Anxiety and fear are more common than ever in the minds of our players. Learn a simple technique for chasing away those demons.
Thoughts about failing are scary, and worse yet – they limit our success. Unless you know how to chase them away!
We’ve all been afraid and know what it’s like to be scared. Some of us like those feelings and purposefully frighten ourselves by watching scary movies, visiting haunted houses or going to theme parks during their nighttime Halloween freight-fests.
And while some degree of fear is normal like whenever you’re doing something that’s new or challenging or in front of lots of people, it’s when your fear gets too big that it can shut you down.
The players that I coach live with much more fear than I ever did when I was playing ball. Sure, I didn’t want to lose, or let my teammates down, but I never thought about those things with a paralyzing fear.
Fears of letting people down (like teammates, coaches and parents) are super intense with today’s players so they limit their effort because they’re too worried about making a mistake. It’s as if the fears have taken on a deathly form and invaded their minds.
This can be a very crippling mind frame and as anyone who’s ever been afraid knows, simply telling them “don’t be afraid” doesn’t begin to cut it!
What does work, is replacing thoughts of fear, with thoughts of confidence. Instead of thinking about all the things that could go wrong on this next play, think about 2-3 things that you know you CAN do! These are your Strong Thoughts that chase away your weak thoughts.
Work with each of your players to help them:
- Know everybody has weak and scary thoughts. That just makes them normal.
- Our Strong Thoughts chase off our Weak Thoughts.
- Work together with them to create a couple VERY Strong Thoughts that they can practice saying whenever they feel the scary/weak thoughts show up.
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