Sports psychology for everyday life

The thrill of victory; the agony of defeat. Sports clichés are everywhere. But what does it actually take to think like a winner? This hour, TED speakers explore the psychology of winning and losing. Guests include former professional soccer player Abby Wambach, cognitive scientist Sian Leah Beilock, journalist Kate Fagan and art historian Sarah Lewis. Original broadcast date: July 19, 2024. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  This message comes from Middlesex County, New Jersey. Here's why companies are actually making the move to Middlesex County, New Jersey. It's ranked in the top 2% of US counties for talent and knowledge creation and is more innovative than 98% of the nation. The opportunity is real and it's right here. Visit biz rediscovermiddlesex.com to set up a meeting with a business advisor today. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  You just don't know what you're gonna find.

• 0:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

• 0:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the psychology of winning. Have you ever wondered what is going on in the mind of a professional athlete?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Part of my personality, from the time that I can remember, is that when the lights were shining, when the moment of the game came down to the last second, to the last play, when the attention and the focus turned toward me, there was something greater in my spirit that came alive.

• 1:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Olympic gold medalist and World Cup champion, Abby Wambach. She played for the US Women's National Soccer Team from 2001 to 2015 and is widely regarded as one of the greatest soccer players of all time.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  And now in my retirement, I am an author, a podcaster, and an avid US Women's National Team fan.

• 1:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  But on July 11, 2011, she had a lot to prove. It was the quarterfinals of the Women's World Cup in Dresden, Germany. Team USA versus Brazil and Brazil's legendary striker, Marta Vieira de Silva.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  There is a healthy rivalry between USA and Brazil in 2011. Marta is at the top of her game. I am at the top of my game. And if Marta just had the game of her life, which was always possible when Marta stepped on the field, then you just had to figure out how to deal with that as best as you can. We scored an early goal.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  And what people don't know about what was going on inside the stadium is when we scored that early goal, we were like, listen, let's keep possession because it was early. I mean, we still had a lot of soccer left. So we were keeping possession. And I remember the crowd, they want to see excitement. They want to see soccer and football really happening.

• 3:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Team USA was sitting on the ball, taking their time, trying to keep the score at one to zero, which really annoyed the fans.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  So the crowd kind of started to turn against us in a way and start to back the Brazilian side. They wanted a game.

• 3:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  A game they ended up getting.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  I think about the 60th minute, one of our defenders, Rachel Bueller, ends up getting into a collision with Marta, ends up drawing a red, a straight red card inside the penalty box. So not only is Brazil awarded a penalty, but we now lose a player. We are now playing with 10 women.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  And, oh God, that was such, I'm experiencing like stress as if I'm right at the back there. So we get ready for the penalty shot.

• 4:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  Brazil takes the shot against USA's goalie, Hope Solo.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Hope saves it.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And we're freaking out. We're all like, oh my gosh, this is great, you know? Well, the referee says, no, no, no, Hope moved early. And so they got to retake the penalty and then Brazil scores the penalty.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  1-1, 60th minute, Team USA is down a player. And I'm just thinking, oh, this is not good.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  This is not good. We play for the next 30 minutes and it's, it's an intense game, you know? There's not many chances from either team, really. Regulation ends and it goes into extra time. And Marta, God, I'll never forget it where I was standing. They get a corner kick and somehow she scores this goal. And I, God, I just remember screaming from that point on.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  We just need one good chance. We just need one good chance.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  We are fighting for our lives. We are fighting to stay in this tournament. This would be, I think, at the time, the earliest exit the US would ever exit a world championship, being the quarterfinals.

• 5:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  What is going through your mind at this point? Are you like angry? Is there a point where you're like, I just have to stay in the zone or otherwise this is all going to fall apart? What is happening?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  I am everything all at once.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  I am angry. I am terrified. I am excited. I am at the edge of myself. I am praying. I am talking to myself. I am pleading. I am willing. I am all things. I'm everything all at once.

• 5:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  Cause the clock is ticking at this point, right?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, the clock is ticking. The ball is basically, I think, on our own goal, goal line where Hope Solo is standing, the end of the field. And I'm screaming like, just kick it north, like direct. We need to get to the goal. We've got, I, I felt like we only had a few seconds, which we did. We only had a few seconds left until the referee was going to call the game.

