Did you know?
- Competitive advantage strategies are important for the mental side of sports. According to the International Journal of Physical Education, Sports and Health, athletes frequently state that the mental side of their sport is the most important aspect of their performance.
- Professional golfer Arnold Palmer said that golf is 90% psychological. According to him “the total time spent by the golfer actually swinging and striking the ball during those 72 holes is approximately seven minutes and 30 seconds, leaving 15 hours, 52 minutes and 30 seconds of ‘thinking time’”.
- Studies have shown that mental readiness is felt to be the most significant link to Olympic ranking.
As an athlete, once you achieve a certain physical ability with your sport, it is your mental skillset that makes or break your optimal performance.
So, how can you improve the mental aspect of your sport, and improve your athletic performance? Check out these 4 competitive advantage strategies.
Strategy 1: Remember why you chose your sport in the first place.
As an athlete, overthinking gets in the way of peak performance. But what does this mean exactly? To help explain this, let’s touch on the conscious vs. the subconscious mind.
Your conscious mind = your thinking mind. Everything you are thinking about in any particular moment is within your conscious awareness. This includes awareness of yourself and the world around you. Your conscious mind is also responsible for logic and reasoning. For instance, you use this throughout the day to make decisions, problem solve, and take action. Any voluntary action you take, for example, raising your arm, is done by your conscious mind.
Your subconscious mind = your non-thinking, ‘power’ mind. Your underlying emotions, memories, beliefs, and urges that are outside of your conscious awareness, are within your subconscious mind. According to Sigmund Freud your subconscious greatly impacts your behavior and experience. This is true even though you are largely unaware of its underlying influences. Your subconscious is also responsible for your involuntary bodily functions, such as respiration and heart rate. The process behind these is known as the autonomic nervous system.
How overthinking gets in the way of peak performance
The conscious mind sometimes tends to overthink. When this happens, your subconscious, or power mind, gets overruled. It is the subconscious where all of your athletic abilities, both mental and physical, exist. When conscious thinking blocks access to the subconscious, this may negatively impact your athletic performance.
For example, have you ever had a stressful time in your life, inside or outside of your sport, that you kept thinking about? When you brought this thinking onto the playing field or arena, did it impact you? As a result, was it a positive or negative impact?
The key concept to remember here is that the part of you that can play your sport well and more importantly, have fun doing it, is at the subconscious level. This is where your power is. In other words, effective competitive advantage strategies incorporate methods of accessing the subconscious.
Something to try
Just for fun, try this short experiment. Focus on what you love about your sport. Bring to mind why you are doing this in the first place. Recall a time when you first started out in your sport, with no thought of failure or success, when it was all about having fun practicing, competing, and building your abilities. Spend a minute or two here….
How do you feel after those couple of minutes? More energized? More in touch with the love of your sport? Most athletes answer yes to these questions. The truth is, this love for your sport is already in you, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this right now. It is important to understand that this part of you is on the subconscious level.
So, when you get caught up in your thinking, sometimes just spend a few minutes recalling what you love about your sport and why you do it to help get you out of an unhelpful thinking cycle.
Strategy 2: Set an intention or goal to stay focused.
Keeping the love of your sport in mind, setting an intention or goal for the day/week/month/season can further help keep you on track and focused.
For example, one of my clients John, a professional baseball player, came to me because he was feeling pressure from coaches, family, and the media. He felt he had to live up their expectations, and this dragged him down and caused him to feel stressed, anxious, fearful and doubtful . As a result, he found himself overthinking everything, and he lost not only his ability to play at his best, but he lost his ability to enjoy his sport.
Needless to say, this was a very serious issue for John. To get him back on track, I had him reconnect to what he loves about baseball. We did this in great detail, with as many specifics as he could provide. He reminded himself of these every day. In addition, we added actions that reflected his love for baseball.
For example, John set a personal goal to practice his batting skills with fast balls for one month, because this was a skill he wanted to improve that would make him enjoy the game even more. After a short time, John experienced renewed motivation to play baseball. His stress, anxiety, fear and doubts subsided, and his batting skills improved greatly.
Strategy 3: Learn to manage challenging emotions.
There are three things to remember with managing challenging emotions. One, every one of us experiences a range of emotions every day. Two, every emotion we experience serves a purpose, providing fertile ground for growth and learning. Three, behind every emotion are specific thoughts and beliefs.
Thoughts -> feelings -> more thoughts -> more feelings -> actions that reflect the feelings. Your emotions, thoughts and beliefs feed off each other. This knowledge alone may reduce the ability of challenging emotions to trip you up.
For example, my client John had thoughts about his situation, himself, and people around him that caused him to feel anxious, stressed, fearful and doubtful. These challenging emotions spawned more similar thoughts. These led to him feeling worse, and impacted his ability to play baseball at his best.
I worked with John to examine his subconscious thinking process. We determined which of his thoughts caused the challenging emotions. I also helped him understand the value in these emotions, in that they could help him learn more about himself, and grow. For example, doubt was a sign that he was overly focused on others’ opinion of him. He needed to redirect his focus to the physical and mental strengths that he already possessed. Good completive advantages strategies will address how to manage challenging emotions.
Strategy 4: Challenge your thinking.
When your emotions negatively impact your actions, reactions, or athletic performance, it is time to challenge your underlying thoughts and beliefs. But how do you know what these are? To get to this level of awareness, you can use practices such as meditation, relaxation or hypnosis, to get out of the ‘thinking’ mind.
It is ok to have beliefs, but sometimes we unknowingly create disempowering beliefs that are irrational and unnecessary. So we form disempowering beliefs for reasons that served us at a particular time in our lives. There is no reason, no need, to carry them forward in our lives. These beliefs are not based in reality other than the reality we create in our own minds. Our personal realty is subjective and changeable. We create our own reality. Sometimes our beliefs seem very real, but the truth is they are only real only because we make them real.
My client John had certain beliefs about himself, about his situation and about other people. As a result these made him feel stressed, anxious, fearful, and doubtful. Until he realized it was his thinking that caused the unwanted feelings, he was stuck in endless, unhelpful thinking patterns. Once he became aware of these, he was able to put competitive advantage strategies in place. As a result he was able to change them to support how he wanted to feel and act.
These competitive advantage strategies are proven to help you get to the next level in your sport and life. We would love to hear how they work for you!
Want to make a positive change? There’s no better time than NOW!
Lynne,
Your Mindset Mental Coach
