Pressure tip #5. When athletes or other performers are just about to do their thing under extreme pressure of having to execute their skills, a curious thing happens…

A part of your mind tries to take over and guide you to do it correctly. It wants to make sure that you have covered all of your bases and considered everything that needs to be done.   If it isn’t bringing you thoughts about your opponent, then maybe it’s reminding you that you have to hold your arm a certain way or make some specific movement your coach reminded you about last week. It wants to control things!

All sorts of thought-stuff like this can be floating around in your head in the form of voices or possibly images.  You might call this your analytical thinking function.  Your analyzer has been trained over the years to do this for you and for some athletes, it actually works well under pressure, but those are the minority.

Most athletes, however, get some degree of what we call “Paralysis by Analysis” when their analyzer grabs for control of you.  This is another interference pattern and it definitely keeps most athletes from playing in flow.

What’s the solution then, Craig?

The answer is to practice and develop another mental skill that you might have heard before:   TRUST

You might have heard the sports cliche:  “Get out of your own way.”

That’s what I’m talking about here.
Ultimately, if you want to play your best under pressure,  each athlete and performer must have a level of trust of themselves and their ability to execute the task.  Now, let me explain what I mean when I say TRUST…

It is the collective intelligence of all the cells of your body that makes you move in an efficient manner to do your sport.  It’s not just your brain cells.

That total bodily intelligence is what you need to have a TRUST built with in order to play to your potential.  You have practiced, trained, and drilled over and over to teach that intelligence (some people call it “muscle memory”)
to do what you want, when you want it….

Automatically And Without Thinking. This is what you need in pressure situations!!

In order to do this, you sometimes need to get your analyzer out of the way.  You can do this by giving it something to do.   That “something to do” can be repeating a simple sentence, phrase or singing a song in your head in order to occupy it so it doesn’t try to take over directing your body.

Imagine getting on a bicycle and trying to ride it with analyzer-controlling thoughts like this:

“Ok, make sure and push hard on the right pedal while simultaneously relaxing the leg and foot on the left pedal…. and now do the opposite.  Hold your balance by moving side to side…that’s good, you’re doing good now Craig…keep your eyes up so that you can have a good peripheral vision which helps you steer…. etc, etc.”

Ridiculous, right?  Of course it is.  Nobody rides a bike like that.

You just get on the bike and think about where you want to go and then you TRUST your ability to ride the bike because you’ve done it before.  Often, you are thinking about something totally unrelated to riding the bike like what you will do when you get there…  and miraculously, your body rides the bike…without thinking about it!

Are you following me now?

This is what you want to do with your sport.  This is how you get into that flow state which is the gateway to the zone.

Now, back to the technique of keeping your analyzer busy.  What I recommend is practicing this TRUST-building long before ever competing.

For example.  A tennis player about to toss the ball up for a serve could simply say to herself – While In The Act Of Serving –  “Rhythm and Flow, Rhythm and Flow.”   Optionally, she could simultaneously have a picture in her mind of the spot on the court she wants to hit and have that superimposed over the vision of the ball in the air.

Vijay Singh

Famous golfer Vijay Singh said that he would simply count numbers while he was swinging his golf club.

A basketball player could do this during free throws.

A soccer player might do it during penalty kicks.

What if before or even during play you just keep saying to yourself:  “Trust Your Skills, Trust Your Skills”

Now, what if you did this many times in practice and then when pressure time happens, and your analyzer tries to control and guide you, you just make it busy by having it repeat your song or phrase?  This little song or phrase then becomes an ANCHOR that brings you back to how you perform beautifully and with TRUST, in practice.  Make sense?  You build the trust in practice and you invoke it in competition.  This is really really powerful if you use it.

If you play a sport that doesn’t stop and start like those above, TRUST is still just as valuable and I would suggest you commit your intention to building this trust in other ways.  However you do it, you’ve got to do it. It’s mostly just a decision in your mind to be aware of this and work on it…you will discover your own way of building TRUST.  Stop
“trying” and start TRUSTING and optimal performances will just happen.

I’ll have more training on those other ways to build TRUST in future articles and videos. Stay tuned.

Let’s do this.
Craig Sigl mental toughness trainer