Your Mind is a Thought Generator
As athletes increase their knowledge about how their mind works, it can help relieve them of expectations of how they should think.
It also clarifies what they can do, given what they are working with.
The mind is a thought generator. This means that, with or without stimulus, you generate thoughts. They may relate to your immediate surroundings or somewhere else entirely. They could be in the past, present, or future. Thoughts can also, and this is important for athletes, productive or unproductive.
When you’re feeling confident, the mind is likely to generate more productive thoughts that help you feel excited and focused. When in a negative state of mind, however, these randomly generated thoughts are more likely to be negative, threat-based, and damage performance in numerous ways.
Understanding that pressure, something every athlete is intimately familiar with, creates a negative state of mind for these generated thoughts to be performance damaging, leaves us with a few actionable takeaways.
First, awareness is key in limiting the damage your negative state of mind thought generator can do. Simply being aware of your mind spawning thoughts is going to quiet it down a little bit - both reducing the frequency of those thoughts and the power they have over you. With no subsequent action, however, it will likely fall back into its original pattern.
Second, following awareness, you want to have prepared anchors for the mind to focus on. These are cue words or phrases that improve the quality of your thoughts. When your mind, as a result of self-doubt, continuously generates thoughts revolving around the idea of “I’m not good enough, this is going to suck,” it’s easy to see why the quality of your thoughts are low and drag your performance down. If, however, you can have more thoughts that facilitate performance, for example, that relate to body mechanics and your values, the quality will be higher, resulting in better performance.
Ask yourself what is most important to tell your stressed out self when the negative thoughts creep in. Do you need boosts in confidence by reminding yourself you have the training and prior experience to succeed? Or do you want to ground yourself in the present, in which case your anchor reminds you to focus on your breath. In any case, anchors (planned productive thoughts) are the key to neutralizing the trap that is set by your thought generating mind.
When in doubt, think of APE - attitude, preparation, and control, to use as your anchor. Surely focusing on one of those controllable components will boost your confidence which simultaneously quiets down the thought generator.
