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The Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory, which hosted Vanessa Shannon’s edUcon session on performance psychology on Tuesday, chronicles the history of the world-famous Louisville Slugger baseball bats.
For more than two decades, Vanessa Shannon, Ph.D., has coached professional athletes, including the Cincinnati Reds baseball team and the University of Louisville Athletic Department, on peak performance. A former division-one athlete herself, Shannon offered edUcon participants some of the strategies she’s used to help her clients build confidence to overcome their toughest mental obstacles.
Ahead of her session — “Major League Mindset: How to Get Game Ready as an Event Professional,” June 2 at 1 p.m., at the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory — Shannon sat down with Convene for a preview of her talk, to discuss the unique challenges event professionals face in their roles, and advice as a local on the one thing not to miss while in Louisville.
Can you share highlights of your edUcon session?
If you think about event professionals, they’re working in a high-stress, high-stakes performance environment, yet most event professionals have never been trained in the skills required to perform in that type of environment. So, what I’m going to be talking about is the science and strategies of performance psychology and how integrating those … can help them perform at their best when it matters the most.
What do you think event professionals should understand about mental performance as it relates to their jobs?
Optimal performance for anyone in any situation — any performance environment, really — requires four things: some type of physical capacity, some type of technical or performance-specific skill, some type of tactical understanding, and then mental skills.
“Ultimately, I’m passionate about helping people, athletes, managers, executives, organizations, teams optimize their performance using performance psychology.”
Vanessa Shannon, Ph.D.
So, when you think of event planners, there’s certainly a needed physical capacity — it’s so go-go-go, there’s so much work, it’s sometimes never-ending because you’re going from one event to the next. The ability to sustain that physical capacity needed is important. [The] technical skills [are the] planning and execution and organization and all those things. And then tactical understanding is what the event should look like at its end and how you’re going to execute that plan. And then the fourth thing is mental skills.
And I think what happens a lot is, commonly, people sort of assume that mental toughness is something that we’re born with, that resiliency is something that is bestowed upon you at some point in your life, and that’s not the case. These are skills that can be systematically learned and developed, and it’s through typically simple strategies that don’t seem like they’re going to do as much as they do, but they really set the internal conditions that are necessary for high performance. I think just wanting people to know — this is not something that some people need to work on and other people don’t need to work on — [that] It’s a part of optimal performance, and we all need to work on it. It’s just a matter of how you specifically need to work on it for you.
Something many event planners grapple with is how to create a better balance for their participants so they aren’t overscheduling themselves with a very busy program. How do you think business events should be designed to allow for optimal mental performance?
I think one of the biggest things that we sort of miss out on is the opportunity for micro recovery and micro focusing. You talk about a really hectic conference schedule — how are you spending your breaks and what are the conference organizers encouraging you to do at that time? If every break is networking, then you’re asking a person to really be “on” for a very long period of time. But if at the end of a session, a conference organizer encourages everyone to take a mindful minute or to take a deep breath or to reflect on something in their day that they feel went well and one thing that could have gone better and how it can go better the next time, those simple kinds of micro pauses, recoveries, micro breaks — whatever we want to call them — can be really impactful. There is also a lot of research and science to support the importance and impact of gratitude [and] the impact of random acts of kindness — [for example], during your break, holding the door for a couple of people as they’re leaving the room.
As someone who has lived in Louisville for 10 years, do you have any tips for first-time visitors on what to see and do?
We have hundreds of non-chain local restaurants, and I think people can miss that if they’re not looking for it. [Especially in] downtown — there are a lot of great local places to eat and to visit and to shop.
Jennifer N. Dienst is senior editor at Convene.