• 6:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  Teammate Megan Rapinoe gets the ball.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Megan takes a couple of touches and you have to understand the relationships that we all have. Like, these are plays that we have done a thousand times with each other. But the problem is, is Megan is now basically on the half mark. So she's probably like 40 yards away from the, from the end line.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  And I'm at the top of the box. And so this delivery and this angle and the trajectory has, has probably never been attempted. But because it was such late game heroics, Pino was like, I know Abby's in there. I'm just gonna take a couple touches. I'm gonna look up and then I'm gonna look down. And as soon as Megan looked up and as soon as she put her head down, I knew the ball was coming toward me. And as soon as the ball came off of her foot, for whatever reason, I knew that that ball was coming to my head. I knew it. The only thing in my mind was, don't screw this up.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  I knew I was gonna head the ball. Would the keeper save it or not? Well, as the ball is approaching my head, I see a pair of gloves come into my vision and come out of my vision. As the ball is striking my head, I realize the goalkeeper has come out and missed the ball. Nobody is in the goal. I have a wide open net. Now I'm thinking, if I miss this, this would be the biggest embarrassment in the whole wide world. My head connects with the ball.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  You know, your eyes have to shut when the ball hits your head. And then when the ball comes off your head, your eyes open back up. But I, I heard the roar of the crowd before I could see the ball. And the roar of the crowd was so loud that I blackout. Like, I don't have a recollection of the ball hitting the back of the net.

• 8:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Moments like this are what athletes and their fans live for. And whether it's on the field, during a crucial exam, or while giving the biggest presentation of your life, going for the win can be exhilarating and terrifying. So what are the best ways to set ourselves up for success? On the show today, the psychology of winning. Why we love watching people compete at the top of their game, and how we can manage our own anxieties in high-pressure situations. Which brings us back to Abby Wambach. Her header in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinals is legendary.

• 9:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  And over the years, Abby has replayed that moment over and over again in her mind.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Because I've wondered, how the heck did that happen? What about me? What about my brain, my body, my spirit? Is different than somebody else to be able to do that? Is it just like right place, right time? Or is it like the sincere openness to utter annihilation had that gone the opposite way?

• 9:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hmm.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Right? Like, I try to tell my kid, the more open you can be to be completely devastated by something, the more possibility opens up to you. And I think that that's true in life. I think that's true in love. I know that that's true in sport. The more you open yourself up to devastation, the more possibility will be open to you. And that's what this moment was. And I believe deeply in all of my being that some of the best athletes we watch and some of the biggest moments we've been able to watch, we gather the energy of everybody watching, and we are somehow able to tap into that will,

• 10:42Speaker 02

  to tap into that desperation, and to give it what it wants. And so I think that that's what happened. And P.S., folks, this only tied the game.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  We go into the penalty kick shootout. Aly Krieger finishes it off for us, for us to win. I hope Solo also saved one. That was the reason why we were able to, to win in five. Yeah, my God, like, I feel exhausted just, just explaining all of it.

• 11:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, I can feel you reliving it. I mean, this, it must be addictive, this feeling.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yep. You know, there's really not much that you can compare that kind of thing with. Winning the game in that fashion, in that way. It was just so unbelievable. It made me famous. It brought the popularity and fandom back to women's soccer. The way that it kind of was when Mia Hamm was present and, and starting the women's soccer sports revolution in this country. That moment was everything.

• 11:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  When you have a moment like that, is there a sense that you can like, oof, take a deep breath, maybe rest on your laurels a little bit?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  I remember the next day, Pia, our coach, she sat us in a, in a circle. She wanted everybody to go one by one and tell their story, how they experienced it. She knew that this was, this moment was bigger than this one specific team. What she was trying to give us was this space to be able to be like, that just happened. Be proud and, and be amazed and be awed. And at the end of that meeting, she said, okay, we have to move on to France. We still haven't won anything here. That, we will be able to celebrate for the rest of our lives.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  But today is a new day and we need to move forward.

• 12:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Abby Wambach. Her podcast is called, We Can Do Hard Things. And by the way, the US team ended up losing in the final of that World Cup, but came back four years later in 2015 and with Abby, won the championship. On the show today, the psychology of winning.

