‘I’ve never seen a group as tight’ - Caroline Currid on the Limerick senior hurlers
CAROLINE Currid, the former sports psychologist for the Limerick senior hurlers, says that working with the team has been five years of “massive memories”.
When speaking about resilience and resolve, Ms Currid said that All-Star hurler Seán Finn - who was in the audience - should be up on the stage as he “epitomises resolve and resilience” in the injuries he has been going through.
“As we all say, within the Limerick hurlers, you know, - I think it's a key to their success - in order to be resilient and to keep taking the punches and getting back up again, you have to have a really strong foundation in yourself, you know, and we have to have a strong foundation as a team,” Ms Currid said, addressing those in attendance.
“And so what I mean by that is understanding what truly matters to us, understanding that intrinsic motivation, because a lot of the time we are chasing after other people's expectations or other people's beliefs for us.
“Everybody in this room, no more than the hurlers, has a very unique belief system and value system. And we need to understand what that is for us so that we can understand what matters to us,” she added.
According to Ms Currid, they have been building that belief system with the hurlers for the past six years.
“I think if you said to those boys, ‘you can have the camaraderie and the brotherhood, or you can have the medals?’ Well, I know, every day, they'll take that brotherhood that they have, because when they're out on the pitch, and they're playing in those games, they're not doing it for those medals, they're doing it for each other because that's what matters to them. That's the intrinsic motivation,” Ms Currid said.
“I’ve never seen a group as tight and as close and it’s even in the backroom team. It's everybody together, we just spent such an amount of time together. Seanie [Seán Finn] was telling me that even just recently, another few of them went off on holidays together. They're not asked to do that, they want to do that, they want to be in each other's company.
“I truly believe you'll handle an awful lot of stress in your life and an awful lot of challenges once you have that really strong core foundation,” she added.
Ms Currid, who resides in Sligo and is currently two years into her PhD studies at the University of Limerick, said confidence and how to pick someone up whose confidence has been shot was one of the reasons she decided to take on more studies.
“What I'm studying is our belief systems and how our childhood experiences impact our belief systems today as adults,” she said.
“What we're seeing with the research is, and it's a huge link to confidence, is that what has happened to us when we were younger, different types of mini traumas, big traumas, that we haven't processed them to a certain extent, because when we're younger, to the age of zero to 12, we have no cognitive ability to process that.
“So anything that has happened to us between that time, we felt it, but we couldn't cognitively process it. So, therefore, when we get to adulthood, we would have taken on a huge amount of beliefs in that space of time, but we didn't process it. When you're triggered now today, by different experiences, you feel it, but sometimes you can't even put words to it. You can lack belief in yourself. But you wonder, ‘why is that?’”
She continued: “What I want to do is to create that process to bring people back safely into their world where they can understand different things that they've experienced and see, well, how is it leading to that belief system today?”