It is the time of year for season openers. Some have already begun. For a lot of athletes, the first game of the season is accompanied by excitement and anxiety. While a little excitement will keep them on their toes, too much anxiety can be a disaster. Below, I’ll share two tools with which you can equip your team to be at their best on opening day. 

The Stresses of a Season Opener

When I was a college athlete, season openers were full of emotions for myself and my teammates. We had punished our bodies and our honed our strategies. We had put in hours of practice. Now it was time to see how we fared against a real opponent. This one counts.

Each athlete may lock in on different stressors. Here are a few common stressors I’ve observed:

• Center Stage – “Everyone will be watching.”
• Doubts – “I’m not prepared enough.”
• Uncertainty – “Will I get to play?” “The other team might be more prepared.”
• Consequences – “If I mess up on opening night, my teammates will lose faith in me.”
• Fear – “I’m in over my head.”

These stressors can be even more evident in players who have moved up a level since last season (i.e., JV to varsity, high school to college).

What happens when players overdose on excitement and intensity? Stress.

According to the basic Inverted-U hypothesis of activation, too much physiological stress can be detrimental to performance.

Too much physiological stress can be detrimental to performance.
Click To Tweet

Some activation (the kind that energizes you to put forth effort and focus) is good. Based on the graph below, activation improves performance, but only to a point. Once an athlete crosses the peak of the curve, activation starts to interfere with optimal performance.

Help Athletes Keep Activation In Check

Coaches can help alleviate some of their player’s anxieties and help them regulate their activation by equipping them with two simple techniques.

1. Relaxation

When stress, doubts, and fears drive activation up, a side effect is often unwanted muscle tension. Excess muscle tension can cause a number of performance inhibiting effects such as:

• slowed reaction time
• decreased flexibility
• limited range of motion
• reduced fluidity of movement

One useful way to combat these effects is to teach players to use a technique called progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) (Jacobson, 1938). It isn’t a quick fix, but with repetition, athletes will be much more aware of when muscles are too tight or too loose and be able to adjust accordingly.

To learn more about how athletes can use PMR and to download my free PMR Guided Relaxation MP3, click here.

2. Reframing Uncontrollable Stressors

Often, over-activation comes when athletes focus on stressors outside their control, like the fact that all their friends are watching the game. These stressors are particularly problematic because, on the surface, it seems like there is nothing the athlete can do about it. Reframing these stressors or focusing attention elsewhere can bring about massive rewards.

Basically, the athlete needs to shift how he or she is thinking about the stressor. Let’s look at a few examples.

• Doubt – “I’m not prepared enough,” becomes, “I’ve been training hard for 3 solid months, pushing my body and working on my technique with the coaches. I am confident in my preparation.”
• Uncertainty – “I don’t know if I’ll get much playing time or not,” becomes, “I have worked hard and am ready to help the team whether I play a lot or a little.”
• Consequences – “I might make a mistake,” becomes, “I definitely could make a mistake, but I won’t let it get me down and I’ll learn from that experience.”
• Fear – “I’m in over my head,” becomes, “I may be in over my head, but unless I really challenge myself I’ll never reach my potential.”

Equip Your Team to Come Through On Opening Day

When athletes perceive that they are heading into a high pressure situation, activation rises. That may be opening the season, playing a rival or heading into the post-season. With a little preparation in how to relax or reframe the situation, you can set your team up to come through in the clutch and put all of their hard work on display.

Coaches can equip athletes in how to relax & reframe pressure situations.
Click To Tweet

Question: What is most stressful about the first game of the season for your players? I’d love to hear your insights in the comments section!

• Book: Progressive Relaxation by Edmund Jacobson
• Post: How to Stay Loose Under Pressure by Practicing PMR
• Post: Let Go Of What You Can’t Control And Reap Massive Rewards

The post How to Coach Your Team Through Anxiety on Opening Day first appeared on The Excelling Edge.

Why is it that the benefits of practice and preparation can evade us when it’s time to make the big play, close the deal or deliver the speech? Our muscles tighten, our tongues tie themselves in knots and we’re as awkward as a giraffe in puberty. Fear raises its nasty head, doubts creep in and all we can picture are the things that can go wrong. Has this ever happened to you?

