When it's not going well does your confidence and self esteem go too, affecting other areas of your life?
Do you train even though you had a bad night sleep, you feel exhausted, your muscles are sore and to be honest you know your not eating properly?
May be you punish yourself in some way, physical or psychological?
So think about it, do you equate your self worth with your performance this is very common. Let me explain ...
What I mean by self worth and self esteem is - who you think you are or how you see your self. This is different from self - confidence because you can have confidence in your ability to perform and still have very low self esteem or the opposite.
So when you take away the sport part of you, what do you see?
The ideal is high self esteem and self confidence in your abilities.
Some clients tell me that being really into your sport, whether your competing or not, is like taking on a role. When you cross the white line or put on the trainers you are into role but many will judge their performance and then take that as 'how they are' into other areas of their life, there is no separation. Imagine just for a moment giving up the judgements, you can understand your errors and learn from them but imagine being able to stop being the critic and judging yourself all the time. It is possible, I know I see it in my work.
Of course you are your biggest critic and often much harder on yourself that any team member or sports coach. Many limiting beliefs are accompanied by the inner chatter, the thoughts that cross your mind to remind you that 'it's not good enough', 'you always do that' etc.
A lot of my work is about first raising awareness regarding limiting beliefs and the self fulfilling prophesy. Then changing beliefs or eliminating them and replacing them with positive and empowering beliefs. So as Tim Gallwey's lovely equation shows: -
P = Po - I
Performance equals potential minus interference
I work on the interference to diminish or eliminate it, so purely working on positive mind skills that anyone can learn and adopt because, as we know we are what we think.
How about some kindness and going easy on yourself for a while? I wonder how that would feel.
