“Fear can be conquered. I became a better person and a better football player when I learned that lesson.” – Roger Timothy Craig

Athletes of all ages (especially the young), at all levels of competition and experience can be predisposed to both rational and irrational fears, leaching football confidence and negatively impacting the football mental game. When the football mind has succumbs to its own individual fears it can have a crippling effect for many athletes’ decision making abilities and performance.

Some athletes may not even be aware that their fears are interfering with their football mental toughness and holding them back. Football psychologists and mental game coaches can help an athlete in identifying their fears and in understanding how their fears are limiting their development. With this newly acquired insight, into the athlete’s football mind, they quickly realize that by allowing fear to take charge they will only ever rise up to the level that their fear will permit.

Football psychology breaks down fear into two basic types and they are; the fear of physical danger and the fear of emotions. All fears tend to share some common symptoms, mainly stress and anxiety within an athlete. By being fearful of future events (emotional fear) it can rob a good athlete of all the good attributes in their skill set by distorting their reality.

By identifying the moments and acknowledging the emotions (stress and anxious) that cause an athlete to experience fear, the first, and most major hurdle, has been overcome. A mental game coach of Football Psychologist can talk to an athlete about their fear and listen out for key words such as “disappointment” or “failure” to aid in the identification of individual fears.

The fear of failure has proven to be a very common irrational fear that athletes struggle with. It causes them to focus on things that are beyond their control; wasting energy and distracting them from focusing on the things that are within their control, things that actually can impact their game. These are such things as technique, meticulously executing each play and quick decision making.

The fear of physical danger can manifest itself, for example, when an athlete is more concerned about getting tackled than focusing on finding a route to the end zone. The fear of physical danger, although injury is a possible outcome whenever an athlete steps out on the field, tends not to be a very debilitating type of fear.

The fear that gets most athletes is emotional fear. Emotional fears are numerous and can be triggered in many different ways. One example of emotional fear could be the fear of embarrassment brought on from making a mistake or an error. The good news is that emotional fear can be conquered and eliminated altogether.

Physical attributes and skills are important, when coupled with an athlete that possesses an understanding and mastery of the own psychology in football terms, they will acquire the complete tool set to unlocking their maximum potential. The distinguishing factor between good athletes and championship winning athletes often comes down to their ability to regulate their own mental toughness.

*Download the free mental game assessment and get started on Improving your Mental Game in Football