Do you dread competition?
Is it an evil ball of darkness that is slowly destroying your world?
Don’t worry.
You’re not alone.
Many of the athletes I work with fear competition for a variety of different reasons.
Some fear it because they’re worried they might bomb and end up humiliated
Others fear it because they might let their coaches or parents down.
However, competition itself isn’t good or bad.
What colors our interpretation of it is the stress we have surrounding it.
Deal with the stress
Instead of putting your energy into worrying about the competition, put your energy into dealing with this stress.
Not only will this help with your competitions, it will also help with other parts of your life.
After all, Stress pops up in situations outside of competitions, like tests, interviews, work, and school.
When you’re aware of the root cause, you can take action.
Remember, competition isn’t the root of the problem, your stress and worries are.
If you want to spend your limited amount of energy in an efficient way, it’s important to focus on dealing with these issues.
Stress around competition is often caused by your mindset.
- I have to prove myself.
- I want to prove to myself that I haven’t wasted time.
- I’m gathering evidence that I’m going to get to my dreams.
All of these cause stress.
Sometimes, an athlete falls apart at competition.
No matter what they do, they can’t land a jump to save their life.
After the competition, they spend a large amount of time and money working on their technique.
“If I have bulletproof technique, then I will never fall apart again.”
In reality, their technique wasn’t the problem.
Remember that stress affects the entire body.
Their focus is off. They’re stressed because they want great results or want to avoid poor results.
This tightens up muscles and throws off their timing which tanks their skills.
Instead of focusing on technique, the athlete needs to deal with the source of their stress. This will equip them to deal with all stressful situations in the future, while saving them time and money.
When you are not worried and stressed, you will be able to skate in competition like you do in practice.
Competition has its uses
When we have negative associations with competition, this is all we see.
Every time competition comes around, these negative associations fill our brain, causing us stress and worry.
Some athletes who dread competition see it as a test, others see it as a deadline.
How you feel about competition has nothing to do with competition itself.
Instead, it has everything to do with the negative ideas you associate with competition.
Competition is neutral.
It isn’t good or bad.
So, changing your mindset around competition can help you alleviate some of this worry and stress.
In fact, competition has many benefits that can be used to help an athlete improve, including:
- Competition is a device to give you helpful feedback from specialists and judges.
- Competition gives you something to strive for.
- Competition gives you external motivation.
- Competition helps you plan.
- Competition gives you practice executing your skills under pressure.
- Competition helps you build mental resilience.
- Competitions are a great way to gather information.
Competitions have both negative and positive aspects.
But, when you only look at the bad, it’s impossible to see the good.
Some athletes try to fix their worries around competition by trying various workarounds.
They increase their practice time.
They over-prepare in the hopes that they will actually “feel” prepared.
But this doesn’t help, because it doesn’t address the root of the problem.
The problem is that they are stressed. Their stress and worries all come from not knowing how they will skate at the competition. This is a mental skills problem, not a technique problem.
They need to put work into changing mentally (aka practice focus and refocusing back on doing your jumps, spins, programs, instead of worrying about a future competition).
Deal with stress, not competition
There’s always going to be something that comes up.
After all, problems happen.
But if you know how to bring your focus back to what you are doing right now, then you will be able to handle your stress and worries more effectively.
Competition is a tool.
A tool that will help you. When you make mistakes or do something well in a competition, use them as opportunities to learn. This will fast track your skill development
Since the Competition success is 100% mental skills based, doing competitions is the only way to practice and improve your Competition Mindset.
A strong Competition Mindset is the only way for your technical skills to shine in competition.
If you’re performing well in practice, but bombing at competition, your technical skills aren’t the problem.
In order to perform well, you need to improve your mental skills.
Because only mental resilience will help you perform up to your full potential.