Pre-Game Jitters & Perform Under Pressure

Do you ever get “butterflies” in your stomach before you compete called pregame jitters? Do you get really nervous before the start of a big match or game and can’t relax after the game starts? Most athletes have felt the negative effects of pressure during their athletic career.

Even the best athletes feel pressure before a big game, but they know how to channel the pressure into positive intensity to boost performance. What is pressure and how do athletes experience it?

Pressure is a perceived expectation of the need to perform well under challenging situations. Fear of failure and expectation is tied to pressure. When an athletes worries about disappointing others, for examples, he or she is putting pressure on him or herself to not fail or look silly.

The first step is to understand that pressure starts within you and your thoughts about the big game or about you meeting others' expectations, for example. High expectations – from yourself and others – turn into pressure. However, pressure is not some external force that grips you by the neck and strangles you.

Some athletes thrive on the feeling of pressure, whereas others crumble mentally and choke their brains out. Why? Experience, confidence, and beliefs play a vital role in how well an athlete will perform under pressure.

Pressure comes in many forms depending on the person and how an athlete *thinks* about the competition. Some sources of internal, self-inflicted pressure include:

1. Expectations you place on yourself about winning
2. Pressure to live up to the expectations from others (coach, parents, fans) to succeed
3. Thoughts underlying the fear of failure, such as having your hard work not pay off
4. Pressure to perform well or lose your place on the team
5. Pressure not to blow the game and not feel embarrassed
6. Pressure to perform perfectly and not make any mistakes

Pressure is very specific to each athlete and his or her own beliefs and thoughts. The athlete’s beliefs are key here. However, one constant is that pressure makes athletes tense, afraid, and worried, which leads to performing tentatively or cautiously. Tentative play looks like choking to others who observing.

How do you cope with pressure? The first step is to understand the specific pressures you place on your performance. When you understand HOW and WHEN you feel pressure, you can then make it help you instead of work against you.

For example, if you feel pressure from your parents to win or succeed, you have to challenge your own thinking about the expectations you have adopted from your parents. Sometimes pressure comes from expectations you have taken on from others people in your life such as parents, coaches, and teammates. You may think that others have given you these expectations, but they are actually ones you have conjured up based on what others have said to you.

I don't want to give away the farm here, because I give you all my secrets to coping with pressure in one of my recorded teleclass titled, “I Can Cope! Performing Your Very Best Under Pressure.”

You can get more information on over 24 recorded Teleclasses by visiting my online mental training program at peaksportsnetwork.com.

In this class, I personally help you to identify the type of pressure you place on yourself AND give you 5 mental strategies to perform your best under pressure. Are you ready to learn how to perform your best in crunch-time? Tune into my recorded mental toughness classes to find out!

Patrick J. Cohn, Ph.D.,

Applying Mental Toughness Daily is Not Easy

Sports psychology experts often talk about the importance of learning mental toughness to improve your performance. However, my 15 years of teaching the mental game to students makes me think that understanding mental toughness skills is not the whole enchilada. To be successful with mental toughness training, athletes must learn how to apply it.

Why would I say this?

I can teach you to improve concentration and focus all day long. You can understand the information and concepts by hearing it or reading about it (See “The Focused Athlete” at peaksports.com). However, until you actually are able to put the focusing skills into practice and competition, you can’t make any progress and REALLY learn mental toughness.

If you're serious about getting the most from what you've learned, then you must be sure to apply consistently the mental skills you understand on a conceptual level. This is the biggest challenge in my work – helping athlete apply the concepts.

Take confidence, for example. I teach athletes and coaches strategies to enhancing confidence – such as how to fight doubt – and how to put it into action. But, did you know that until an athletes actually implements them, practices them, and add them into their routines that you won't see improvement?

See, the biggest challenge is to commit to working on your mental toughness daily over weeks, months, and even years. It’s easy to pick up a book on mental training and then forget about the strategies you learned one week later. The key is to find a system to apply your new mental toughness strategies to practice and competition on a daily basis.

This is similar to the skill of visualization and seeing what you want to happen. When an athlete visualizes her performance, she can see it in her mind, but can she truly believe it and feel it?

Visualization can be just wishful thinking on the part of the athletes. If you don’t believe in the images you create in your mind and have complete control over those mental images, then it just will not be effective.

In a coaching student, I asked one of my golf students if she visualizes each shot before she executes. Her reply: "Oh no, I stopped visualizing my shots because I would only see a bad shot in my mind before I hit it." Is this athlete really using visualization the way it was intended? I don’t think so.

The best athletes truly feel, sense, and believe in what they see in their minds AND have total control over the images when they use visualization. When you can join your mental pictures with true confidence, then you have power to change your performance by just using your mind.

Want to learn simple, proven mental toughness skills that you can apply to competition? I suggest you grab my free online mental training newsletter, Sports Insights Magazine, for athletes, coaches, and sports parents:

Thank You,Patrick J. Cohn, Ph.D.,
Master Mental Game Coach

Competitive Self-Confidence Really Matters

Sports self-confidence is the number one mental skill that your young athlete must possess to be successful in sports and life! Self-doubt is the number one mental barrier that blocks athletes from success in sports and life.

Having high levels of confidence is so important that I spend most of my time teaching students how to develop and harnesses the power of confidence.

I recently received an email from a concerned sports parent about her son 'folding' under the pressure of big games. She said, in big games, he seems to lose confidence to easily and not perform well, but in practice looks like a million bucks.

This is a very common challenge that I help athletes overcome and is highly related to confidence (or what I call 'competitive confidence'). In my book, there is a big difference between practice self-confidence and competitive self-confidence.

Anyone can feel confident and look great in practice, but the challenge is having the same high level of confidence in competition or big games and performing well in these situations.

At any one time, young athletes either think in ways to boost confidence or hurt confidence. My approach is to help athlete improve their thinking so they can feel more confident AND help them identify and discard thoughts or beliefs that undermine confidence.

Some athletes are blessed with a high level of confidence in their ability and it shows in competition.

You might be the most positive sports parent in the world, but in spite of your positive parenting, your son or daughter may hold on to doubts and negative self-labels (i.e. 'I choke in big games.') that will severely limit his or her performance.

I have great news for you! We have a NEW program to help athletes boost confidence and dispel doubts forever called THE CONFIDENT ATHLETE!

'The Confident Athlete,' a 2-CD and workbook program, is a ground-breaking system to teach athletes and sports parent how to think like a champion and have ultimate self-confidence every time athletes step on the playing field, court, track, or course.

Here are a few highlight of my new program, The Confident Athlete: A 14-Day Plan for Ultimate Self-Confidence:

>2 CDs packed with confidence-boosting tips that you can enjoy many times again to squeeze out the last drop of confidence you can.

>A 68 page workbook to help you practice and apply the mental game strategies, and individualize the exercises to your needs.

>14 Days of confidence boosters and other unique exercises to solidify each confidence booster and help apply to competition.

>A daily confidence scoreboard that can be used to score confidence levels after every competition.

>A summary of all confidence action plans you must take to top off the confidence fuel tank.

>Two additional peak performance bonuses that ads real value to the program.

I strongly suggest you hop on over to my web site and check it out!
Here is the link to read more about THE CONFIDENT ATHLETE.

Sincerely,

Patrick J. Cohn, Ph.D., Mental Training Expert

'The Confident Athlete' includes two SPECIAL bonuses that you can download immediately. The first is an e-book titled 'The Confidence-Expectation Connection.' The second is an hour-long teleclass MP3 recording I did with peaksports.com members called, Don't Hang Your Head: How to Keep Confidence after Mistakes.

Get More Sports Confidence Today!