Athletes face failures as much as successes during competition.
For professional and Olympic athletes, these shortcomings can manifest themselves in unique and devastating ways in front of a global audience.
From a competition by seven-time Olympic gymnast Simone Biles “Twistys” During the Tokyo 2020 Games, previously Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner Fans have remembered this heartbreaking moment ever since the infamous mistake in the 1986 World Series.
When Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Orion Kirkeling joined the club, Mishandled a come-from-behind pitcher with the bases loaded. That led to his team being eliminated from the MLB playoffs.
“Just keep going. I hope it’s the start of a long career,” the third-year pitcher said with misty eyes when asked how he coped after the game. “Keep it in the back of your mind. … Get over this hump. Keep pushing.”
Overcoming such failures is not easy. Pope Leo XIV is also a hot topic dealt with in a social media post earlier this year.
“In a competitive society where only strong winners seem worthy of living, sports also teach us how to lose,” the post said. “In learning the art of losing, we are forced to confront our fragility, limitations, and imperfections.”
Sports psychologists who work with amateur and professional athletes say that in addition to accepting failure, you also need coping strategies to return to a high level of performance.
Here are some strategies used by athletes who are great athletes in many ways. What the general public should learn Because it has to do with overcoming adversity.
Advance preparation
No one can predict future events, but you can rehearse what will happen in your mind.
Robert Andrews, founder and director of the Sports Performance Institute, has 30 years of experience in private practice as a mental training consultant and certified therapist. In that time, he has worked with Biles and other Olympians, as well as players from the NBA, NFL and MLB, over the past five Summer Games.
One of the elements of the series of techniques that Andrews uses to build confidence and belief is preparation.
“(Kerkeling) was very responsive to that play,” Andrews said. “The critical situations he was in in the playoffs made him more vulnerable to rushing things and getting off-balance and doing things that he will sadly never forget. But mental preparation is a big part of that. … That’s what I call being mentally and emotionally focused in a situation like that. So we would have done a lot of mental preparation work to prepare him for those situations.”
Alex Auerbach is a performance psychologist currently working for the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars. He has also worked with Olympians, NBA players, and MLB players, as well as elite troops and Fortune 500 companies.
He said the “release, reset, refocus” routine is something athletes can practice “to quickly forget mistakes during a game or performance.”
“The biggest thing is learning to pay attention to the task at hand,” Auerbach said in an email. “When we make mistakes and dwell on them, that rumination interferes with efficient motor execution. … If we can bring our attention back to the present and the task at hand, we can minimize interruptions in performance.”
Adversity strikes, now what?
When the inevitable happens and the game or competition is over, the work of mentally repairing has only just begun.
Step one, Andrews said, is to avoid social media. On social media, failures in such situations are often followed by hateful messages and, in extreme cases, even death threats.
“I’ve worked with a lot of baseball and softball players who lost games because they missed throws to third base and the catcher couldn’t throw the ball back to the pitcher,” Andrews said. “Their brains go crazy. They get a baseball version of ‘Twistys.'” So he’ll take a few days to solve the problem. …Be loved and surround yourself with people who will support you through this situation. ”
Andrews uses a protocol called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization, Reprocessing) to teach the parts of the brain caught up in such events how to calm down and process the experience.
“It helps them get through to a point where they don’t get the yips, so they’re not afraid to go out and hit ground balls again,” Andrews said. “They work, but you have to calm down that part of your brain quite a bit before next season.”
However, that won’t happen right away either. The brain, like everything else in the human body, needs time to recover after trauma. Andrews’ advice? Over the course of a month or so, you begin to teach your nervous system how to process the shock of the event.
an open mind helps
The good news, Auerbach says, is that people are becoming more receptive to adopting mental strategies after setbacks.
“Athletes, especially in baseball, are more receptive to mindset work than ever before. There is a growing recognition of the role mental health and performance plays in promoting peak performance in these athletes,” he said.
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