• 13:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

• 13:36Speaker 03

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• 13:51Speaker 04

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• 14:05Speaker 03

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• 14:16Speaker 05

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• 14:39Speaker 06

  In the much-talked-about new movie, "Wicker," Olivia Colman plays a woman who commissions a husband literally made of wicker. Yes, wicker. We'll tell you why the silly and bawdy new movie is also a nice, cozy fall watch. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the psychology of winning. We just heard how soccer great Abby Wambach was able to turn a crucial moment into a clutch goal. But what if she'd whiffed, totally missed the ball? For every win, there's an example of someone, at the worst possible time, choking.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Did you perform worse than you expected, given what you could do?

• 15:33Speaker 07

  To me, that's a joke.

• 15:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is the president of Dartmouth College.

• 15:37Speaker 07

  My name is Sian Byalock.

• 15:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Sian is also a cognitive scientist who spent most of her career studying what happens in our brains when we crack under pressure. For Sian, there was one particular day in high school when this happened to her, and she will never forget it.

• 15:54Speaker 07

  I was playing soccer. I was the goalkeeper, which is a pressure-filled position. All eyes are on you. And I was playing as part of the California State Team, which is part of the Olympic Development Program.

• 16:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 16:06Speaker 07

  So it was a big deal. And I remember turning around and realizing that the national coach, the coach that would select somebody to come up and play on the national team, was standing behind me. And I first just shook it off, but I remember really, all of a sudden, becoming really self-aware of everything I was doing, from breathing to moving.

• 16:34Speaker 07

  And soon after that, the ball came towards me. Someone was dribbling down the field. And I essentially was in slow motion, almost thinking about how I was playing, like the coach was watching me. And I missed such an easy shot.

• 16:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  And shortly after that, it happened again.

• 16:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh.

• 16:56Speaker 07

  And really blew my chances to play at the next level and shook me to my core about whether I could perform well when it mattered.

• 17:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  OK, so is that why you became a cognitive scientist?

• 17:13Speaker 07

  I definitely do me-search, so trying to understand how I can perform better under pressure. And when I got to university, I found this amazing major called cognitive science, where you could actually ask questions about how you were performing, what happened in the brain and body as people learn and perform at their best. And one of the things I realized was that there was a lot of research focused on how people learn, whether it's how you learn as a young child, how you learn to become an expert in everything from chess to athletics to music. But there was less research focused on what happened when someone was pretty highly skilled and all of a sudden they didn't perform well. And I wanted to ask that question.

• 17:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  How do you even go about studying what happens in the brain? Can you take me through the process that you went through to try and pinpoint where things, I guess, go wrong?

• 18:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, so I'm interested in performance at all kinds of different levels and in different tasks. And one of the first things that we actually did when I was in graduate school and first studying this is we set up a lab with a putting green and we invited professional golfers in. And we put them under pressure and looked to see what happened, if they got worse in terms of how they putted.

• 18:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, it's called the yips, right? When you like just completely whiff the ball, but you're actually a very good golfer?

• 18:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the yips is one way that it's been described or just choking under pressure. And golf is a great sport to study this because people certainly can play differently depending on what's on the line and who's around them.

• 18:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  What did those golfers tell you?

• 18:51Speaker 07

  It was really interesting. So we had pretty high level golfers, whether it was division one golf team or some professional golfers. And one thing that they told us is that when they putted well, they actually couldn't really remember what they were doing. They were sort of in a zone. And when we asked them for their memory, they couldn't tell us much. It's, you know, why I always think professional athletes after a really good game either thank their moms or they thank God. Like when people ask them questions, they can't tell you what they did because they were playing, in a sense, out of their mind. They weren't focusing on what they were doing. But when they performed poorly, they actually were paying a lot of attention to every step of what they were doing.

• 19:33Speaker 07

  And this gave us insight that maybe, counterintuitively, one of the reasons people flub under pressure, especially in athletics, is they start paying too much attention to their performance, things that should just run on autopilot.

• 19:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do we know how, I guess, good someone has to be as an athlete? Or I guess any skill that they have, public speaking or anything where they're under pressure? Is there a level of achievement that they reach when they can do this autopilot thing and don't have to talk themselves through every step while they're actually doing it?

