Blog | The Athletes Edge

After our weekly session where we discussed how to take control of our thoughts, we had a brief fireside chat. What came up was that most of the players struggled with a consistent thought that manifested itself in multiple formats:

I am nervous about my parents watching me

I am nervous about scouts watching me

I am nervous about how I will play

I am nervous about what my school will think of me

I am nervous about what the fans will think of me

Essentially:

I am nervous about what people will think of me

How do we beat that as high performers?

Step number one is always that you need to recognize these thoughts and emotions as they come up to be able to control them. Next, you need to be skilled enough to replace them with better thoughts. This is a skill in and of itself which we will discuss later.

Let's assume you’ve recognized your falling into a trap of worrying about what someone or something is thinking of you while you perform. It is our job to USE all available resources around us to maximize our performance. What is better if you’re having these thoughts you better believe other people are too. So if you can control them and use them guess what; you have an edge over your other competitors.

Now back to you, you’re starting to focus on people-watching and worried about them judging you. You NEED to know how YOU perform best. Do YOU need to be having fun? Be angry? Be sad? Be aggressive? Nervous? Relaxed?

Your first step is to figure out how you play best. Next, we can dance with a new stimulus input which is the feeling of other people watching.

Take that input and spin it so it works for you!

We can spin it to add to our performance.

Scouts watching have you nervous?

If you play best by being:

Angry

Your thought can be: Screw those stupid scouts, they don’t know what they are doing anyway. If they did they would be a coach or still playing. How dare they judge me.

Relaxed

Your thought can be: There is nothing I can do because I have zero ideas what they are looking for anyway so I might as well relax. I will do my best and let it be what it will be.

I don’t even care if I don’t make this team so who cares what these guys think (even if you do make yourself believe you don’t)

Happy

ONLY think about how much fun you are having. Think about how awesome it is YOU get to play here! Get pumped up and excited about performing at the thing you LOVE!

Focused

Dude. I am going to show these guys what a good performance is. Watch this you losers!

Grateful

I! Get to play! In front of scouts! Dude! I Get to PLAY IN FRONT OF SCOUTS! I don’t even care if I suck. Scouts came to watch me. I am so grateful I get to play in front of these scouts! This is awesome!

The point is. Thoughts are stimuli. External events are items that give you thoughts. You get to choose how to see those things. You get to pick the lens you view ANYTHING from. Choose one that serves you at all times. Keep the power in your hands by viewing situations and picking thoughts and perspectives that serve you to achieve your goals!

A quick example:

A girl I work with from time to time said she was playing pretty horribly while trying out for THE US Olympic team. She was one of the youngest players there and REALLY wanted to make the team.

She said she felt slow. Sluggish and was just worried about playing well. It was draining her and her performance suffered.

After chatting SHE decided in the past she played the best when she was having fun. So for her skate the next day I told her to try something out. Have the maximum amount of fun the entire time she was at the rink. Walk into the rink skipping. Think about how much fun you are about to have and how much fun it is that YOU are trying out for the FREAKING OLYMPIC TEAM! That is insane! When you get on the ice laugh it up. Have a smile on our face and make sure you and everyone else around you are having a ball.

The next day she says: Oh my gosh. That was a game-changer. I had a ball, I played amazingly, I was relaxed and I know I did the best I could.

Same situation. Same person. Different perspectives have radically different results.

You choose the way you want to interpret things in your life to serve you. No matter what they are. You keep the power within you. Do not give it away without your consent.

How to Prepare

Preparing for a major event is hard.

There is a reason why top performers are different from everyone else. They know how to engage consistently, efficiently, and intensely.

This is not a skill you just "get".

You don’t just wake up and have these skills. More importantly, you do not wake up and suddenly find yourself ready to engage in a high-level performance.

As individuals, we have different selves that need to be used at different times based on what we need.

For example:

When you wake up in the morning, are you ready to jump into an MMA arena and fight someone?

Probably not.

You need to get yourself into the right frame of mind to perform whatever the task at hand is.

Choosing the right state, creating the right head space, and preparing for a performance is a ritual and a habit that needs to be developed over the years.

Let’s dive into a few ideas on how to do this.

