“If you play football, there’s going to be a 100 percent injury rate. Something is going to be bothering you. So I just try to focus on the things that I can do to help my team” —-Larry Fitzgerald

Mental obstacles refer to any psychological or emotional issue that interferes with your ability to perform your best consistently in the game.

You can’t improve your performance if you don’t have the mental toughness that prepares you for success and the knowledge to remove the obstacles that set you up for failure.

It’s one thing to have the capabilities to move forward, mentally, physically, technically, and tactically. It’s an entirely different thing to have psychological and emotional anchors that weigh you down and keep you from moving forward.

Here are five obstacles that can hold you back the most in your sport efforts:

Over-investment – You, of course, want to be invested in your sport. You want to care a lot about our sport and it should be an important part of your life. With this deep commitment, you will give your best effort, respond positively to setbacks, and persevere in the face of the inevitable challenges of pursuing your own personal greatness as an athlete. This overinvestment causes a preoccupation with results, expectations, and pressure that lead to doubt, worry, anxiety, and fear. The endgame is that you perform tentatively and cautiously.

Perfectionism – Our culture reveres perfectionists. Yet, there is a dark side to perfectionism that you may not be aware of. The goals they set for themselves are often unattainable, resulting in almost-guaranteed failure. Perfectionists make their self-esteem dependent on how they perform and the results they produce in the game. They berate themselves unmercifully for failing to live up to those unreachable goals. Perfectionists often fear failure more than they are want success. They are also unwilling to take reasonable risks because, by definition, they may lead to failure.

Fear of Failure – According to sports psychologists for football, fear of failure is the most common and most harmful of the obstacles for athletes. Young athletes get this fear of failure from their parents and from our hyper-achievement culture in which being labeled a failure is worse than death. This fear can become so great that you become more focused on avoiding failure than pursuing success. In doing so, you become unwilling to take risks and even sabotage your efforts to succeed to protect you against the possibility of failure even when the chances of failure are small.

Expectations – Expectations are a kiss of death in sport, in other words, if you enter a competition focused on expecting a certain result, you are pretty much assured of not getting that result. Expectations are so harmful because they put you in a football mindset in which you have to meet your expectations because, well, it is expected of you. To not meet the expectation would be perceived as a major fail. The weight you place on fulfilling these expectations results in immense pressure which, in turn, produces doubt, worry, and anxiety, all of which will make meeting those expectations very unlikely.

Negativity – The above four obstacles create an un-scalable wall of negativity that basically ensures both failure and a low level of football mental toughness. You have no confidence and are filled with doubt. You perform with a sense of impending doom.You experience tremendous anxiety and tension so you’re physically incapable of performing at your best. You are your own worst enemy on game day. Your opponents want to be beat you on game day. If you are your own worst enemy, then you have no chance of performing at your best and achieving your goals.

Of course, this change is easier said than done, but it begins with awareness of the obstacles you or others have placed in your path toward your athletic dreams.

The commitment to change also involves the realization that the road you are on just isn’t going to get you to your destination.

After that, you must understand how the obstacles have come into being, why they hurt you, and then do the work necessary to tear them down.

Only then you will have the opportunity to improve your football mental game and achieve your goals.

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