Staying Positive

The Power Of A Positive Mindset

is so important and you should use this everyday.

It's too easy to focus on the negative or make excuses for why you can't or what stopped you.

But imagine if you change the mindset around specifically in our sport?

I have a friend who is a psychologist and he would always tell me that "your energy flows where your focus goes".

The problem is that most of the time we aren’t consciously aware of our internal dialogue, let alone how influential it is.

Our thoughts seem to arise out of nowhere. They are so automatic that it seems we have no control over them. To make the most of self-talk we need to make a deliberate effort to develop it as a psychological skill.

First off you need to become aware of your existing thought patterns.

Lets say you make an error when rolling. Do you criticise yourself for making a mistake? Or do you tell yourself, ‘Never mind. Let’s move on and figure out how to recover’?

Recognising our self-talk can be a tricky business especially in the moment and useful starting point is reflection.

This is hard but think back to a particularly good or bad performance and recall the self-talk that accompanied it. You could even watch video of your previous competitions or recorded wrestles at training to jog your memory.

How can we do this with our sport?

One thing you can do is plan what you would like to achieve in training, whether it's a specific move, ​escape or submission. Keep a log or diary of your thoughts about training and competition. The benefit of this is that you can track your mental patterns as you go along instead of relying on memory.

This requires discipline and is very hard to do for some people.

Training and competing require different mindsets though.

In training you might also find that there is a teammate that always gets the better of you, so you always look to avoiding them because the little voice in your head tells you your no good or that they will beat you.

These ARE the people you need to train with because they will elevate your skill set without you realising it.

In competition you can't allow the negative thoughts to enter your head and you will only make things worse when you check the profile of an athlete on Smoothcomp and find their stats are pretty good.

Very rarely do I notice of the stats or even look at the profile of another athlete. Especially when I've never 'played' against my opponent before.

I tell myself they've never played ME!

When I'm standing on the edge of the mat before the referee calls me on, I tell myself that I'm the champion, it's my day today. I won't allow any other thought to enter my head as your perception determines your reality.

When you hear your child athlete talk negative, don't focus on what they are saying. Tell them what you saw that they did you thought was good and build on that.

Just remember these two things:
- your energy flows where your focus goes
- your perception determines your reality