• 20:10Speaker 07

  It's a really good question, and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer. And we're all really expert at certain things. Like, you shuffle down the stairs all the time, and if I asked you what you were doing with your knee, you'd probably fall on your face. So we're all experts in certain things.

• 20:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  So this actually happened to me, not under pressure, just I was carrying a laundry basket down the stairs. And I, you know, was like, be careful, be careful. And I like looked and I felt very nervous about falling, so I guess that is high pressure. And I was thinking so much that I flubbed it and fell and actually broke my foot. So, yeah, so I have actually experienced that.

• 20:51Speaker 07

  It turns out it would have been better if you just hummed a song or thought of a key word and just kept on going down the stairs.

• 20:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, I mean, there's something actually very reassuring about this idea of our brain being able to take over without us having to pay attention.

• 21:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's how we do all sorts of things in our lives. I mean, we're getting bombarded with all sorts of information that we don't pay attention to at particular moments. And sometimes, like, you're probably not thinking about your foot right now, but now you are, because I told you about it. We do a lot of things outside of conscious control. And a lot of what my research has shown is actually you have to trust yourself and be able to perform that way, because that's how you're going to have the best outcome. Cian Bylock picks up from the TED stage. My research team and I have studied this phenomenon of over-attention, and we call it paralysis by analysis.

• 21:43Speaker 07

  In one study, we asked college soccer players to dribble a soccer ball and to pay attention to an aspect of their performance that they would not otherwise attend to. We asked them to pay attention to what side of the foot was contacting the ball. We showed that performance was slower and more error prone when we drew their attention to the step-by-step details of what they were doing. When the pressure is on, we're often concerned with performing at our best, and as a result, we try and control what we're doing to force the best performance. A lot of it comes down to the prefrontal cortex, that front part of our brain that sits over our eyes and usually helps us focus in positive ways.

• 22:28Speaker 07

  It often gets hooked on the wrong things. The end result is that we actually screw up.

• 22:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  It feels important to mention gymnastics. Simone Biles is, of course, the most famous example of being at the absolute top of her field and then dropping out after experiencing what people in gymnastics call the twisties, this sense of not knowing where your body is in space. Is that different than what you're talking about, paralysis by analysis?

• 23:02Speaker 07

  No, I mean, I actually think it's really similar in terms of this idea that all of a sudden, what had gone on autopilot, what she knew how to do, didn't feel right. And then when she needs to focus on where she's going to land, for example, she isn't able to. And so it's a form of your performance changing because of what's happening mentally. This what she didn't say, "I've injured my foot," right? She injured her ability to attend to what she wanted and to not attend to what she didn't.

• 23:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  And do you think stress, anxiety, the pressure of the moment makes that out of syncness happen between the brain and the body? Or could that have happened at any point?

• 23:51Speaker 07

  Well, I think the yips, which sometimes just creep up out of nowhere in golf and other sports and, you know, in baseball, it's happened. Sometimes it happens out of nowhere. But there is a body of research that suggests that when you are really stressed, when all eyes are on you, that actually can be an avenue that changes how you think about how you're going to perform and can induce some of, whether it's the twisties or the yips or performing poorly under pressure.

• 24:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  So talk us through what you think are some easy hacks, I guess, to not let our prefrontal cortex get hooked on the wrong things.

• 24:29Speaker 07

  Well, first, I think practice is key. Not just practicing a toast you have to give at a wedding or a speech without anyone watching you, you got to practice under the conditions you're going to perform under. So if you're giving that toast and you want to practice to perfection, you got to practice in front of your friends. You got to make yourself a little nervous. Even practicing in front of a mirror, it increases self-consciousness so that you're ready to go when you're on the big stage or it's that big day.

• 25:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  I read that the golfer Jack Nicklaus used to think about his pinky toes.

• 25:06Speaker 07

  Yeah. That's another idea. It's sort of a crutch to not overthink the step-by-step details. So either thinking about your pinky toe or having a key word or a mantra or a swing thought, anything that sort of takes you from spending too much time dwelling on the details of what you're doing. So when I was playing soccer and then lacrosse, I started the game with a song. Like, I always had Take It Easy by The Eagles in my head. And now when I go into an important talk or presentation, it pops up in my head. I start singing it.

• 25:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's your soundtrack for doing, like, well without stressing out?

