Championship Mindset Series: Putting Yourself in the Right Headspace
Putting Yourself in the Right Headspace
You walk out onto the mat. You know your opponent is tough. You’ve faced them before, but this time there’s more on the line. Your heart is racing, your legs don’t feel as strong as usual, and you can’t seem to catch your breath. This isn’t the headspace we want to be in before big matches, but whether you have anxiety or not, this situation happens for a lot of us. For these big matches, it’s super important that we be in the right mental state so we can perform our best, but how can we go about putting ourselves in the right headspace when there’s so much on the line? By improving a skill called psychological flexibility.
Psychological Flexibility
Psychological flexibility is the ability to influence and alter your psychological state, and it is done by strategically directing one of our brains’ key thinking processes that create our actions.
To best understand how to accomplish this, we will reverse-engineer what creates an action, the final domino in the chain. An action is something you do based off an urge, an urge is a sensation inside yourself resulting from an emotion, and an emotion is felt based off a thought, and a thought is created when a memory is recalled.
From this process, we can see that our actions can be somewhat dependent on the type of memory we recall. Psychological flexibility involves knowing what action you want to have and forcing a thought or recalling a memory which will create it.
For example, for these big matches, one memory you might recall is one that makes you feel confident in yourself and your own abilities, maybe a time when you overcame something you were scared of and felt good about it. Once you recall this memory, the domino effect takes place and puts you in the mental state to perform with confidence.
Wrapping It Up
This is a very powerful skill, and it can be used at any time for any situation. It will take some practice to fully master it, but the more you practice, the more of your true potential you can start to fulfill.
Give this skill a try, and share with us what you used it for and how it went!
