Sports Performance and The Trap of Trying to Do Too Much

Do you go for too much, kick yourself and then do it again?
Are you ever less consistent and make more errors in competition than in practice?
Ever have a hard time choosing the right shot or thing to do when playing?

If so, you are in the trap of doing too much and this article is for you!

In completive sports, everyone wants to win, a lot. It is easy to get up against a strong opponent, size them up and decide that they are good. Maybe even better than you. Familiar? When this happens, the common and automatic way to try to beat this opponent is to try harder and give it more. GRRR!!! When this happens, we often get in the trap of trying to do too much.

The Trap

I’ll use a tennis example, but this goes for any sport. We see the opponent, and they’re very good. We think, “It’s going to take a lot to win this one.” So then we start to go for too much. We try and hit the ball harder, closer to the lines and do things that are not necessarily in our game plan.

So what happens? We make more errors, we lose points, and we shoot ourselves in the foot.

If this is familiar, be proud. You’re not the only one.

Now that we know the trap, what keeps us stuck in the trap?

What Keeps Us Stuck

It comes from a few possible and similar underlying notions that are hidden from our immediate view.
1) There is something wrong with my game – there is a problem with my game, it is bad in some way. This could apply to your whole game or specific parts of it.
2) I am unable – I can’t win this, beat this person/team.
3) My game isn’t good enough – what I have, my skill, my experience… just are not sufficient or enough to win here.

What is going on in our heads give us our actions. Because these notions have been our focus, what we end up doing is compensating by going for too much, trying to play beyond our abilities and in the end, blow the game or match.

None of these notions will help you win, and they certainly erode any mental toughness or completive advantage you have. The most useful thing to do from here is to recognize which one(s) is/are most relevant to you. As a side note- these are natural and common notions people have with regards to their abilities in sports let alone other areas of life, and are not necessarily true.

The Solution

Now that we see that this has been our focus (although hidden from our immediate view) what there is to do is choose to give that notion up, and focus on something that will actually give you peak performance and contribute to your mental toughness. Again, this could be your game plan, being aggressive, excellence or exploiting a weakness. You choose, just make sure that it is interesting to you.

Now that we have broken it down, what there is to do is engage in the mental training that it takes to grow your mental strength. So when you find yourself matched up against an opponent that is really good, or catch yourself trying to do too much, give up the notion that is keeping you stuck. Then shift your focus away from that and to something that WILL have you play great!

David Groemping
Gemini Mental Toughness Training
www.Sports.GeminiExecutiveCoaching.com

Peak 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

Dealing With Distractions In Competitive Sports

This article was written in the context of tennis, but is applicable to any other sport and even business situations where you may become distracted.

Often times, we are not playing tennis, or any other sport for that matter, in a vacuum. There are things going on that can serve as distractions, making it harder for us to focus and play well.

I am often asked, “how do I focus despite XYZ distraction?”

If you have ever asked this question, this article is for you!

First, lets name a few common distractions:
-People on a court next to you
-People yelling or talking near you
-Objects coming on to your court
-The weather
-Noise or noises
-Body pain
And there are certainly more!

In this article, we are not going to get into the distraction/challenge of focusing while people are watching- this is a whole different can of worms which I will deal with another time. Here, we are dealing with stuff that is happening around us that can derail our focus.

Now that we have a few of our most likely distractions on the mat, lets talk about how to play great in spite of them!

First off, lets lump the things that can cause us to be distracted into a category called “circumstances.” These are things that can happen or go on, that we may or may not have control over. It is actually likely that we do not have control over them.

In whatever we are doing, we always have a focus, whether we are aware of it or not. A lot of times when it gets windy, the player on the court next to you is having a tantrum or you have a blister, this circumstance becomes your focus. And you start complaining to yourself about it. Having a circumstance be your focus is not being mentally tough because you cannot focus on this circumstance and how to win at the same time. IMPOSSIBLE!

So the first part to realize is that your circumstance becomes your focus and it is ineffective for winning.

What there is to do is to shift your focus from your circumstance to your strategy, game plan or something else that actually does have something to do with winning.

For some of you, this may be easy, for others, it is harder. That is OK because next we are going to get into what keeps your focus stuck on the circumstance so you can get it unstuck.

The first thing that has us get stuck is thinking about how this particular circumstance is bad/wrong/should not be. What goes hand in hand with this notion is we start to resist the circumstance being there. The more you get mad at the circumstance, think about how bad it is and the more you resist it being there, the worse your mental toughness will be. Giving up the notion that it is bad/wrong and resisting it is the first step to more easily shifting your focus to something productive. Getting mad at the circumstance and resisting it will not change it anyhow.

The second is that focusing on the circumstance is a way to get off of the hook from actually focusing and being tough. Focusing is hard and takes a degree of intellectual effort. It is easier and lazier to blame a circumstance for having you lose focus and play badly than actually be mentally tough to focus and win. You have to give up letting yourself off of the hook from really focusing by blaming the circumstances to be mentally tough in dealing with distractions.

We often have the view that the particular circumstance is making us get distracted and we have no choice in the matter. Wrong. The circumstance is happening and then we allow ourselves to get distracted.

Another useful thing to remember is that for many distractions such as the weather or noise, they are happening to the other person too, not just you.

Distractions happen and make it tougher to focus. But to play well and win, you have to use mental toughness to surmount them. Mental toughness is a muscle like any other and it takes using it to force your focus away from circumstances and towards what is going to help you win. If being mentally tough and winning were easy, everyone would be doing it!

David Groemping
Gemini Mental Toughness Training
www.Sports.GeminiExecutiveCoaching.com