• 25:42Speaker 07

  That is my soundtrack.

• 25:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  So I do have to ask, you have a very stressful job. But when you were first learning about all of these things, about what was going on in our brains, did it change the way that you approached your work?

• 26:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a great question. And I think for me, the most exciting part of my work is showing that you can get better at things with practice and you can learn how to perform and lead in different situations. And so for me, the idea that you're not born a choker or a thriver, that everyone has to practice and that's how you are able to show what you know when it matters most, I think, gives me hope.

• 26:28Speaker 08

  And hello, class of 2024. This is so exciting.

• 26:33Speaker 07

  At Dartmouth, we had Roger Federer gave this commencement speech, which was absolutely amazing.

• 26:38Speaker 08

  Today, I want to share a few lessons I've relied on.

• 26:42Speaker 07

  And he talked about this whole idea that even though oftentimes people would say he was effortless in what he did, it was the farthest thing from the truth.

• 26:51Speaker 08

  Effortless is a myth. I mean it. I say that as someone who has heard that word a lot, effortless. People would say my play was effortless. Most of the time, they meant it as a compliment. But it used to frustrate me when they would say, he barely broke a sweat. Or is he even trying?

• 27:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, I want to make clear to people who maybe aren't tennis fans that, you know, he is one of the greatest players of all time. And one of the key things he's known for is being cool as a cucumber under pressure.

• 27:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, he had to train himself to be consistent.

• 27:29Speaker 08

  The truth is, I had to work very hard to make it look easy. I spent years whining, swearing, throwing my racket before I learned to keep my cool.

• 27:39Speaker 07

  And then he spent a lot of time practicing how not to pay attention to what he was doing in those moments, how to trust himself and what he knew.

• 27:47Speaker 08

  I didn't get where I got on pure talent alone. I got there by trying to outwork my opponents. I believed in myself, but belief in yourself has to be earned. Trusting yourself is a talent. Embracing the process, loving the process, is a talent.

• 28:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, what a life lesson for those students to hear right at a pivotal moment when they are about to embark on a very uncertain journey.

• 28:15Speaker 07

  It was a life lesson for me, right? It's never too late to go back to those basics and to be in a situation where you really, you feel you can trust yourself in that most important situation. Whenever, still to this day, whenever I give talks where I'm a little nervous, I remind myself that I know my material, my research, better than anyone else in the room, which is true. And so even if I mess up or don't get everything exactly right, like, I'm probably the harshest critic of myself relative to anyone else. And that's pressure relieving in a way.

• 28:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's cognitive scientist and Dartmouth College president, Cian Bylock. Her book is called Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

• 29:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  On the show today, the psychology of winning. So we have been talking about how each of us, whether we are an athlete or not, can put ourselves in the right mindset to score. But what is it about competition that we find so compelling to watch?

• 29:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Why do we spend millions of hours and dollars gaping at people kicking or throwing around a ball?

• 29:41Speaker 09

  We want to see some form of transformation. You want to watch your protagonist grow. That's really what it is.

• 29:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is sports journalist Kate Fagan. Kate has thought a lot about why some sports captivate viewers while others, particularly women's sports, don't.

• 30:02Speaker 09

  And that's something women's sports has suffered from, too. This idea that collectively as a culture, we haven't decided it matters. So when it comes to people tuning in, you start to get that, well, if this thing doesn't matter culturally, then I'm doing it almost as a form of charity. Like, do it for our young girls, as opposed to, no, these are the best in the world. And if we actually treated women's sports with the respect, like, you wouldn't need to think of it as a charity.

• 30:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Kate began questioning why it was such a challenge to get people to pay more attention to women's sports years ago, when she started out as a sports commentator at ESPN.

• 30:45Speaker 10

  When I worked at ESPN and I would do a TV show, I was in the production room and I was always pitching women's sports stories.

• 30:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Kate Fagan on the TED stage.

• 30:55Speaker 10

  It almost never worked.

• 30:58Speaker 10

  Every once in a while, it would work. But this thing would happen when we would do a women's sports segment. Many of the other men on the segment, they didn't really do their homework.

• 31:10Speaker 10

  So they were kind of blah. Then the segment would be kind of blah. There's actually a term for this. It's called gender bland.