This kind of anxiety is the last thing you want before it’s time to perform. Through my experience as an athlete and now as a speaker, I’ve learned that I can put these demons to rest. One quick way is by using mental rehearsal (also called visualization). Learn how to make it effective here. Before any important event, I use mental rehearsal to increase my chances of success. Many clients I’ve coached have found it helpful too.

Using mental rehearsal right before you execute increases your chances of success. Here’s 2 scientific reasons to make it part of your routine.

Prime Neural Connections

Coaches often talk about building muscle memory. The tactics are practice and repetition. However, it is the brain that tells the muscles what to do. In the brain, neural connections are paving a route that culminates in the execution of the desired action. Mental rehearsal achieves nearly the same objective. And, it’s more controllable. Once I determine what right looks like, I can repeat it again and again in my mind.

As an athlete, this directly impacted my chances of success. When I rehearsed a serve in tennis in my mind before I actually hit the ball, I was more likely to get the result I wanted. In this case, that meant the intended technique, velocity and accuracy of the serve. When I didn’t use mental rehearsal, my chances dropped. Mental rehearsal warms up the connections in the brain like a dress rehearsal before the big show.

Prime Positive Emotions

Most everyone knows that confidence is key for a high level of performance, regardless of the context. Whether on the field, in the office or asking someone out on a date, you need confidence.

When you mentally rehearse a successful outcome in your mind, the picture triggers positive emotions such as confidence. Positive emotions counteract stress and relax the body. When we’re less stressed and more relaxed, our minds and bodies both work with greater precision.

Settle your nerves and prime yourself to get the results you’re looking for. Learn to use your brain to work for you rather than against you. The more you use mental rehearsal, the more effective it will be for you. Mental rehearsal has a permanent place in my pre-performance routine. What about yours?

Question: When will you give mental rehearsal a shot? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. 

Links: 

• Post: Mental Rehearsal: From Saving Lives to Winning at Work
• Post: 3 Tactics to Corral Nervousness and ACE Your Next Performance

The post Why Imagery Needs to be Part of Your Routine first appeared on The Excelling Edge.

Acknowledge The Benefits
The symptoms that we associate with feeling nervous are tied to our body’s Fight-or-Flight response. It is a survival mechanism designed to help us rise to the occasion in life and death situations. While there isn’t likely a lion chasing us around the boardroom, our bodies react to our perception of a threatening situation. If our thoughts are of danger, fear, worry and a desire to show what we’re made of, then our bodies prepare for battle. An internal chain reaction supplies us with a burst of energy, elevates our heart rates to get more blood to major muscle groups, opens up our lungs to take in more oxygen in every breath and heightens our senses to process more information in our environment. How amazing is that? We are created to perform under pressure and face the biggest moments. Our bodies know how to prepare to be awesome! We simply need to acknowledge what is happening, accept it and let the performance happen.
 
Channel The Energy
Often times we mis-interpret the symptoms of an activated nervous system (described above). We may think, “I’m not ready for this,” “I’m going to fail,” “I don’t have what it takes.” Because our thoughts drive our reactions, they often become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We do fail, botch the speech, choke, blow the game. But what if we channeled that energy by changing counterproductive thoughts to productive thoughts? What if we directed it toward our preparation, rehearsal, or research? What if we channeled it into making an energetic and engaging pitch to the investors, or to hustle up and down the court? Rather than thoughts that hold you back, allow your thoughts to focus on the possibilities, what good can come from the situation, and what there is to gain. I find this turns nervous energy into productive energy, the kind that I need to win.

The post 3 Tactics to Corral Nervousness and ACE Your Next Performance first appeared on The Excelling Edge.

Credit: USA Today Sports

The post 4 Powerful Lessons About Pursuing Our Potential from America’s Olympians first appeared on The Excelling Edge.

The post Mental Rehearsal: From Saving Lives to Winning at Work first appeared on The Excelling Edge.