Peak Performance, Even While Playing in Front of a Crowd
Thursday, July 9th, 2009Peak Performance, Even While Playing in Front of a Crowd
Playing in front of an audience can be intimidating, distracting or down right nerve-racking. It is certainly a situation that can derail your mental game but also one of the times that you need your mental toughness the most.
If you have ever found it hard to focus when playing in front of others or wished the audience would just go away, then read on!
Playing in front of an audience, like any other distraction, it gets you off the hook from doing the hard focusing and concentrating that is needed to excel. But, this is not the focus of this article. For more about this, check out a previous article on avoiding distractions: Dealing With Distractions In Competitive Sports
The thing that derails our focus the most while playing in front of others is an innate human characteristic that pulls us to want to be admired, look cool and avoid looking bad. When playing for an audience, our focus can easily shift to ‘trying to look good’ for others. This is the mindset that sets in that causes tightness, lack of focus and for your game to be off.
Looking good can take many forms, including:
-Hoping you don’t mess up
-Worrying about what they will think
-Wanting to impress the audience
-Being afraid of letting someone down
-Having and overall desire for the onlookers to think you are awesome
Looking good and avoiding looking bad is also the reason people often dislike public speaking- it is an excellent opportunity to look bad with many people as witnesses. It happens in tennis as well.
When this is our focus, mental toughness, winning and fun go out the window.
As mentioned earlier, when the mindset of looking good sets in, we get tight and play to not lose. If you make a mistake or lose, not only will onlookers witness it, but all of the things that you think losing say about you (you suck, your worse than you thought, all your work was for nothing…), now the audience will think those things about you too. In light of this, it is clear why we play to not lose! Note: this ALL goes on in your head, not in reality.
When our focus is taken over by looking good, we often get upset more easily. Getting upset communicates to the spectators that you are actually better than you are playing. Getting mad lets them know this- you may even throw something to make sure they got the point.
These are all in service of having you be admired by the audience in some way.
We will not examine each particular aspect of the focus called “looking good” that can so easily take over when playing in front of people, but we have hit on several common ones. What would be really useful is to think to the last time you played in front of an audience, it does not have to be a big one, and think of the ways that looking good hampered your focus. Get to know these well.
Now that we have discussed all of the junk going on in our heads when we are playing in front of an audience, what do we do?
What there is to do is to notice this happening in your head when playing. It will still come up, but now you have the choice to pay attention to it or not. Do NOT pay attention to it, do NOT buy into it and not DO get stuck in it!
So what do you pay attention to? Focus on your game plan, strategy, how well you can play, being aggressive, dominating…. Something that is effective and powerful while playing tennis.
I say this in about every article I write or podcast I record, but mental toughness requires a developed mental strength. It takes practice, intention and attention to get good at it. The stronger your mental game, the faster and more effectively you will be able to regain your focus and get back in the zone in situations where there are people watching you play.
David Groemping
Gemini Mental Toughness Training
Sports.GeminiExecutiveCoaching.com