• 31:19Speaker 10

  And then the segment would end and the producer would be like, "See, this is why we never do women's sports, because they're boring." When a men's segment fell flat, the problem was us. We would redo it. "All right, come on, do your homework. Pick it up. We're doing that again." When a segment on women's sports fell flat, the problem was women's sports. The reality is that just existing in our culture, you will know a dozen men's storylines. I mean, these things are literally push notified to your phone. Or you're at a bar, or a doctor's office, and the talking heads are giving you the latest NBA drama.

• 32:01Speaker 10

  In America, osmosis will have you knowing men's sports storylines.

• 32:07Speaker 10

  So, who tells the storylines of women's sports today? If we're willing to inspect what actually spikes our heart rate and pushes us to the edge of our seats, instead of just assuming we know, we can all collectively make the sports world a more equitable place.

• 32:29Speaker 09

  I started to notice that it's not as if people just don't care about women's sports. There are environments and there are circumstances in which people are caring about women's sports. So I started to think, along with a lot of my female colleagues at ESPN, like, what are the common denominators when this does happen, when people care about women's sports? Because it felt to me like that could also answer the broader question of why we watch sports.

• 32:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, the key ingredients Kate believes every athletic event needs to make it impossible for us to turn away. Today on the show, the psychology of winning. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 33:34Speaker 03

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• 34:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the psychology of winning. And we were just talking to sports journalist Kate Fagan about why women's sports have struggled to get equal footing. Kate says to understand what the problem is, we need to go back to basics and why people love watching sports to begin with.

• 35:23Speaker 09

  You know, the billions of dollars that are poured into it. We've gotten so far away from understanding what actually drives our investment in it. If you strip that all away at its base, like, what are you left with? Like, what are the common denominators?

• 35:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  For many, she says, sports start out as a family affair.

• 35:42Speaker 14

  The noise is terrific here that the race goes with Wrexham look to start off a new era at the club.

• 35:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Take the recent FX show Welcome to Wrexham. It's a documentary series about a failing Welsh soccer team that then gets bought by two Hollywood actors, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

• 36:04Speaker 15

  I don't think I really understood the weight of it until we stepped into that stadium.

• 36:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  The saga goes well beyond the scoreboard. It's about how the citizens of this depressed, post-industrial town intertwine their identity with their team. This is a place where many people have Wrexham tattoos and are buried in coffins draped in Wrexham flags.

• 36:29Speaker 16

  People say it's only a game, but it's not. It's more than that, you know? This football club means everything to people in this town.

• 36:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Kate calls this kind of fandom generational inheritance. And many women's sports, she says, just don't have it yet.

• 36:43Speaker 09

  There's so many veins of generational inheritance in sports. There's the one that does take time and literal family generations where you can actually say, well, why am I a New York Met fan? Well, because my grandpa was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. And then they left for LA. And then the next team that we got was the New York Mets. And there's something bigger than yourself about that. I think why we love sports at its core is...

• 37:22Speaker 09

  For the culture and community of it. And whether it's your literal community, it's like your city team, or you live out of state and it's your grandmother's favorite team, or your grandfather's favorite team. That's all part of community as well. And then pair that, and they often go hand in hand, with cultural value. Like, we want to be in on what culture's talking about. And you've seen that happen with women's sports over the last few years. It's cultural value has risen dramatically, meaning that the community is bigger. Meaning that now you're a part of something outside of a small group, but that you feel like the culture is telling you has value.

• 38:06Speaker 09

  And then more people come into that circle, and then it grows.

• 38:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  OK, so that's why we love watching an established sports team. But what does it take to get people to watch a new sport or an athlete that we've never heard of? Or for that matter, a women's sports team that hasn't been around that long?

• 38:23Speaker 09

  Well, I think sports blossom in our minds when they have two things, when they have stakes to them, and when we understand the storylines within them.

• 38:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Kate Fagan again on the TED stage.

• 38:37Speaker 09

  This is what burns at the center of sports. In the Olympics, we have all agreed a gold medal matters. Same with the World Cup. And now, paired with this agreed-upon stakes, we also have, at the Olympics and the World Cup, very obvious storyline. One person has a USA jersey on. Someone else has a different country's jersey on. All right, we've got agreed-upon stakes. We've got very obvious storylines. Of course, now, we're going to have a commitment to even deeper storytelling, which is how we end up teary-eyed after a three-and-a-half-minute NBC vignette about a Romanian gymnast. Yeah?

