Put Your Game Face On – Be Competition Ready!

You have to prepare yourself to be competition ready. Your pre-competition routine is as important as practice. This prep is the way to deal with mistakes and overthinking, and to utilize muscle memory and develop a process oriented way to evaluate performance. This is an incredibly necessary part of competing.

Learning how to deal with key competition moments has transferable skills to how you see, think, and feel about performance at practice and in daily life. And, there is another moment just a few seconds before performance that’s important to specifically address – at the start line, kick off, tip off, first pitch, green flag, puck drop, opening play, match play – and be competition ready!

Overall mental attitude

You can’t be positive about everything all the time but you can learn to be more positive – in your performance life and life in general. You can also learn to deal with nerves, doubt, overthinking, etc., all which impact performance and life.

Because performance mental skills and life mental skills are the same and each impacts the other, this is the reason that at the core, mental performance skills are life skills. For example, learning to deal with nerves before a test or presentation has carry over to dealing with nerves before competition.

Beat the demons

These are the 4 key moments that can make or break you in competition.

1. Switch on your Champion… before performance. Could be week before, day or night before, morning of, etc. To be the most effective, you must deal with what happens mentally before a performance.
2. Develop Mental Muscle Memory… during performance. Thinking is what destroys performers who know how to perform. This routine Is designed to help you tap into muscle memory and distract you from thinking too much.
3. Bounce Back Faster… let go of mistakes. This is the most difficult. Why? An action has just happened, your brain starts to analyze it and your critical voice (ego) wants to immediately reprimand you for it. This is how you’ve been conditioned to respond but you can control that critical voice.
4. Post-Match Evaluation…after performance. Objectively evaluating performance – what went well, what was challenging, and what do I need to work on tomorrow.

These are the basic, foundational building blocks for mental skills. Developing these key moments develops confidence, positivity, resilience, focus and emotional control.

Crossing the imaginary start line

So you develop your beating the demons (BTD) mental training program and develop the ability to utilize these skills in your performance and life in general. Congrats! You are well on your way to having better control of your life but then there are some small, seemingly innocuous moments that don’t quite fall within the lines of BTD. One of those moments is crossing the imaginary start line.

You’ve done your mental and physical warmup and are ready to go. But then, you cross an imaginary line. This line triggers that you are going from warmup to competition and things are about to get very serious and something starts to change. Even though you did an awesome job setting yourself up for success, the final seconds before competition could bring it all crumbling down. You have to be prepared for this.

Preparing for those seconds – be competition ready

1. Know it exists, know it will happen.
2. Figure out how to deal with it, and plan to deal with it.
3. Extend your mental preparation.
4. Decide if you’ll use something similar to what you use in your competition ready plan or need something else.

In these few seconds just before the start, many athletes will take a couple of deeps breaths, recite a positive mantra and physically ready, set, go! Regardless, don’t let these few seconds ruin all your hard work.

Be prepared. Be competition ready. Make it happen.