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During competition, athletes have to face success as well as failure.
For professional and Olympic athletes, those shortcomings can play out in fantastic and devastating ways in front of a worldwide audience.
From Seven-Time Olympic Gymnast Simone Biles’ Battle With “The Twisties” During The 2020 Tokyo Games boston red sox After first baseman Bill Buckner’s infamous mistake in the 1986 World Series, fans never stop paying attention to these painstaking moments.
philadelphia phillies Pitcher Orion Kerkering joined that club when he mishandled a bases-loaded comebacker that caused his team to be eliminated from the tournament. mlb Playoffs.
When the third-year pitcher was asked how he was coping after the game, he said with bleary eyes, “Just keep going with it. Hopefully this is the start of a long career.” “Just stay behind my head. … Get over this hump. Keep pushing.”
It’s not easy to move on from that kind of failure. It’s a topic that Pope Leo XIV also addressed in a social media post earlier this year.
“In our competitive society, where it seems only the strong and winners deserve to survive, sports also teach us how to lose,” the post said. “It forces us to confront our weaknesses, our limitations, and our imperfections, learning the art of losing.”
Sports psychologists who work with amateur and professional athletes say that returning to performance at a high level requires not only accepting failure, but also having the tools to cope with it.
Here are some strategies used by athletes, who in many ways are great ones for the general public to learn from as it relates to overcoming adversity.
prior preparation
Although no one can predict future events, one can rehearse by thinking about what might happen.
Robert Andrews, Founder and Director of The Institute of Sports Performance, has over 30 years of experience in private practice as a mental training consultant and licensed therapist. During that time he has worked with Biles and others the olympians at the last five Summer Games, as well as players from the NBA, NFL and MLB.
One component of the set of techniques Andrews uses to build confidence and trust is preparation.
“(Kerkering) became overreactive on that play,” Andrews said. “The dominant playoff situation he found himself in made him more susceptible to rash actions and off balance and all those things that he’s sadly missed throughout his life. But mental preparation is a big part of it. … I call it being mentally and emotionally focused in a situation like this. So we would have done a lot of mental preparation to prepare him for a situation like this.”
Alex Auerbach is a performance psychologist who currently works with the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars. He has worked with Olympians, NBA and MLB players, as well as elite military units and Fortune 500 companies.
He said the “release, reset, refocus” routine is one that athletes can practice “to quickly overcome mistakes in a game or during a performance.”
“The biggest thing is that you learn to redirect your attention to the task at hand,” Auerbach said via email. “When we make a mistake and focus on it, that rumination interferes with efficient motor execution. … If they can bring attention back to the present and the task at hand, they can minimize the disruption to their performance.”
Disaster strikes, now what?
When the inevitable happens and the game or competition ends, the work of improving mentally just begins.
The first step, Andrews said, is to avoid social media, where hateful messages — and in extreme cases even death threats — can often await after failures in these situations.
“I have worked with many baseball players and softball players who missed a throw to third base, causing them to lose the game and the catcher not being able to throw the ball back to the pitcher,” Andrews said. “They lose their minds. They get a baseball version of ‘The Twisties.’ So he will need a few days to do some work around it. … Find love, surround yourself with people who are going to support you in this.
Andrews uses a protocol called EMDR – eye movement desensitization and reprocessing – which teaches the part of the brain that is involved in such an event how to calm down and process the experience.
“It helps them work to where they don’t have the yips, so they’re not afraid to go out and field ground balls again,” Andrews said. “They work, but you have to quiet that part of the brain quite a bit before the next season.”
However, this also cannot happen so soon. The brain, like anything else in the human body, needs time to recover after trauma. Andrews advice? Give it a month or two and then begin to teach the nervous system how to “deal with the shock of that event.”
open mind helps
The good news, Auerbach said, is that people are becoming more receptive to employing mental strategies after setbacks.
“Particularly in baseball, athletes are more receptive than ever to mindset work. There is a growing appreciation of the role mental health and performance play in facilitating peak performance for these athletes,” he said.
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