Compositional adaptors are psychological tools which we can use to change ours or another person’s thought process quickly. ‘Compositional’ referring to the way we compose our thoughts and actions, ‘adaptor’ to how we change them.
The reality is: you likely already have many compositional adaptors in your arsenal. Some are useful for the pitch e.g. “I’ve got this” “No problem” - potentially triggering a more confident state of mind. Others can recall bad experiences which in turn may bring about negative emotions which harm your performance.
We can use compositional adaptors to snap out of a particular frame of mind, back to something which we actually want. In order to apply adaptors well, we need to be a step ahead of ourselves and understand how to alter our perception.
Imagine that you are in a room with many doors. Each door represents an objection which you might have. For example, “I can’t be bothered to go to the gym - it’s too far from home”. Each time that you try to leave through the door, you have prepared a brick wall to prevent the use of the objection. The adaptor here might be a specific word fused to a set of emotions, which at least get you to do the minimum of travel to the gym. Your job is to pre-empt the objections you may have and defuse them before they have a chance to manifest. The better you know yourself, the easier it is to recognise what doors you might try to take to then seal them off.
There are about 40 interventions that are extremely useful to apply compositional adaptors, many of which might be used in co-ordination to greater effect.
Something we do with players before a match is mindset conditioning. Starting a couple nights before the match, we mentally condition a player using an intervention technique, either creating new adaptors or working on older ones. Then, we have the player repeat the intervention in the hour before the game starts, or in some cases during the game if that’s where it’s meant to help. In turn, they are able to affect their mindset in relation to the game and perform greater.
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