Whether you’re just beginning, in the middle of, or just ending your sport’s season. Whether you’re having a great season and want it to continue, having an okay season and want to improve on it, or it has been a disappointing season so far and want to turn it around. Whatever your sports situation, you want to do everything you can to perform the best you can in your athletic efforts.
In my last post, I offered some suggestions based on what I’ve learned from George Costanza of Seinfeld fame. In this post, I want to share what I call the ‘Seven Fs’ that describe attitudes and approaches that can relieve you of the unnecessary expectations and pressure that can hurt your efforts to achieve your sports goals this season.
Free
One thing that can happen, whether you are performing well or not, is that your mind can get cluttered with thoughts (e.g., negative, doubt, worry) and emotions (e.g., fear, frustration, disappointment) that do you absolutely no good and can actually make it impossible for you to perform your best.
My goal is for you to perform free. In other words, to clear out all of the irrelevant junk and unnecessary cognitive detritus and have your mind clear and focused on what will enable you to perform your best when you enter the field of play.
Focus
Speaking of focus, that is one mental muscle that you need to have strong and primed for you to perform your best. As I have said ad nauseum over the years, the biggest obstacle to effective focus is being preoccupied with results. Unfortunately, we live in a results-obsessed sports culture in which ignoring results requires an almost Herculean effort.
Many athletes believe that by focusing on the results they want, the more likely they’ll be to achieve those results. But, the fact is that by obsessing about results, you are less likely to get the results you want. Why, you ask. Because if you’re focused on results, you’re not focused on what you need to do to achieve them. Plus, being fixated on results causes fear of failure, expectations, pressure, and anxiety, none of which play nice with successful athletic performance.
On game day, you want to be entirely focused on what you need to do to perform your best: A positive attitude, a good physical and sport warm-up, and an effective pre-competitive routine.
Feelings
What underlies the clutter and results focus I just described is that athletes are thinking too much before their competitions. In fact, overthinking is a major obstacle for the vast majority of athletes I work with. The problem with thinking is that it occurs in your mind, yet sports happens in the body.
Your goal on game day is to keep thinking to a minimum and draw on your feelings to perform your best. When I refer to feelings, I have two kinds in mind. First, your physical feelings. As physical beings, you may have it all together technically, tactically, and mentally, but if your body isn’t ready to perform its best, you are simply not going to perform your best. So, the time leading up to the start of the competitions should emphasize getting your body and your physical intensity ready to roll.
Second, your emotions. I believe that feelings can either act as an anchor that weighs you down or fuel to propel you to athletic success. Another key step on game day is for you to generate positive and motivating emotions (e.g., excitement, joy, pride, inspiration) that will drive you toward your game goals.
Fight
Sports can be very frustrating with many aspects of them outside of your control (e.g., weather, conditions, judging). When things don’t go your way, it’s easy to want to just give up (think fight-or-flight and choosing flight). When I talk about giving up and flight, I don’t mean running away from the sidelines. Instead, giving up and flight are expressed with cautious and tentative efforts in which the slightest mistake can cause you to surrender. But there’s one huge problem with this scenario: As soon as you give up or choose flight, you lose! 100% of the time!! Plus, it’s a lose-lose situation in which you not only fail to achieve your goal for the day, but you also feel awful because you gave up on yourself which is far worse than any defeat you may experience.
Particularly when things get tough on game day, and your mind and body are screaming at you to quit, you must make a conscious decision to fight. Of course, I don’t mean going over to your opponents and punching them in the nose. Instead, I mean deciding that no matter how bad it gets, you’re going to continue to stay focused, motivated, and intense, and, importantly, fight to the end, regardless how it turns out. If you keep fighting, one good thing might happen and one good thing will happen. In the might-happen category, you just might get the result you were hoping for despite the tough conditions. In the will-happen category, you will feel great pride and satisfaction in knowing, regardless of the outcome, that you fought to the end and you couldn’t have done anything more.
F&%# it!
A big problem that many athletes have is that they enter what I call the “too zone” in which their sports becomes too important and they care too much. This reaction causes them to see sports as a threat to their self-identity, self-esteem, and goals. In other words, every time they compete, they feel they have everything to lose.
The antidote to this kind of self-imposed weight on their shoulders is the F&%# it! attitude (my apologies for the coarse language, but sometimes the F-bomb is the only way to adequately describe what we’re feeling). The F&%# it! attitude means letting go of results and recognizing that you will be okay if things don’t work out the way you want on game day. In other words, you have nothing to lose, which triggers the other five Fs in this post.
Fun
If you’re a serious athlete, it’s easy to get wrapped in your sports hopes, goals, and dreams. You can want it SOOO bad that you lose perspective on why participate in your sport. That’s when sports becomes more grind than flow, threat than challenge, burden than uplift.
That’s where the sixth F-word comes in: fun! One of the most common refrains that I hear from the professional and Olympic athletes I work with is “I just wish sports were fun the way it was when I was a kid.” Well, it can be if you let go of the junk and get back to your roots. The ironic thing is that if you focus on fun, the other Fs fall into line resulting in the seventh F.
Full Gas
It’s easy to make sports complicated. There certainly are a lot of factors, both within and outside of your control, that will determine how you perform and the results you get. And they can become overwhelming if you let them. But on game day, you want to make things as simple as possible and focus on the basics. In other words, everything you think, feel, and do should culminate in one powerful act: Performing the very best you can. And that ultimate goal in sports can be boiled down to two simple words (or other words that mean the same thing): Full gas!
Want to take a big step in your mental training? Take a look at my online mental training courses or my latest mental training book, Train Your Mind for Athletic Success.
