The Mental Game – Giving up Anger and Upset

Are you ever playing or competing and you get angry or upset?  And you can’t shake it?

If so, read this article because getting angry and upset drags down your performance big time!

As mental toughness has a lot to do with breaking down what gets in the way or the trap that we fall into first, lets deconstruct what happens.

1) We make a mistake or mess up- this is what happens.
2) We get mad at ourselves and play badly afterwards for some amount of time.

The Trap

Underneath or behind us getting angry or upset, there are a number of nasty benefits that keep us in the trap.  Here they are:

The first part of getting angry or upset that lies under the surface and keeps us stuck is we immediately think that we are or just did something wrong or bad (note- this is in our heads, not in the read world, but we collapse the mistake with that we are bad or wrong. The fact is we just made a mistake. That’s it.).  So we start kicking ourselves.

In kicking ourselves, we get ourselves off of the hook from actually facing that we just did something that gets us closer to losing, not winning.

Wait! There is more!

When you are being angry or upset, you are dominating and controlling what is going on around you.  Not in a productive dominating the opponent and kicking butt kind of way, but more like you are having a tantrum and making every one pay attention to you kind of control.  You make everyone look at you, and you even dominate your coach or teammate because when you are angry or upset, they definitely cannot talk to you.  This is another one of the nasty benefits of being angry/upset.

The last and maybe the biggest nasty benefit of getting mad is you get to make a communication to everyone else around, including yourself, that you are better than what you just did.  This gets you to look good for anyone watching.

These are the parts of the trap that get us stuck in being angry and upset.  What is there to do next?

The Solution

First, start to recognize and give up indulging in these nasty benefits when you are getting them. You will know it is time to give them up when you are angry or upset.  It takes  practice to do this. Mental toughness is a muscle, just like any other, so it needs attention and intention to grow it and improve.  Once you give up stewing in being upset, then you are free to focus on you game plan, being a leader, great teammate or kicking butt!

Tags: angry, athlete, athletic performance, mental conditioning, mental toughness, mental training, performance anxiety, sports coaching, sports focus, sports mental toughness, sports performance, tennis mental toughness, upset

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 8:12 am and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.