Video transcript:
One of the things that you can do as an athlete to focus more effectively and ultimately perform better is to create some distance between yourself and your thoughts. Let me explain what I mean by that.
When it comes to our relationship with our minds under pressure, we’re kind of like fish. It sounds weird, but hear me out. Our minds, the fisherman, like to constantly cast out bait for us, thoughts. And when they’re under pressure, they always seem to have something to say and most of them, having a bit of a bias towards negativity, like to cast out thoughts that don’t really help us. The overwhelming majority of the time, we take that bait and we’re gone. Our unhelpful thoughts have hooked us and now completely dominate our actions in ways that we don’t like, but we just can’t seem to control and the more we fight against it, the more hooked we seem to become.
Think back to the time where you made a silly mistake in a game and your thoughts about that mistake just seem to haunt you for the rest of the game, causing your performance to go down the drain. Now what would happen if we just took a second to notice our thoughts. To ask ourselves, does this thought really help me in this moment, to recognize that our unhelpful thoughts don’t have much power over us when we don’t grab on to them. When we notice our unhelpful thoughts and kind of just let them be, we free up a bunch of energy and attention so that we can put it towards actions that matter to us. Feel like in baseball if you’re at the plate and your mind tells you, “You can’t strike out here.” Just recognizing that that thought probably is not going to help you get a hit. And then, we can just respond with, “You know what, thanks mind, but I’m just going to commit my plate approach.”
Two things can be true at once. We shouldn’t be latching onto every single unhelpful thought that our mind throws our way, but our unhelpful thoughts are not detrimental performance killers. Simply notice them. If they’re helpful, great. If they’re not, just put some distance between yourself and them.