Sports: Foundation of Prime Sport
Before you can begin the process of developing Prime Sport, you need to create a foundation of beliefs about your sport on which you can build your mental skills. This foundation involves your attitudes in two areas. First, your perspective on competition; what you think of it, how you feel about it, and how you approach it. Second, your attitude toward success and failure; how you define success and failure, and whether you know the essential roles that both success and failure play in becoming the best athlete you can be. Clarifying your views in these areas will make it easier to win the mental game and to achieve Prime Sport.
Perspective on Competition
Sports are obviously important to you. You put a great deal of effort into your sports participation. Because of this, you put your ego on the line every time you perform. When you don’t perform well, you’re disappointed. This may not feel good, but it’s natural because it means you care about your sport.
There is, however, a point at which you can lose perspective and your feelings toward your sport can hurt your performances. The key red flag is what I call the “too zone.” You want to care about your participation in your sport, but you don’t wan to care too much. You want your performances to be important to you, but not too important, You want to try hard to achieve your goals, but you don’t want to try too hard.
In the “too zone,” your self-esteem is overly connected to your involvement and results in your sport, when how you feel about yourself as a person is too influenced by how you perform. If you find yourself feeling this way, you have lost perspective on the role that sports play in your life. You should reevaluate what your sports participation means to you and how it impacts your life and your well being. You will probably find that it plays too big a role in how you feel about yourself. When this happens, you not only perform poorly (because you feel far too much pressure), but you may find that your sport is no longer fun for you.
The Prime Sport view of competition means keeping your sport in perspective. To perform your best and to have fun, you need to keep your sports participation in a healthy place in your life. It may be important to you, but it should not be life or death. Sports should be a part of your life, not life itself. Remember why you participate: it’s fun, you like the exercise, it’s a great way to socialize, it feels great to master a sport, and, yes, you like to compete and succeed. If you have fun, work hard, enjoy the process of your sport, and do not care too much about success and failure, you will enjoy the competition more, you will perform better, and you will be more likely to achieve your goals as well.
Ups and Downs of Sport
To achieve Prime Sport, you must also recognize and accept the ups and downs of sport. In the history of sport, very few athletes have had perfect or near-perfect seasons: Wayne Gretzky, Steffi Graf, Michael Jordan, Nancy Lopez, Tiger Woods. Even the best athletes have ups and downs. Since they do, then you should expect to have them as well. It’s not whether you have ups and downs in your sport, but how big the ups and downs are and how you respond to them. In fact, Prime Sport Alert! is devoted to assisting you in minimizing the ups and downs of sport.
In a down period, it’s easy to get frustrated, angry, and depressed. You can feel really disappointed in how you’re performing and can feel helpless to change it. You may want to just give up. But none of these feelings will help you accomplish your important goals: getting out of the down period and returning to a high level of performance. This is a skill that separates the great athletes from the good ones. The best athletes know how to get back to an up period quickly.
How do they do this? First, they keep the down period in perspective, knowing that it’s a natural and expected part of sports. This attitude takes the pressure off them to rush back to a higher level of performance and keeps them from getting too upset. It also enables them to stay positive and motivated. Most important, they never give up. They keep working hard, no matter how bad it gets. Great athletes look for the cause of their slump and then find a solution. If you maintain this attitude toward the ups and downs of sport, your down periods won’t last as long and you’ll more quickly swing back to an up period.
Love and Fun
It’s easy to lose sight of why you compete in sports. There is the competition, awards, rankings, and attention. Yet, when you get focused on the external benefits of sport, you may lose sight of the internal reasons why you compete. You may not have as much fun and you won’t perform as well either. When this happens, you need to remind yourself of what sport is all about. Sports participation should be about two things. First, about love: love of the sport, love of others, and love of yourself. If you love your sport, you have a chance to achieve Prime Sport.
Second, sports should be about fun. Working hard, improving your performance, the intensity of competition, and enjoying the process—win or lose—should all be fun. If you always remember that sports are about love and fun, then you will enjoy participating and you will perform your best.
Success and Failure
Related to your attitude toward competition is your approach to success and failure. How you define success and failure, and your perceptions of the roles that success and failure play in developing Prime Sport, will determine your ability to perform your best consistently. Your attitude toward success and failure will either promote or interfere with achieving your goals.
Too often, success and failure are defined narrowly as winning and losing. The athlete who wins the competition is successful and everyone else has failed. But how many times have you performed well, yet lost. The fact is you can’t usually control whether you win or lose. What you can control is the effort you put in and how well you perform. It’s fruitless to strive for something that’s out of your control, so success and failure should be defined in terms of things over which you have control. With this in mind, I define success as giving your best effort and performing to the best of your ability. I define failure as not trying your hardest and not performing as well as you can. The nice thing about this definition is that it’s within your control, you’ll feel less pressure, you’ll perform better, and as a result, you’ll be more likely to achieve your goals and enjoy the experience.
There are many misconceptions that athletes hold about success and failure. Many athletes believe that the only way to win is to have always won; that winners rarely lose and losers always lose. The reality is that successful athletes lose more often than losers. Losers lose a few times and quit. Successful athletes lose at first, learn from the losses, then begin to win because of what they’ve learned.
Both success and failure are essential to achieving Prime Sport. Success builds confidence and reinforces your belief that you can perform well and meet the challenges of competition. There are, however, problems with too much success too early. Success can breed complacency because, if you succeed all of the time, there’s little motivation to improve. Sooner or later though, as you move up the competitive ladder, you’ll come up against someone who is just as good or better than you, and since you haven’t been motivated to improve, you won’t be as successful. Success also doesn’t identify areas in need of improvement. If you always succeed, your weaknesses won’t become apparent and you won’t see the need to work on your performance. Success also doesn’t teach you how to constructively handle the inevitable obstacles and setbacks of sport. You may become so accustomed to success that when you finally do fail, it will be a shock to you.
There are also benefits to failing that will ultimately enable you to succeed more. Failure provides you with information about your progress. It shows you what you’re doing well and, more importantly, what you need to improve on. Failure shows you what doesn’t work, which helps you identify what works best. Failure also teaches you how to positively handle adversity, persevere in the face of setbacks, and be patient in your athletic development. Rather than becoming discouraged by failure, you should focus on how it will help you become a better athlete. If you learn the valuable lessons from both success and failure, you’ll gain the perspective toward your sport that will allow you to achieve Prime Sport.