First:

To Mentally prepare we must create conviction and determination:

Hours, days, weeks, months, maybe even years before your event, you can imagine the outcome you want.

But you need to start focusing your mind/body and spirit on the task at hand.

Roger Bannister was the first to break the 4-minute mile. Before him, it couldn’t be done, and everyone knew it couldn’t be done.

So how do you do something that cannot be done? Or something you've never done?

Create unstoppable belief and conviction within yourself that you will do it.

How do we create belief and conviction?

One tool is Affirmations:

Keep telling yourself: I run a 4-minute mile. Say it over and over and over again. Say that with conviction, faith, belief, and determination until it is all you can think of. You will believe I run a 4-minute mile!

Congratulations! You just started to mentally prepare. You have defined your task and outcome. This will focus your mind in on what YOU want.

The next tool we can use is to visualize how running a 4-minute mile will feel, look, taste, and be.

What will your muscles feel like? How about your lungs? What will you see? Run the race in your head. Feel the strides, and most importantly, see the clock at the end: 3:59.04.

This will help spiritually/mentally/emotionally prepare you for the pain you will endure to accomplishing your goal. In addition, it will SHOW you what accomplishing your goals will be like.

You are bringing the future forward.

Second is the be physically prepared:

You need to spend years training and honing your body to achieve greatness. However, that is not in the scope of this article.

What we can talk about is how to physically prepare just before your performance.

Key Points:

Be sure to

Eat properly
Sleep properly
Prepare your body immediately prior. This could mean dynamic warmups, stretching, or resting. Or anything else it takes for you to warm up. (should be easy to figure out)

Third is to make sure we are Emotionally ready.

Depending on your performance and your specific needs you need to decide what emotion you want

Some people need to have fun before performing. So they will be extra focused on laughing and seeking out fun experiences and fun people. Others will want focus and intensity. They will probably put headphones on and start working in a very tight environment with a close-knit group to maintain a specific environment.

The important part is playing around with different emotions: angry, happy, sad, frustrated, mean, focused, you name it. Then work backward to figure out how to enhance that emotion with your actions or surroundings.

It is person-specific, and you need to find what works for you!

One item that combines emotion and physical movement is a term coined by Tony Robbins: “Motion=Emotion”

It means you can use your body in ways that empower and enable you. This can take the form of walking with your chest puffed out, having your eyes narrowed and focused, or going out and laughing. Use your body to achieve the state you need.

Last, we need to get spiritually prepared.

I use this term because I believe to fully immerse yourself in a performance, it needs to be your EVERYTHING for that period. You have to be fully present. Mind, body, soul, and spirit into your performance.

It is a state of being where you resolve yourself that you will do whatever it takes to achieve your desired outcome.

This is important. Think about it. If you run a marathon that lasts 3 hours, You have exactly 3 hours where you can quit. Your goal and outcome need to be more significant to you than anything else. If it is not, during those 3 hours you will have plenty of time to quit.

So how do we make the performance our everything?

It is different for each person, but we need to find our why and enhance our why.

Why is this activity and result so meaningful to you? If it is worthwhile enough to sacrifice almost anything for you to do that work.

However, if it isn't that critical to you and you're why isn’t that strong, you won’t have much to strive for.

An example: You're on a bar and you need to do a full body weight hang for one minute. Your why is that if you make it a minute, you will get $1.

Can you do it?

Maybe, maybe not.

Because at 45 seconds, when it gets tough, the motivation to continue through the pain isn’t very strong.

But what if your reason was that you were hanging over a 1,000-foot drop and you needed to hold on for one more minute so you can be rescued and taken to safety? Your why just got a heck of a lot more motivating, and I am willing to bet you would find a way to last.

Your why should inspire you, motivate you, and focus you on a singular outcome you are ready to fully commit to. Remind yourself of your why as you prepare for your performance.

The last thing we need to do is make sure we are mentally focused on the here and now.

We build this skill through hours and hours spent in meditation over the years. It is a skill of focusing your mind, without distraction, on one thing. If you can completely focus your mind on the task at hand, you are focused.

This is something you will hone in away from the performance and not something you should just expect to happen out of nowhere.

That said. As soon as you can completely focus your mind the sooner you will be able to get into the zone and you will start to perform like you never thought possible. More on that in a different article.