A peak performance Mindset is a combination of 2 things:
- Showing up as the best version of you.
- Controlling the elements of your sport which are within your control.
Let’s start with showing up as our best self. This comes down to the way we prepare both physically and mentally.
So, what is preparation? and when do we start preparing for competition to get the best out of ourself?
Short answer – as soon as your last competition meet ends. All the trainings, workouts, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and hydration set you up for your next meet. Those are some of the physical components of preparation. But what about the mental component of preparation?
Most athletes I know perform at their best when they feel at their best. And that’s why it is important to do everything possible to show up as the best version of you. And for the most part, this is absolutely within your control as an athlete.
Only you know what the best version of you looks like so if you think about the times or memories that you were at your happiest. Not just in sports but in everyday life.
- What do you notice about yourself?
- What do you say to yourself / think about?
- What sort of emotions do you feel other than good or happy?
- How do you act or behave?
- How is your posture?
- How do you hold your body?
- How would your friends or the people you care about describe you at your best?
- What would they say about you?
And if you still can’t think of anything, answer me this question…
- What sort of person or characteristics do you want display to be the best person you can be?
This is going to set the baseline / foundation for your mental preparation & pre-competition routine. It will give you clarity and direction to work towards for each competition meet. Granted, you are a human being, we carry emotions, so you’re not always going to feel at your best. But knowing who you are at your best will also help with what we call a transformational routine.
What is a transformational routine?
A transformational routine is knowing and implementing parts of your pre-competition routine that are going to put you into the right state of mind. You may have all the right intentions but there may be situations leading up to performance that are outside of your control. Whether that’s something that has happened outside of sports, issues with other competitors, fans, etc. The competition meet starting early or being delayed. It is the elements of unexpected surprise or adversity that can impact the way you feel. And that is why we want a go-to transformational routine to get us back into the right frame of mind, so we can show up as the best version of ourselves (or at least as close as possible), feel in control and locked in to what we intend to achieve.
The truth is nobody performs at their best in a state of stress. The mind loves to be in control. And when distractions or unexpected things happen, it has the ability to take us out of control and into a state of stress. We can’t feel both at the same time. So we are either calm and feeling in control or we are stressed, overwhelmed, anxious and doubting ourselves. When we go into stress… cortisol, which is the stress hormone, is released into the brain and into our nervous system. It clouds our thoughts, increases our heart rate and some interesting feelings start to occur in our body.
We feel lightheaded. We feel sick in our stomach, or the butterflies, the weak knees or jelly legs. We start to sweat profusely. This is how the fear centre of our brain warns us to fight, flee, or freeze the situation. For most athletes this results in overthinking, hesitancy, and rigid actions as everything is controlled by the conscious mind. The problem, is that every rep lodged is embedded into our subconscious mind or you may know it as muscle memory. It is where all of our habits are lodged. And if you practice a skill over and over, it eventually becomes an autopilot behaviour embedded into our subconscious mind. But to access this, to play in flow… There has to be a deep trust, a resilience to distraction, a confidence in your skillset, so that you are able to feel in control. And that is why, the foundation of confidence is developed through practice, repetition, and perseverance.
But this is also why a pre-competition routine is key to peak performance and also performance consistency because it gives us a level of resilience and control. The mind loves to feel in control. If you knew that you were going to perform at your best every single time you that you stepped into competition, you would feel in complete control. But the fact that every race starts at 0:00 the fact that every score starts at 0-0 means that anything can happen. And that is where we sense a lack of control.
Anxiety, nerves, self-doubt comes from future thinking. It’s the “what-ifs” of performance. And as humans, at default we have a negative bias which means it’s usually “what-if bad”. What if I mess up? What if I lose? What if I let my teammates or coaches down? What are people going to think of me? etc. So once again, a pre-competition routine gives us a sense of familiarity, comfort, and control.
So, what sort of things can we implement into preparation that give us every chance of performing at our best in competition? Well, a great start and something that can help guide your preparation is understanding what level of focus is required for you to perform at your best. Some athletes don’t like to play the game too early in their mind because it leaves them feeling anxious, jittery, and can leave them feeling mentally exhausted even before competition starts. While others need time to get through the different components of their preparation to give them a sense of comfort and control.
Although we are unable to specifically measure focus intensity like you can with the more physical elements of sport, such as size, speed, agility, etc. we know when we are locked into competition and when we are not. So one thing to set the tone, is to give the level of intensity you need to perform at your best a number on a scale of 1-10. 1 is a lack of energy, feeling fatigued or tired, feeling a little slow or a play behind, and a 10 is super-hyped, out of control, feeling rushed or like everything is moving at a break-neck speed, ready to run through a brick wall. Now this will differ for everybody depending on the sport and the individual. The reason we do this is so that we can monitor where we sit in regards to our peak performance focus intensity. And in turn, this creates the elements or the actions we can implement to get us feeling primed for competition.
So, let’s say for example that you’re peak performance intensity is a 7 on a scale of 1-10 and today you’re feeling at about a 3. We obviously need to boost those levels, so there is a number of ways you can go about this. A popular strategy is to listen to music. Obviously lyrics and tempo play a part in this so you probably wouldn’t listen to something like “The Lazy Song” from Bruno Mars. Everybody has their own taste in music, but finding a tempo that matches your peak performance intensity. The second part of that is if you are feeling a little fatigued or a lack of energy your mind is probably giving you a whole lot of excuses or unhelpful thoughts so listening to lyrics that inspire , allows you to switch your mindset to a more positive frame of mind.
