Grab the Lapels

Dialed In by Dr. Dana Sinclair

After Anne @ I’ve Read This reviewed and recommended Dialed In: Do Your Best When It Matters Most by Dr. Dana Sinclair, I grabbed a copy from my library. At the beginning of the semester, I felt like I was in a wonky place mentally when it came to interpreting. Suddenly, I felt scared of the idea of interpreting on stage, which I had already done three times last semester. I wanted to get a book about performance and strategize how to improve my thoughts so I could do my best when the time came.

Dr. Sinclair is a psychologist for performers, mostly athletes, of a high caliber. She is someone coaches of professional sports team has on speed dial. However, her advice in applicable to a variety of performance situations. Say, interpreting. I learned that people have different performance styles, and each has pros and cons. Instead of focusing on performance flaws, we should visualize what we need to do. Interestingly, that concept — visualization — applies easily to both sports and interpreting. It’s a tool we discuss frequently in class and workshops. You have to “see” what you are doing right in front of you, like a picture. You have to imagine yourself performing. It sounds like woo woo, but in interpreting we are setting up pictures in front of us, so visualizing has more application than just feeling successful. You may literally ask yourself, “Where did I set Frank up? And where did I put that tortilla?”

Surprisingly, Dr. Sinclair says to avoid a need to feel confident. Confidence can be overinflated and unreliable, so what we need to remember is our competence. If you have the skills to do something, it doesn’t matter if you do not feel confident in that moment. For me, this one hit home. There are times when something else in life, be it home, homework, or hormonal, that makes me feel unconfident. I can’t just make myself suddenly feel confident, so I started positive self-talk about my competence. It is a game changer.

Also, motivation can be a problem. If you are motivated, that means you want something without thinking about the steps to get there. So, if I am motivated to do well on a video assignment, I’m thinking about the end, not the performance. Everything should be focused on the moment of performing. If you focus on what you are doing, there is no room for negative self-talk — or even positive self-talk! If you think, “Hey, I’m doing it!” or “Wow, I suck,” you’ve taken your attention away from what you are doing.

Lastly, another principle that applies to me is when people give you positive messages that are vague. Simply saying, “You got this!” is not helpful, because what makes the person believe in you? I’ve had people who don’t even know my name tell me I’ll do great the next time I interpret on stage. It’s phony. This is not good enough. Instead, positive messages need to be specific, like “You’re going to do well interpreting the speaker because I noticed your processing time has improved in class.” I have a deep aversion to positivity posters, the kind some therapy practices put on the wall. The cat hanging from the tree branch with the message HANG IN THERE comes to mind. At some point in the past, I realized I find those posters offensive because they are mindlessly feel good and have nothing to do with me or my situation. However, I hadn’t realized that positive messages in school could have the same effect if they were not paired with evidence.

Overall, I felt Dr. Sinclair’s book was helpful, though if you hate sports, all the sports examples and metaphors may wear you down. I was under the impression she had more clients who were not athletes. If she does, there are not many examples in Dialed In.

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Published by Grab the Lapels

I'm a graduate of the MFA fiction writing program at the University of Notre Dame, which inspired me to follow along with trends in teaching, publishing, and reviewing. I also have an MA and BS from Central Michigan University. I used to teach composition, creative writing, and literature in higher education, then did a brief stint at a civic theater, followed by two years at a references desk at a public library. I'm now working toward my ASL Interpreter license.

21 comments

  1. I’m so glad you found this book useful, and you brought up some really good points. I don’t feel confidant very often, especially leading up to stressful situations, so I really appreciated her suggestions to focus on competence instead – that I can do!

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  2. So glad you found the book helpful! My cycling coach is always reminding everyone she coaches that it’s about the process. You may enter a race and want to win it, who doesn’t? But how are you going to do it? So instead of saying, how we are going to win, we focus on how we are going to race and then we race our own race, not someone else’s. If we end up winning, yay! Then afterwards we think over what went well and what didn’t so next time we can improve our process/performance. Same goes for workouts/training. It’s such a mental game!

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      • Haven’t been racing much lately, the pandemic took a lot of wind out of my sails but I still train because it’s fun and you never know when the race bug might grab me again. But races I’ve done: crit racing, gravel races, e-racing on Zwift on my smart trainer, but my favorite is always long distance races of 100- 200 miles. 🙂

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  3. I’m glad you found this helpful! I talk about the difference between confidence and competence with my students quite a lot – there is little correlation between how confident a student nurse is and whether they actually know what they’re doing. (In fact, overconfident students are much more difficult to teach, because they are constantly running around trying to do things they haven’t been taught yet, so you have to keep a weather eye on them at all times). Instead, with underconfident students, I do a lot of “what did you do on placement yesterday? Well, that sounds hard. Could you have dealt with that situation a year ago? What would you have done then? What did you do this time? Well then, there’s your proof that you’re getting better.”

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    • Lou, I love everything about this comment. When I was teaching, I found that the most confident students often earned poor grades in my class. They had mastered the “art” of the five-paragraph essay and refused to learn college-level writing, so they were stuck at an unacceptable level of performance. The students who were iffy about the entire class typically came out on top, grade- and content-wise.

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  6. Forgive me if my comment posts twice – I thought it sent but then it didn’t show; but I’m glad you found this helpful and I love the advice about confidence vs. competence. And Don Mattingly, who is quoted on the cover, is one of my husband’s favorite baseball players.

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    • I used to keep up on baseball myself, but that was when I lived in Michigan and watched the Tigers. I moved to Indiana, and now we can’t watch the Tigers without an expensive sports package on TV, so that’s sad.

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  7. I just never know what I’m going to read next on your blog Melanie. I’m not a big reader of how-to or self-help books – which one is this, or is it both? – but some of this advice makes great sense to me. I love the idea of focusing on “competence” not “confidence”. I reckon that could even help me know at my great age.

    And yes, I’m with you about things like “you’ve got this” unless it is supported by some sort of evidence or it comes from someone you know has seen you “get this” before! I think there’s a bit too much empty positivity around. People mean well, but it doesn’t really help most of us, does it, because we see it as kindest rather than being founded in anything real. My inner voice says things like “how do you know?” or, “no, I haven’t”.

    Interesting point about all the sports examples. What a shame.

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    • The empty positivity makes me defensive, and it also makes me say negative things about myself because, as you noted, I start with the thought, “You don’t even know me.”

      The sports examples were okay, I just thought the book would apply more generally. I don’t dislike sports, but it was a lot of “lost my confidence before/after the big game” examples.

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      • Yes, I got that that was pretty much what you meant. Sport is easy picking for examples, I reckon, but that doesn’t mean as you say that the advice isn’t broader in value and wouldn’t benefit from examples showing that, eh?

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  8. I used to keep up on baseball myself, but that was when I lived in Michigan and watched the Tigers. I moved to Indiana, and now we can’t watch the Tigers without an expensive sports package on TV, so that’s sad.

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