Psychology, I talked with Connor Chaney about The Two Towers, improv, leadership, resilience, hope, and why sometimes the mental game is less about controlling what happens and more about figuring out what you are going to do with what happens.
Focus on What You Can Control
One of the biggest psychological themes in The Two Towers is also one of the simplest.
Pay attention to what is actually in front of you.
Athletes hear this all the time, but that does not make it easy.
You can control your preparation. You can control your effort. You can control where you put your attention. You can control how you respond after making a mistake.
You cannot control the referee.
You cannot control the weather.
You cannot control how good your opponent is today.
You definitely cannot control whether an army of Uruk-hai is about to show up at Helm's Deep.
Yet we spend a lot of mental energy trying.
The problem is that when you are focused on something you cannot control, you have less attention available for the things you actually can control.
That matters in sport. It also matters in improv.
What Improv Can Teach Athletes
Connor and I spent a lot of time talking about improv, which makes sense because improv is basically a giant exercise in dealing with uncertainty.
You walk onto a stage without knowing exactly what is going to happen.
Then somebody says something.
Now you have to respond.
You do not get to stop the scene and say, "Hang on. I had a better idea for where this was going."
That is not how improv works.
And, honestly, that is not how sports work either.
Athletes spend a lot of time preparing for competition, but preparation does not mean you get to control the competition.
The other team gets to do things.
The official makes a call.
Your teammate misses an assignment.
You make a mistake you have not made in practice all season.
The plan changes.
You have to respond.
That is one reason I like using improv in mental skills training. It gives athletes an opportunity to practice responding to uncertainty without needing everything to go according to plan.
Sometimes the goal is not to know exactly what is going to happen.
Sometimes the goal is to trust yourself to handle whatever happens next.
Aragorn Has a Leadership Problem
There is also a pretty interesting leadership story happening with Aragorn.
Aragorn is, objectively, pretty qualified to be a leader.
He is also doing everything he can to avoid being one.
Part of what Connor and I talked about was the idea of being called into leadership. In improv, there are also ways that performers can give each other structure and permission to step into different roles.
One example is an "endowment."
You give another performer something to work with. You give them a role, a characteristic, or some kind of structure that helps them contribute to the scene.
And when it works, you are not taking something away from the other person.
You are giving them more room to be good.
I think that is an important part of leadership.
Good leaders do not necessarily have to be the most impressive person in the room. Sometimes leadership means helping the people around you become more capable, confident, and willing to contribute.
Aragorn does a lot of that.
And yes, I realize I am talking about Aragorn as if he is a real person.
He is also apparently 87 years old, so maybe he has had plenty of time to take improv classes and read the UCB manual.
Hope Is Part of the Mental Game
Then there is Sam.
If you have seen The Two Towers, you know the scene I mean.
Things are bad.
Really bad.
Frodo and Sam are exhausted. They are stuck in Mordor. There is a giant war happening somewhere behind them. Their chances of getting out of this alive are not exactly fantastic.
And Sam talks about stories.
About how people keep going.
About how the people in those stories had opportunities to give up, but they did not.
That is hope.
Hope gets talked about in mental health and sport psychology sometimes as if it is just positive thinking.
I think it is more useful than that.
Hope can help us remember that what we are experiencing right now is not necessarily the entire story.
An athlete who is injured may have a hard time imagining competing again.
An athlete dealing with anxiety may feel like they will always compete this way.
An athlete who has had a terrible season may start believing that the season has already told them who they are.
Sometimes part of the work is helping athletes remember why they are still fighting.
What matters to them.
Who they are doing this for.
What they want their story to be.
That does not mean pretending everything is going to be fine.
Sometimes everything is very much not fine.
It means continuing to take the next step anyway.
You Do Not Have to Get Rid of Every Uncomfortable Feeling
This is probably one of the biggest connections I see between The Two Towers and the athletes I work with.
A lot of athletes want to know how to get rid of anxiety.
How do I stop being nervous?
How do I stop thinking about the mistake?
How do I make myself feel confident?
How do I make sure I never choke again?
Unfortunately, our brains do not really work that way.
Trying harder to eliminate every uncomfortable thought or feeling can actually make those experiences more important.
Instead, we can learn how to notice what is happening and respond differently.
You can be nervous and still compete.
You can have doubts and still take the shot.
You can make a mistake and still run the next play.
You can be scared and keep moving toward something that matters to you.
That is a very different kind of mental toughness.
There Is a Reason We Keep Coming Back to These Stories
One of the things I like about The Lord of the Rings is that the characters rarely know exactly how everything is going to turn out.
They just keep moving.
That is a pretty good description of sport psychology, too.
We cannot promise athletes that they will never get nervous, never fail, never get injured, or never have a bad game.
What we can do is help them develop the skills to handle those moments.
And sometimes that means focusing on the next task.
Sometimes it means trusting the people around you.
Sometimes it means becoming a better leader.
And sometimes it means remembering that the story is not over yet.
Also, if you have a giant magical horn that can somehow make everyone feel brave before a battle, I am not saying you should not use it.
I am just saying I would like to see the research on that one.
CHeck out the Episode
In this episode of Movie House Sport Psychology, Connor Chaney and I talk about The Two Towers, improv, leadership, resilience, hope, male friendship, and some of the psychological ideas hiding underneath all those swords and exploding walls.
If you are an athlete struggling with anxiety, confidence, perfectionism, OCD, or the mental side of competition, sport psychology can help you develop skills for handling those challenges while staying connected to the reasons you play in the first place.
If you are in Long Beach, you can learn more about my approach on my Long Beach Sport Psychology page or schedule a consultation to see if working together might be a good fit.