• 39:21Speaker 09

  You have everything you need now for the next two hours of competition. An Olympic gold medal is on the line. And you've got your storyline. Romanian gymnast desperately overcoming the odds. Boom. Storylines drive up the stakes. Higher stakes, more storylines. And on and up we go.

• 39:47Speaker 09

  You see it played out so much in the Olympics because you're dealing with like these very random sports often that aren't in the limelight. You're dealing with all different countries whose athletes we probably have no name recognition for. And so NBC spends, you know, whatever their budget is, every Olympics to build these little vignettes so that when we're watching an obscure sporting event, all of a sudden, we're invested.

• 40:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, to me, English major, I'm like, of course, it's Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey, right? It's like

• 40:24Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 40:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Those old methodologies of sending someone on a quest and then they have to overcome. Like, there's the Miracle on Ice, there's the Cubs winning the World Series in 2016, or Muhammad Ali, who built himself into a mythology. That's always been the case, would you say?

• 40:47Speaker 09

  Yeah. For the same reason we watch a movie or we read a book, obviously, we want to watch something where we fully believe everyone on the field or court is pursuing the championship with as much passion as they possibly can. But like, let's say Katelyn Clark, for example.

• 41:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's the college player who turned pro and got women's basketball a lot of attention.

• 41:09Speaker 09

  Yeah. I think we could have a decade-long storyline of her. I live in Charleston and I was walking to the local coffee shop and there were two guys, both of them older than 60, shooting around and I was just walking past and they were talking about Katelyn Clark. And one of them was like, her game still needs to develop, right? But those are the storylines. You're watching because you know the players and what happens matters. And because it matters, you have a vested interest in if they win or not, but that doesn't mean if they don't win, you're not watching the following year.

• 41:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  So I do want to ask you, we have talked about why people love watching sports, but what about talking sports or sports language? I feel like, you know, whether people love sports or not, we all use sports terminology and metaphors all the time, like, oh, he struck out, or keep your head in the game. Kate, do you have a favorite metaphor, something that you think about often?

• 42:12Speaker 09

  Well, this is a little selfish one, but like, my dad, he passed away from ALS, but he taught me basketball. And he always used to say, and he was just talking about basketball, always make your last dribble the hardest. And he just meant that when you're going for a pull-up jumper, like, you really got to pound the basketball into the floor on that last dribble, because like, you want it bouncing up into your shooting motion. And, you know, you don't leave it behind you. But like, he would always say it to me in high school, and I'd always be like, make your last dribble the hardest, make your last dribble the hardest. It was very helpful on the basketball court, but it was really helpful off the basketball court. Because it was like, all right, if I'm going to do something different, like, leave a job, you know, you got to make your last dribble the hardest.

• 42:54Speaker 09

  Like, you got to propel yourself into the next motion, whatever that is. And maybe sometimes you don't know exactly where it's taking you, but you want some sort of forward energy off of the thing before. And I think about that one a lot. It's not like a common sportsing phrase. The other one I loved was, growing up, was you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And that's like a standard basketball one. But, you know, my wife and I will say it to each other all the time. When we want to do something, we're not sure if we should. It's like, well, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

• 43:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was writer and sports journalist Kate Fagan. She's the author of Hoop Muses: An Insider's Guide to Pop Culture and the Women's Game. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

• 43:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  So all this hour, we've been talking about the psychology of winning. But even if we do win the proverbial gold medal, how do we keep up the stamina to go for it again and again? Writer Sarah Lewis believes most of us underestimate the power of the near win. Here she is on the TED stage in 2014.

• 44:08Speaker 17

  What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question I've long asked myself. I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win. I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity archers, all women, as fate would have it, at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbia's Baker Athletic Complex. I wanted to see what's called archer's paradox, the idea that in order to actually hit your target, you have to aim at something slightly skewed from it.

