Balancing sport and life, What’s Important Now?
Goal setting, performance planning and regular check-ins with your coaches and trainers are all essential steps to help keep you on track. Achieving success is not a straight line where hard work over time is directly correlated to the desired outcome. Success is a squiggly line that, hopefully, keeps moving in the direction of your end goal, but may take all sorts of crazy twists and turns before it gets there.
So what happens when those twists and turns actually happen, when life or your sport throws you a complete curve ball? Sometimes it slows you down. It may even send you in reverse, moving away from your goal. Other times it may just be a little blip in your progression. It may not even be a bad occurrence that has happened to you, just something that was unexpected or happened at a different time than you were expecting. As I have talked lots in the past, it comes down to your awareness of yourself and your current situation.
When something happens to you, good or bad, it is up to you to do an evaluation of the WIN; What’s Important Now. What is the next event that must happen in order for me to keep functioning? Depending on your sport, this may be an injury, equipment malfunction, or an external factor that may include the opponents or officials. You must be aware of how your body is responding, and what you need to do to get it back on track – to straighten out that squiggly line and get it heading in the right direction again.
Awareness is key, as without it, you’re just going through motions. Even worse, they might not even be the right motions. Once you’ve evaluated your needs, you can start taking the little steps you have to in order to get yourself back on track. This will not only help you reroute, but will help you feel less overwhelmed or thrown off by the unexpected event. Furthermore, when you identify and acknowledge the next immediate action you must take, you have taken what may have been big and scary, and turned it into a manageable step. This action helps you identify what you can work with, and will therefore also help you turn that curve ball into a blip in the roadmap, and not a complete road closure and shut down.
When is the best time to evaluate these curveballs? Well, take into consideration the size of the event, and when it occurs. You’re not going to want to dismiss yourself from a game to go manage your energy and emotions. In this case, getting yourself back on track may be a quick dip into your mental skills toolbox to retrieve a short-term fix that you can manage for the time being. Then, following the game or event, you may want to reflect and re-evaluate, as you’ll have the time and perhaps clarity to help you work through it. In addition, if something has happened outside of an event but you still feel it may impact your sport performance, you must ask yourself what the best method of reflection and action will be, as you’ve got the time to do so.
With all mental training, it really comes down to practicing different options before you need them, so that your body will know how to respond in a critical situation. This may mean simulating different curve ball events that could throw you off, then planning for how you’d like to respond in those moments. From there, finding what works for you will come from trying out different mental tools to find what you like, what works, and how you’ll need to tailor it to you to be the most effective tool for you. Then remember, curve balls may change the game, but they most definitely don’t have to end it.
Courtney Marchesin, MA, sport psychology consultant, is the mental skills coach for the Alberta Sport Development CentreSoutheast. She can be contacted at courtneymarchesin@gmail.com.