Читать книгу Sports Psychology For Dummies - Leif H. Smith - Страница 23

IN THIS CHAPTER

Determining your ideal mindset

Using journaling to hone your mindset

Assessing and improving your mindset

Getting into the zone

Knowing your ideal mental state is a critical step in building your mind for consistent high-level performance. Most people habitually criticize themselves for even the smallest of mistakes. It becomes a bad habit that they don’t know how to break. When asking athletes, performers, and everyday people about their past negative experiences and mistakes, they can usually quickly recall a long list of them. These are the experiences and incidents that stand out in our brains. Our “default” mental state, unfortunately, is usually negative. It is an almost automatic response. As a culture, we are trained to focus on the negatives in our everyday lives. There is an evolutionary and biological reason for this fact as well (i.e., fear kept people alive thousands of years ago — because without focusing on the possibility of danger around them, they could have easily been attacked by a hungry animal).

Think about it for yourself. Do you focus on the positive things you are doing in terms of your performance? Or do you focus on the negative? What are your thoughts about this response from one of our professional athletes, who had just made the World Cup Soccer Team:

“I cannot believe I had such an awful practice today. Why did they even keep me on the national team?”

He did not even take a few seconds to celebrate his accomplishment of making the World Cup Soccer Team for his nation! Clearly, the battle to stay positive in our brains is a very real one.

Here’s another example from a high school softball player we were working with. She had gone 1 for 4 at the plate, no errors in the field, and pitched three solid innings that game. She did happen to pitch at the time when a tying run scored from the opposing team, however. Her team went on to lose, but she spent almost a week beating herself up for that one pitch (and the pitch was a good one — the hitter was very good). Her inner critic took over for days! She took the loss personally and did not consider that there were three fielding errors by her teammates, or that her team’s batting average at the plate that game was about .200, and the opposing team was highly ranked nationwide.

The point we are making here is simply that neither of these athletes took the time to think about, absorb, and celebrate the positive aspects of their performance. This is where having an ideal mindset can help, however. If you do not work on your ideal mindset, you cannot practice it, refine it, or master it. Thus, if you infrequently pay attention to when you perform well and frequently obsess when you do not (usually due to a mistake or two), your default negative mindset will continue, and this is not helpful for performing at your best.