Lucid mental training app helping Mt. Lebanon athletes
Graham Betchart does an activity with the Mt. Lebanon wrestling team on Dec. 15.
Graham Betchart gives a motivational speech about being present, rather than living in the past or looking towards the future.
While studying social and emotional learning on a sabbatical last spring, Mt. Lebanon High School psychology teacher Tina Raspanti was simply trying to further her understanding of positive thinking and mindfulness.
Raspanti had many conversations about the topic over the years with district Superintendent Timothy Steinhauer and athletic director John Grogan.
“We never really had a vehicle to bring this concept to our athletes,” Raspanti said.
After attending the Wisdom 2.0 conference where author and longtime “mindfulness” teacher George Mumford spoke about his recent consultation on a mental training application called Lucid, it provided that opportunity Raspanti was searching for.
After the speech, Raspanti approached the lounge where Andrew Zimmerman, content director for Lucid Performance, was standing to present him with an idea of her own.
“I thought of this as a great opportunity, so I just asked if they would like to pilot it at a high school,” Raspanti remembers. “They were really open to it. It was a really good opportunity for both us and them because we are able to get this to our athletes and Lucid was going to be provided with feedback about the program.”
To find out more about how their program, which officially launched in June, is working on developing minds of teenagers, Zimmerman and Lucid mental skills coach Graham Betchart visited Mt. Lebanon High School on Dec. 15 to not only teach parents and athletes the importance of achieving peak performance, but to learn what users of their app think about it.
The athletic programs that initiated the program, which includes 1,000 five-minute mental workouts, were the wrestling squad and girls’ basketball team. However, boys’ basketball, baseball, swimming and girls’ lacrosse are all committed to try the pilot program that focuses on four paradigm shifts.
“The idea of peak performance is mostly mindset and your body doing what it’s trained to do,” Zimmerman said. “You do all this work but it’s about unlocking all of that work when you’re under pressure. Our paradigm shifts – win wisdom, being present, confidence and competitive drive – focus on doing that. A lot of what we do in our culture is built on whether we win or lose, which is a future focus. We aren’t trying to have people forget about those things but really to just go about it the right way.”
For Betchart, who has been tasked with improving the mental game of elite programs including Stanford University, Cal Berkley and the University of San Francisco, along with many professional athletes, it’s about introducing the concept early.
“Our workouts that we developed should realistically take four years to finish,” he said. “If you are really trying to develop positive habits and skills, then we aren’t in a hurry. This is real skill development. Sometimes the challenge is, especially for professional athletes, is they haven’t learned how to make a mistake. They are so talented that they haven’t had the ability to learn about failure. I love the moment when they realize they can’t always will their way to success and just have to become vulnerable. That’s where your biggest growth takes place. It takes a lot of courage to go into vulnerable spaces but that’s really where it’s at.”
Lucid also focuses the concept of ‘next play speed,’ where athletes mentally train to forget something that just happened – whether it be good or bad – and focus on the present.
It’s a vital part of the message that Mt. Lebanon wrestling coach Marc Allemang tries to continue to instill during a stretch or cool down session when they listen together as a team.
“If you make a mistake it’s not a big deal,” Allemang said, “but if you take too much time to worry about that mistake you are already behind even more. At the end of the day, if we are measuring how well we did solely on what the scoreboard says, we might come out of the gym feeling like crap.”
Raspanti and Betchart point out that while Lucid is mostly directed at athletes, it applies to every aspect of life’s wins and loses.
“We’ve tried to take mental training and make it as simple as possible,” Graham said. “If we can get it to work in a school district and we get a rhythm going, we might have something. Mental training is far from a quick fix where somebody comes in and talks for an hour and you’ve solved the world.
“It’s every day. You have to practice it every single day.”