If you’ve ever put yourself in the shoes of a superstar sports personality, you can’t help but conclude that they are exceptionally mentally tough people. The basketball player who can shoot a flawless penalty basket; the tennis player who can hold his nerve in a tie-break, and the athletics champion who can bring their A-game to a crowd of screaming fans – it all requires psychological toughness. You could have the most skilled sportsperson on the training ground, but if they don’t have the mental fortitude to perform at their best when it counts, then they’ll forever fail.
Sports psychologists have spent decades studying the world’s top athletes to find out how they think differently from the average person. Superstars don’t arrive at the top of a sport by chance: they get in a mental place that allows them to dominate the game and come out on top as the victor. What are their secrets? And how can you apply them in your own life?
The great thing about sports psychology is that once you know the principles, you don’t have to apply it solely to the realm of sport. You can put the lessons you learn into practice in business and even your relationships. Here are sports psychologist secrets you need to know.
You Need To Believe Unconsciously That You’ll Succeed
The majority of people live in the prison of their unconscious mind. Their unconscious tells them the success that they can expect in their lives and the kind of level that they can achieve. The horrible thing about these self-limiting beliefs is that they are invisible and, often, inaccessible by the conscious mind.
People with self-limited beliefs often come to believe that they don’t have the skills or the talent to become a professional sports personality. Their parents, culture, and people they spend time with can all feed the bias of the unconscious mind. This primes it to believe things that aren’t necessarily true. Who is to say that you can’t become a world-class basketball player by doing basketball workouts at home?
The work of sports psychologists is to reprogram the unconscious mind. A person has to believe on a deep level that they can succeed so that they avoid self-sabotaging on the way up. A soccer player who unconsciously believes that she can never progress past Sunday league will probably continue to play in a way that means that she can never progress past that stage. Unconscious beliefs are often self-fulfilling.
You Can’t Let Past Experiences Inform Your Future Beliefs
When Roger Federer first entered Wimbledon in 1999, he barely made any progress and hardly picked up a game. He could have gone away from that tournament, believing that he had nothing to offer the tennis world. He could have packed his bags, and stayed away from Grand Slams forever. But Federer had an absolute ineffable belief about himself. He knew on some level that he possessed the talent he needed to see him through, at least to the quarter-finals.
The turning point undoubtedly came for Federer in a 2003 Wimbledon match against former champion Pete Sampras in the quarter-finals. Federer was still relatively unknown at the time. But during that match, he showed that he had the mental muscle to take on a seven-time champion like Sampras and win. Few people realized it at the time, but that moment was a genuine change of the guard. Federer would go on to dominate the tournament for the rest of the decade, quickly dispatching practically every other opponent that came his way.
If Federer had allowed past experiences to get the better of him, he would never have emerged from obscurity. He wouldn’t have had any of the success he now enjoys. And he would have remained a minor league player with practically no real-world impact.
You Are Your Own Competition
We live in a culture which tells us that we have to be better than the next guy to climb to the top of any industry. But this isn’t how it works in reality. What sports psychologists do is turn the focus of the sports star inwards on themselves. Instead of asking whether they can beat the best person in their sport, they always seek to improve their own abilities, whatever they may be. Doing this enables you to progress at a sensible pace. All you have to do is be one percent better than the day before, not match somebody who’s been on the professional circuit for a decade.