Mental Game Pro Tip
Pro-Tip: Don’t give too much emotion to a logical problem.
FOR THE RECORD: I am NOT saying that it’s bad to have emotion. If you don’t have passion for your sport and your progress, competition probably isn’t for you. You SHOULD have emotion in all aspects of training and competition. Just know that too much emotion rarely leads to intelligent progress or decisions.
Defeat comes in many shapes - a missed lift, a lost competition, an injury, a plateau, a bad call, a bad practice,etc. Even with “perfect” circumstances, all of these things will happen to you at some point in your competitive or training career. They’re inevitable.
Over the course of my coaching career, I have been blessed to work with athletes of all ages, backgrounds, goals, and results. All of these athletes have different personality traits, different love languages, and different needs as individuals. However, the one common denominator between those that stall and those that go on to reach their goals is how they handle defeat.
The good ones get upset just long enough to acknowledge and accept the defeat, then start thinking of how to improve their chances of it not happening again.
Training and competition have a logical process to them. Tying too much emotion to a missed lift, a lost match, injury, etc. is only going to slow down and impair your ability to get better. You may love your sport, training, competing, etc. But guess what? The sport itself has no emotional ties to you. So why give it the power to ruin the next opportunity to get better because you’re still giving energy to something in the past?
There is almost always a logical reason behind why the training session was bad, you lost the competition, or you got injured. It’s on you to move on. But how do you do that? Follow these three steps:
1. Acknowledge it. The defeat, in whatever shape it takes- acknowledge and come to terms with the fact that event just happened. Understand that it wasn’t a personal attack on you, it was the price of sport.
2. Accept it. You’ve already acknowledged it, now accept that it has happened. Especially in the case of injuries or a loss at a major competition this can take longer than acknowledgement. But, the sooner you can accept that it happened, the sooner you can get better.
3. Take the next step. Talk to your coach, ask for feedback, get to the doctor, do whatever the next necessary step is. If it’s a bad training session or competition, there are a million reasons that could’ve caused it- talk to your coach, talk the referees (respectfully), look at your outside the gym activities, etc. and find the next way to keep moving toward your goals.
Bad training sessions, lost tournaments, injuries, etc. are part of sport. You can have any of these things happen, let it bring down the rest of your session, day, week, month, etc. OR you can acknowledge it, accept it, and take the next step towards getting better. The choice is up to you.