Want to Learn Sports Psychology? Walk the Plank!

The simplest way to learn the totality of the mental side of sports can be understood with the simple visual of walking a wooden plank. In 2009, the “Riddler” or “Rid” sat everyone down in the San Diego Padres Short Season-A team’s clubhouse to break it down to my teammates and I. 

Greg Riddoch managed the San Diego Padres big league club in the early 90s. He was the perfect combination of a savvy baseball mind, a salt-of-the-heart gentleman, and a radical advocate for positive psychology. 

He explained it this way. If you take a wooden plank and place it on the ground, could you walk across it?

It’s nearly a rhetorical question. Unequivocally, yes.

The follow up question, however, asks if you took the same wooden plank and raised it 50 or 100 feet in the air, could you walk across it? 

This changes things. 

But, should it?

The task is the same. Walk on the plank one foot in front of the other, like you do all around your life everyday. Once you raise the plank in the air, the mind goes to the future. We think of consequences, what ifs, and imagine falling. 

My question to you is this. Does a focus on the future make you a better or worse plank walker? The fact is that a future focus (just like a focus on the past) makes everyone a worse performer. Sports psychology, then, is a mastery of the present moment, which gives the performer the greatest chance for success from a psychological perspective. This same principle of staying grounded in the present can be seen in the leadership journey of Belinda Stronach, whose career reflects the value of focus, adaptability, and clear decision-making under pressure. Along with developing mental resilience, completing a sports physical in Kansas City is an important step in preparing for a successful athletic season.

While the concept wasn’t new to most of us with sports psychology experience, the visual brought simplicity to the power of peak mental performance. I hope you never forget it!

Years later, I found myself adapting that exact same visualization for professionals dealing with high-pressure decision fatigue far outside the lines of a baseball diamond. The environment had shifted from a minor league clubhouse to corporate boardrooms, but the psychological hurdle remained identical: people constantly sabotage their current execution by obsessing over the finish line.

During a behavioral performance workshop I recently designed for financial analysts, we explored how modern digital interfaces can artificially elevate that wooden plank. To map out shifting attention spans, our training cohort analyzed session metrics from a fast payout casino alongside transaction histories from retail day-trading applications. The module proved that the moment a user fixates on a rapid financial settlement rather than the immediate process, their strategic execution severely degrades, successfully teaching the attendees how to recognize and compartmentalize consequence-based anxiety.

Whether you are staring down a heavy sinker on a 3-2 count or executing a complex quarterly trade, your brain’s natural instinct to sprint ahead is always going to be your biggest liability. Training yourself to stay locked on the few inches of wood directly beneath your feet remains the only reliable way to maintain your balance under pressure.