Sports performance depends on your mental condition. Often, athletes could move up in rankings, not due to physical improvement, but because of good mental condition. In competitive events, athletes need to think, decide and act very quickly. This requires clear mind and excellent decision making procedure. Athletes should know how to act and react properly. The mindset of athletes depends on the responses and outcomes. Sport psychology often covers things like visualization, goal setting and self talk to overcome any obstacle. Performance block can be caused by poor mental condition. Emotions directly impact your perception and response. This could result in increased disappointment, fears, shame, anger and anxiety.
Cognitive performance is decided by your mental process, such as problem solving, memory retention and perception. Intelligence emerges from cognitive portion of our brain. Cognitive barriers can be caused by perfectionism, mutual blame and low self confidence. Cognitive can also be seen as an action based on feelings and thoughts. So, conflicts between interests and low motivation will affect your mental situations.
Your actions are essential, so it will be easier for you to recognize problem. If not, you will only scratch the surface. If you want to deal with mental-related performance block, you should understand the root cause. Athletes should also aim to get long lasting change, so they can always move forward. If athletes understand about themselves, they can make the right choice. Internal struggle can be quite damaging. There are two basic types of obstacles, internal and external. Some of the external problems are delayed starts, poor conditions and technical problems. Psychological and physical factors may lead to various internal issues.
Internal problems may include fatigue, substance abuse, illness and injury. Psychological issues may revolve around actions, perceptions and emotions. Each of these factors will impact your performance. If there’s no resolution to these problems, this could result in troubled athletes. You may need to change perspective and understand new meaning, so you can clear any performance obstacles. Here are things athletes should do to remove mental-related performance block:
- Find root causes: Generalizations don’t work and it is important for athletes to be much more detailed. You should find out whether a problem is internal or external. Athletes take responsibilities for their overall actions. Good perspective about your problems should be a good first step.
- Make the right choice: In reality, there could be multiple issues that happen at the same time. Solving one problem may not solve others, so your motivation and performance can still be affected. Also, attempting to simultaneously solve several issues can be ineffective. Choose to work on task at a time and you need to be consistent. Choose the most crucial problem first and it should be a good place to start.
Reframe: You may need to change perception and meaning to get desired outcomes. The world is often not black and white. You may need to step out of the box, so you can develop a proper response. If you want to move up in rankings, you need to focus on personal growth. Eventually, all psychological barriers can be dismantled one by one.