Learning to managing your thoughts in the heat of battle is a skill that will help you to maintain or elevate your performance when it counts. However, waiting to manage your thoughts until the battle is at hand, is like waiting to hydrate until you are thirsty or to fuel until you are hungry – it’s too late. So, to be effective, preparations must be made well in advance of competition and ultimately become a normal part of your daily training regimen.

Where do you start?

The simplest way to begin is by thinking about it, that is, drawing your attention more regularly to what thoughts you are having at given times throughout your training and competitive sessions. By simply devoting some “thought time” to this topic you will draw your attention to surrounding information that will help you identify the thoughts you are thinking and also help you to categorize those thoughts into patterns that may be triggering your emotions in counterproductive ways.

It is like setting a virus scan on your computer that, on a scheduled basis, will check for potentially harmful threats. The more you practice scanning for threats the more you become aware of how to manage and use your thoughts and emotions to ensure better performances.

The key word is “awareness”. Awareness is simply being cognizant of what is going on in a particular span of time. That is, understanding what thoughts and feelings you are experiencing at a given moment. Simply put again, if you become aware that your house is on fire, likely you will want to remove yourself from the danger and seek a safer place to stay. However, if you were not aware that your house was on fire or you didn’t have a specific exit plan, your stress levels may go through the roof at the exact moment that you needed to be calm and thoughtful about what your next move would be.

This is where I come in. As a Performance specialist, my role is to help you identify thought patterns and their emotional impacts and develop strategies that can be practiced or trained into your training and competitive performances. With the repetition of training, the idea, if all goes well, is that when the destructive thoughts attack your thinking (the house is on fire), you will be able to rely on your preparation plan to get you easily to safety – better performances.

Set a Goal

So, time must be dedicated to learning how to become more aware of your emotions and states of mind during training and competitions. This can be done by setting a training goal of being more aware of your thoughts during practices, paying particular attention to when your mind moves off the task at hand. That is, at scheduled intervals during practice do a quick attention scan and determine where your mind is versus where you would like it to be. Then, take time during water breaks to record what you were thinking, and repeat this throughout your practice session. Finally, at the end of practice, take a few minutes to go over the list of thoughts and see if you can see any specific patterns that might give you insights into why your thoughts shift during training.

Finally, once you have tracked your thoughts and identified any destructive patterns you will need to create a “thought management plan” to help quiet your mind and get it focused on the thoughts that will help you perform better and move away from thoughts that hinder your performances.

Once you begin this attention scanning process, and make it a consistent part of your normal training routine, you will be able to improve the consistency of your performances when you train and compete.

That’s it for now. Check-in next month for the next progression: Thought Patterns – Why We Think What We Think.