Tryouts- Negative Thoughts And Nerves

:: TRYOUTS – NEGATIVE THOUGHTS AND NERVES ::

Imagine for a second you are standing at the tee box (I know… golf… but I have a valid point) you look at the water that is about fifty yards in front of you and say to yourself, “I hope I don’t hit my ball into the water,” where’s your ball going? Most likely it’s going in the water. I don’t think that you need to be a mental expert to know that we always get what we are most focused on. This means that no matter what we are focusing on, either a positive or negative result or consciously or unconsciously will have a direct effect on our performance. Too often during high pressure situations we see athletes crumble and the cause often results in a poor mental makeup or simply ignoring the mental aspect of the game.

If you want to get nervous, focus on what you don’t want to happen, focus on the past or future and feel all of the nervousness, stress and doubts that will be created. The truth is that no one WANTS to create these negative feelings themselves but yet almost every athlete will create negative feelings all on their own.

For athletes to become successful, they must learn how to monitor their thoughts and images that are creating these negative emotions in their mind during competition and learn how to automatically replace these negative thoughts with positive images and thoughts. Athletes I work with begin to make this switch automatically so that whenever you find yourself focusing on what you don’t want, it automatically gets replaced with one that you do want, WITHOUT you thinking. This means that when you play, you can simply enjoy performing at your best and no longer are overwhelmed with negative thoughts or focusing on not thinking of negative thoughts.

The first step to an automatic mind is to determine the specific moments when you get tense, nervous or discouraged. Every athlete I work with will have a unique set of experience that creates their negative emotions. The best way to determine this is through visualization and previous performances. Look at competitions that you recently played in and replay the game in your mind keeping in tune with the emotions that you felt during the competition.

The key to visualization is to make the images in your mind realistic by recalling the ice sights, sounds, feelings in your muscles and your mind. If you find a moment where you were particularly nervous replay this event in your mind and determine the root cause of the negative feelings. Complete this activity for multiple competitions and you will soon discover a trend of events which trigger your negative emotions. Triggers can range from stepping on the ice for warm up to a bad call from the referee so look for those events that affect you.

The process of determining what causes you to be overcome with negative emotions or feelings is a very deliberate process but will help you to gain self awareness. By completing this activity you will now be able to understand what causes you to be overcome with negative emotions. This is only the first step in replacing the negative emotions with a positive emotion but I hope that it will help you to gain more self awareness in your game. Professional athletes are aware of what triggers them even if the answer of what triggers them is embarrassing.

Shaun Smith is the founder of Absolute Mental Training and provides The Goalie Guild with a weekly column that is posted every Tuesday. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email him atssmith@absolutementaltraining.com!