As an athlete, performer or competitor, self-criticism, beating yourself up and focusing too much mistakes can seriously hinder your ability to perform. Self-criticism is one of the major mental blocks.

I teach and operate under this principle: Performance = Potential – Interference. Meaning, you will play, compete or perform your best when you have no interference or mental/emotional blocks.

How Do You Get Rid Of Mental Block?

To be able to clear this mental block (the inner critic), it’s extremely helpful to understand it first and then you can take it apart. Let me explain your solution to this problem using my 4-step R.A.C.E. Formula for mental toughness, which I developed from my experience working with thousands of athletes and performers over the years. This is the vehicle that will transport you to clearing this block and this is what I use for everything now to help my clients acquire mental toughness.

The 4 STEP R.A.C.E. FORMULA FOR
CLEARING MENTAL BLOCK

1st Step: R

R stands for Relentless. It means you must be relentless about your ability and desire to change these automatic thought responses that seemingly are out of your control and believe me that they are not. I give you the tools to believe you can change this and to actually do it. You just can’t give up on it and I promise you that it will go away. This video starts the process for you.

2nd Step: A

A stands for Awareness. The inner critic is a destructive (to your performance) occurrence that originates from a very useful, natural function – your goal- striving mechanism. Let’s call this your success function. Everybody has this function to some degree and it helps you accomplish things. It is normally a very helpful and useful mental gift you have. Those that have this function to a high degree have to be very careful when it comes to sports and performing. What happens is that this function gets corrupted, just like a virus corrupts computer programs and apps.

What’s The Effect Of Mental Virus?

This mental virus, if you will, gets into your bio-operating system and then turns your success function against you. It’s all automatic once the virus gets inside the system and no matter how much mental willpower you try to come up with to counter it, it will always win as I’m sure you’ve noticed.

When working well, your success function pushes you to do your best and work towards identifying and correcting errors and mistakes along the path to success. When corrupted, it turns into perfectionism and this hurts performance and here’s why, it’s really quite simple:

Do you perform better when you feel good or feel bad? Obvious right? No mystery there. The virus of perfectionism is a mis-guided belief structure that says: “I HAVE TO be perfect!”

Strive for perfection without being a perfectionist

So, if you have this, any time you aren’t perfect,or are worried about not being perfect, you are going to feel bad, which is not the best state to be in for performing well. Nobody can be perfect so you are caught in a catch 22 of trying to attain something you can never achieve! I am still surprised at how many people still think to be a “perfectionist” is a good thing. It is not. I often teach my clients to strive for perfection without being a perfectionist. Big difference.

3rd STEP: C

C which stands for Clear. I believe that there is always a reason why we do everything we do and there is a reason why we respond and react like we do and that goes for the perfectionist mind just the same. You have to clear the reason why the success function has turned against you. And here’s the kicker: You have to do it at the inner mind programming, or bodily level. You can’t just think it up here.