Being a one-hit wonder isn’t as difficult as being someone who is a two (three, four, five) hit wonder. Meaning, yes, it takes a lot of work to be at the top of your game but once is not as difficult as continuing to be. In order to continue to be competitive and at the top, you must understand it and develop the mental skills that help keep you there.

Once: the one-hit wonder

Being at the top of your game once is incredibly difficult because you must put in as much as everyone else. If you’ve never been at the top and you suddenly find yourself there, it’s probably because you deserve to be there but also because you had a “nothing to lose” attitude.

Mentally there’s something to be said about feeling like you don’t have anything to lose. In this place you can perform without thinking about it and aren’t attached to the outcome. You go out and just do it. It’s the best place for anyone to perform from – in the zone. And actually, this place allows performers to perform like practice and in a state of flow.

Reaching the top takes hard work but if you get here, you must deserve to be there. However, it’s one thing to be there and it’s a very different thing to stay there.

Twice or more: the one-hit wonder multiplied

You reach the top. It’s amazing – you are ecstatic. You should be. The challenge is how do you keep playing the way you did when you first reached the top. 99% of the time when performers get there they panic because unconsciously they don’t know how they’ll ever be able to stay there or get better.

When this happens, performers move from a “nothing to lose” attitude to feeling like they have “everything to lose.” They start performing from a place of fear. Expectations increase. They are scared to let others down, they over analyze what they are doing versus just doing it. They experience one bad performance which leads to another and before you know it you’ve fallen from grace.

You were on top but didn’t have quite the right mental perspective or skills to deal with being there and then you aren’t.

Mental shift

Sometimes when I start working with clients to develop their mental performance and they start to feel success with the mental training we are doing, they stop doing it. When I ask why they’ve stopped, they aren’t sure. It’s almost as if, they take the magic pill and now they are cured.

But that’s not what happens. What happens is they start to fall back into old patterns and behaviors; and crash and burn. When if they’d continue to use what was working, they would continue to experience more ‘success’. If something works once, then chances are pretty good that it’ll work again. Once you get to the top, stick with what’s working. This doesn’t mean that you should have a fixed mindset and stop growing and learning. It means to reflect on what you are doing that’s working and continue to use it until you realize that you need to do something else. But don’t just do something else out of fear or because you don’t think you need it anymore.

If you are going to make a run for the top, realize that it’s not the same as where you are right now and that you have to be mentally prepared for it. Physically the workload is close to the same but mentally it’s very different.

Remember, you deserve to be there otherwise you wouldn’t be but you have to learn how to continue to have a “nothing to lose” attitude. Nothing has changed. You still know how to perform. Don’t let your head take your continued success away from you.