Photo by cottonbro studio
An athlete’s emotional control impacts performance on the field. Marc Jones published an article in The Sport Psychologist (2003) titled Controlling Emotions in Sport outlining the various impacts that emotions have on sports performance. Emotional responses can affect motivation, cognitive and physical function. For a more detailed explanation, I encourage you to read this article as this article intends to keep the topic as simple as possible.
Building on our previous post, Clutch Performance and Positivity, we offered tips to stay positive during athletic performance. The tips were to focus only on the facts of a situation, controlling only what you can and to stay within yourself. Simplicity is the goal so an athlete may be able to rely on these tips during performance, when emotions are hitting the hardest. In this article, we hope to provide more insight into these tips in case there were questions.
Focus on the facts, not conjecture or opinion
Sports are filled with moments that we can think the worst automatically within situations. Missing a shot doesn’t make a poor shooter, hitting a tee shot into the trees doesn’t mean you are a poor golfer or missing a tackle doesn’t mean that you are a poor tackler. At the same time, maybe you are poor at these aspects. The point is, an isolated event doesn’t create fact. You must take one’s entire body of work or the entire situation into account and then decide which is fact or conjecture/opinion.
Making sure that what our brain is focusing on is actually factual and not conjecture or opinion is paramount to maintaining positivity overall. Missing a shot with 30 seconds remaining in a game doesn’t mean you’ve lost. Now, if you believe that isolated events are fact, they will become fact. If you are a poor tackler and your mindset is that you are a poor tackler then you’ll likely continue to be a poor tackler. Changing your mindset to ‘I’m not a good tackler YET’ creates action for you to attack a weakness so that you are not a poor tackler for long.
Focus on what you can control and work to control it
There are always 2 things that every athlete can control: attitude and effort! In sports and life, there will always be up’s and down’s and many of them are completely out of your control. If you are spending time and energy worrying about circumstances outside of your control, you are taking energy away from those things that you can control.
In all circumstances, we can all control our attitude and effort. Even when the attitude or effort of others is lacking, don’t criticize or point fingers. Instead, lead by example by always exemplifying an outstanding attitude and outstanding effort! This one tip will take you very far at all things in life.
Stay within yourself
Don’t try to do more than you have to or you are able to in a situation. Learn to also rely on the skills of those around you. Being down by 1 point doesn’t mean that the ultimate Clutch play is you making the game winning shot. Perhaps the Clutch play would be a drive to open up a teammate for the game winning shot. Don’t try to do too much, just do what you have to do!
Keep it simple!
Sticking to the facts, controlling what you can control and staying within yourself is a simplified take to help athletes gain emotional control. However, it is effective. We don’t need to make things more complicated than they are, life does enough of that for us. If we can keep it simple, we definitely should.
Controlling our emotions doesn’t mean that we don’t have any emotion. In fact, sports and life are and should be full of emotion. As a person and an athlete, feel and experience those emotions and love every minute of it. Just learn to control the depth or height of those emotions in order to perform in the biggest moments! To be the ultimate Clutch performer in sports and life!
BtL
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