Train Your Mind
In baseball, there’s countless, countless things to try to pull our attention away from our intent. But our intent requires us to be in the present moment. Well that following through with our intent requires us to focus on the present moment, right?
There’s a quote from the navy seals that says we don't rise to the occasion, we sink to our level of training. And I think this rings really true in sport as well. I noticed a lot with athletes, I myself was one of them, who put in a ton of work in training, but it just doesn't always seem to be translating into competition. And I think the biggest reason is that we don't practice the skill of competing under pressure enough.
Why do you play the game? Why did you begin playing the game? Every athlete that I've asked these questions to, whether it be baseball, softball, golf, you name it, has said something along the lines of: It's the complexity of it. Or it's the beauty of it. Or it's just the fact that you're taking a very difficult and nuanced activity and doing it really well. If you've been playing your sport since you were a kid you might not even completely understand why you’ve always loved it. You just knew it was really fun and you showed up and balled out every time.
If you’re someone that’s prone to having unwanted, elevated levels of nerves before competition, here's three ways that you can manage those.
So why does it sometimes seem like our pre-game nerves wreck our performance? Well it's not the nerves, it's not the importance of the game, and it's not the fact that we're being evaluated. It's our interpretation of all of it. It's the belief that the demand of competition outweigh our abilities to compete.
The dreaded pre-game jitters. We've all probably experienced them before and they’ve probably wrecked our performance a time two. But I'm not convinced that it is the nerves that themselves that wreck our performance but it's more that we don't know what they are, why they happen, and how we can handle them.
Stop chasing your past performances. More often than not, when we have a really good game or a really good bat or a really good rep or whatever it might be, we tend to think that we have to follow it up with another performance that is just as good, if not better.
