“Teams do not go physically flat, they go mentally stale.” – Vince Lombardi

Fumbling the ball or being blindsided by a tackle is just as much a part of football as is scoring the winning touchdown or nailing a 60 yard pass. When things are going great, the football mind naturally rides and feed off the emotional highs that come along with an athlete’s successful experience. The result is a boost in football confidence and performance.

But what happens to the football mind and the football mental game of the typical athlete when things are not going that great? What happens when they are not meeting the expectations of their own performance, when their team is losing or when they make a mistake on the field?

We all know of the saying “nobody is perfect”, so we should all understand and be comfortable with making errors, mistakes and enduring various stressful scenarios as they are just another part of the game. The way in which an athlete typically reacts to errors, mistakes or various stressful scenarios are all indications to football psychologists when they are determining which areas to focus on with the athlete, on the path to instilling football mental toughness.

If the athlete is repeatedly allowing their emotions to get the better of them in a way that negatively impacts their performance then, unless this automatic process is broken, the athlete will experience the same negative outcomes every time. In fact the longer an athlete chooses to react to their emotions in this negative manner, the tougher it will normally be for them to become aware before they can begin working on breaking the vicious cycle.

With the help of a football physiologist or mental game coach you can learn various techniques and methods to work towards gaining emotional control and composure.

Learning how to take a supportive pre-game mindset into competition as well as learning to let go of errors before your emotions snowball out of control is a method that will help you reach peak performance.

The supportive pregame mindset is about ignoring the negative critic inside your head and replacing it with a positive and supportive voice. The reason it is important to do so is because if, for example, you keep telling yourself that “I will never be able to score a touchdown today”, then your belief is that your abilities are not good enough. So when you step out on the field your body will feel like it will always be one step behind its own abilities, causing it all the stress that comes along with thinking in that negative way.

Athlete’s that have learned to allow themselves to feel their negative emotions but understand that the way in which they react to them is their choice alone to make, are the ones that start to excel.

The athletes that have mastered their emotional control can even learn to read and feed off of their negative emotions. The first step to achieving this is to learn to let go of errors. Instead the athlete chooses to focus on what needs to be changed or done to reach their maximum performance.

By fostering this approach, athletes eventually get to the stage where they automatically let go of the emotion and know what they need to alter their game to make their next attempt more likely to be successful.

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