Another strategy is to take a shower. If you’re looking for energy, water is energy so it has the ability to boost your levels. That’s why we always feel better after taking a shower.
Another very simple way of boosting energy levels is by simply moving your body. Our physiology (the way we move our body) impacts our psychology (our thoughts) and vice versa. So by going for a walk or by doing a couple of minutes of exercise, we can change the way we feel.
And the last one for boosting energy that I’ll give away is through some breathing exercises. So something like breath holds or the double inhale breathing method can release oxygen into our muscles and into the blood stream to help us feel more energised.
But what if you’re feeling a lot of pressure or super anxious about competition. So let’s say you’re sitting at a 9 out of 10 on your peak performance scale so you need to bring it back a couple of notches.
There is also a number of strategies we can implement into our pre-competition routine that will allow us to relax or calm down a bit more. So, depending on the time you have available, it could be taking a pre-game nap. It might be doing some meditation or yoga. You can also add in some breathing exercise that bring the heart rate back if you’re feeling anxious such as nasal breathing (controlling your breathing through your nose) or long exhale breathing which also slows down the heart rate and brings you back to a state of calm.
If you are using visualization or mental imagery as one of your mental preparation techniques and you are noticing that you are struggling to focus or there are more negative images coming up for you. Instead of trying to force more positive images, allow the negative to occur but followed by a positive response. For example, if you’re imagery is filled with adversity, distraction or actions that you don’t want to occur in competition, let it play out but have a plan how you will rectify or turn the adversity in your favour.
Once you’ve created a routine or strategy that allows you to show up at your best. We really want to narrow your focus to a few things in competition to promote a high level resilience, control, and confidence, to allow you to consistently perform to your upper echelon.
Our short-term memory can only hold between 5-9 pieces of information before we start to enter a state of stress or overwhelm. In the heat, of competition, there is so much to think about and therefore it is easy to fall into the trap of taking on too much. And as soon as you take on too much we take ourselves out of our body and into our head, and we try to control performance from conscious thought.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to turn off thoughts, so we want to flip that to our advantage instead of to our detriment and be very deliberate with where we direct our thought. So we do this by creating 3 short, simple, and most importantly, controllable elements of performance.
So to get you thinking about what you want to create for your 3 mental cues, I have what I like to call the Preparation Power 7, and this is something that I use with my athletes to help them create their cues. It’s is basically 7 questions that allow them to choose what they want to focus on in competition. So here they are as follows:
1. What do you want to achieve?
This is a question to you personally. What has to happen for you to look back and say I performed well today? It also sets the goal or at least the direction for performance. It’s okay for these to be out of your control because we obviously can’t control the end result. But from this end result, find the process to focus on. For example, I want to score 30 points in my basketball game. Okay cool, well 30 points is 15 successful makes which breaks down to around 4 successful shots per quarter. If I focus on getting up 4 shots per quarter, I may not score 30 points but it will keep me in a aggressive and attacking mindset which is when I’m at my best.
2. What are my strengths?
It’s easy to become focused on the hype of another competitor or team but when you do that you’ve already lost. There are things that you do well that allow you to play at the level you’re playing at. The great performances you’ve had before accentuate what you do well. Focusing on what we do well makes us feel good about ourselves and can boost levels of belief and confidence.
3. What is my 1 effort goal for competition?
Ray Lewis said it best. Nobody can judge effort because effort is between you and you. Only you know if you’ve left it all out there. So what is 1 effort element of performance that you want to be great at?
4. What is my attitude goal for competition?
What is one element of mindset or attitude that I want to be great at? Is it body language? Communication? Supporting my teammates? Moving on to the next play asap? Telling myself “I got this.” or “I’m courageous or fearless”, etc. What is one thing that I can do or say to keep me in the best frame of mind.
The next 2 questions go hand-in-hand and play into the Though Model TFAR which is the belief that our Thoughts trigger feelings. Our feelings which feel so real in the body (which is why they are called feelings) influence our actions. And our actions ultimately determine our results.
5. How do you feel when you’re performing at your best?
I want you to go further than just feeling good. Do you feel confident? Calm? Relaxed? Hyped? Proud? Powerful? Joyful? Courageous? Optimistic? Inspired? Accepted? Fulfilled? Liberated? How would you describe this feeling? But in your own unique way.. Your own vernacular.
6. What can you think about or say to yourself to allow you to feel this emotion?
It doesn’t just have to be in the sports arena too. Think about a time outside of sport that you felt confident, inspired, proud, powerful… What were you thinking about or saying to yourself in that moment.
7. Choose 3 things on that list to focus on in your next competition:
This is where it all comes together. Now you have a brainstorm list of things that you can control for the most part. So pick 3 things on that list to focus on in your next competition. This will create your mental performance focus cues.
To take this to a whole new level you can sit down and give these cues a rating out of 10 post-performance. 1 being a rating that you probably won’t use again & 10 being a successful mental cue that you can use again in my next performance. Remember that while making mistakes gives us the immediate feedback to learn and improve – Success also leaves clues. And when you find something that works keep going back to it.
What are your 3 Performance Cues that you’re taking into your next competition?