• 44:48Speaker 17

  I stood and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van, and they exited with this kind of relaxed focus. I stood behind one archer as her coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support and watched her, and I didn't understand how even one was going to hit the 10 ring. The 10 ring from the standard 75-yard distance, it looks as small as a matchstick tip held out at arm's length. And this is while holding 50 pounds of draw weight on each shot. She first hit a seven, I remember, and then a nine, and then two 10s, and the next arrow didn't even hit the target. And I saw that gave her more tenacity, and she went after it again and again.

• 45:33Speaker 17

  For three hours, this went on. At the end of the practice, one of the archers was so taxed that she laid out on the ground just starfished, her head looking up at the sky, trying to find what T.S. Eliot might call that still point of the turning world.

• 45:52Speaker 17

  It's so rare in American culture, there's so little that's vocational about it anymore, to look at what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude. What it means to align your body posture for three hours in order to hit a target, pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity. But I stayed because I realized I was witnessing what's so rare to glimpse, that difference between success and mastery. So, success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can't do it again and again. Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though. It's not the same as success, which I see as an event,

• 46:36Speaker 17

  a moment in time, and a label that the world confers upon you. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal, but to a constant pursuit. What gets us to do this, what gets us to forward thrust more, is to value the near win.

• 46:55Speaker 17

  Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It's in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be.

• 47:07Speaker 17

  Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft, and not for the sake of crafting your career. We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge. It's a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington, who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next one, always the one he had yet to compose. Part of the reason that the near win is inbuilt to mastery is because the greater our proficiency, the more clearly we might see that we don't know all that we thought we did. It's called the Dunning Kruger effect. The Paris Review got it out of James Baldwin when they asked him, "What do you think increases with knowledge?"

• 47:51Speaker 17

  And he said, "You learn how little you know."

• 47:56Speaker 17

  Success motivates us, but a near win can propel us in an ongoing quest. One of the most vivid examples of this comes when we look at the difference between Olympic silver medalist and bronze medalist after competition. Thomas Gilovich and his team from Cornell studied this difference and found that the frustration silver medalists feel compared to bronze, who are typically a bit more happy to have just not received fourth place and not medaled at all, gives silver medalists a focus on follow-up competition. We see it even in the gambling industry that once picked up on this phenomenon of the near win and created these scratch-off tickets that had a higher-than-average rate of near

• 48:38Speaker 17

  wins and so compelled people to buy more tickets that they were called heart stoppers and were set on a gambling industry set of abuses in Britain in the 1970s. The reason the near win has a propulsion is because it changes our view of the landscape and puts our goals, which we tend to put at a distance, into more proximate vicinity to where we stand. It gets us to focus on what, right now, we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights. It's Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in 1984 missed taking the gold in the heptathlon by one-third of a second, and her husband predicted that would give her the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition.

• 49:23Speaker 17

  In 1988, she won the gold in the heptathlon and set a record of 7,291 points, a score that no athlete has come very close to since.

• 49:36Speaker 17

  We thrive not when we've done it all, but when we still have more to do. I stand here thinking and wondering about all the different ways that we might even manufacture a near win in this room, how your lives may play this out, because I think on some gut level we do know this.

• 49:56Speaker 17

  The deliberate incomplete is inbuilt into creation myths. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women would deliberately put an imperfection in textiles and ceramics. It's what's called a spirit line, a deliberate flaw in the pattern to give the weaver or maker a way out, but also a reason to continue making work.

• 50:19Speaker 17

  Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They're masters because they realize that there isn't one. Now, it occurred to me, as I thought about this, why the archery coach told me at the end of that practice, out of earshot of his archers, that he and his colleagues never feel they can do enough for their team, never feel there are enough visualization techniques and posture drills to help them overcome those constant near wins. It didn't sound like a complaint exactly, but just a way to let me know, kind of tender admission, to remind me that he knew he was giving himself over to a voracious, unfinished path

• 51:02Speaker 17

  that always required more. We build out of the unfinished idea, even if that idea is our former self. This is the dynamic of mastery. Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain more than you ever dreamed you could. Even if we created utopias, I believe we would still have the incomplete. Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end. Thank you.

• 51:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was writer Sarah Lewis. She's the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. Her new book is called The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about the psychology of winning. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Monteleone, and Fiona Guerin. Our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Cloutier, Harsha Nahada, Chloe Weiner, and James Delahoussaye. This episode was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Katie Monteleone,

• 52:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  and me. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were James Willets and Josh Newell. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Highlash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.