Do you play scared? Do you focus on not wanting to make mistakes and as a result, your play is fueled by this fear?
As an athlete, if you play with a scared mentality, you will hold yourself back and underperform.
The opposite of a scared mentality is an aggressive mentality. One where you are focused on playing to win instead of playing not to mess up.
In this article, we’re going to explore the difference between a scared mindset and an aggressive mindset, and three tips you can use to adopt an aggressive mindset as an athlete.
A Scared Mindset Defined
A scared mindset occurs when you are focused on not wanting to make mistakes and you are afraid of negative things happening when you play.
There is a long list of negative that you may want to avoid, including:
- Stats dropping
- Losing your starting position
- Coach yelling at you
- Teammates being mad at you
- Letting your parents down
- Losing the game
- Not making it to the next level
- Making errors
The list goes on and on and we can get more specific based on your individual sport. The bottom line is, when you have a scared mindset, you are focused on avoiding negatives.
How Avoiding Negatives Hurts Your Play
Playing to avoid mistakes and other negative things that could happen is a quick way to leave games disappointed in yourself. It is also a quick way to make mistakes and underperform.
As a mental performance coach, I work with many athletes who struggle with a scared mindset when they play. A common characteristic is that their scared mindset causes them to perform poorly.
But how can that be? Aren’t they focused on not wanting to have these things happen? Wouldn’t that actually help you avoid them?
No. Because when you play to avoid negatives, because you have a scared mindset, you play timidly, you hold yourself back, you hesitate, and overall you perform in a way that is far below your potential.
Scared play equals poor play.
The more you play to avoid mistakes and other negative things, the more likely they are to happen.
An Aggressive Mindset Defined
An aggressive mindset means you are focused on getting what you want and playing well.
Think of this like you wanting to make something positive happen instead of wanting to avoid having something negative happen.
For example, you may have the mentality that you want to go out there and play hard defense. That is an aggressive mentality.
Or, you may say you want to be fully focused and have a positive mindset and help your team no matter what…that is also an aggressive mindset.
Having an aggressive mindset is not always about being aggressive physically. It is about you, mentally, focusing on what you want to have happen and what you want to do (in a positive way) instead of focusing on what you want to avoid.
Three Tips to Develop an Aggressive Mindset in Sports
Remember, an aggressive mindset involves you focusing on what you want to have happen instead of playing to avoid negatives.
To adopt such a mindset, we must work on changing your goals, changing your thinking, and keeping yourself focused when you play.
Changing Your Goals During games
I was on a coaching call the other day with an athlete who currently has a scared mentality when he plays. He’s a basketball player and hesitates with his shots and doesn’t drive to the basket very much.
This is due to his fear regarding coach and other people thinking he’s a bad shooter.
Because of the fear that is present, it’s safe for us to say the underlying goal he has going into games is avoiding having people think he’s a bad shooter.
Now, we could assume that if he made a lot of shots, people would naturally think he’s a good shooter. So that would be the way to avoid having people think he’s a bad shooter.
However, that’s not how our brains work.
When there is an underlying goal present to avoid a negative, our minds will work to achieve that goal in the easiest way possible. We will follow the path of least resistance.
As strange as it seems, the path of least resistance when it comes to having people not think he’s a bad shooter is for him to not take shots. If he doesn’t take shots, he can’t be seen as a bad shooter.
I know it makes more sense to make shots so that people think he’s a good shooter, but our brains don’t typically work that way.
If I want to avoid a negative, the easiest way to do so is to avoid the situation in which the negative could potentially occur.
This is why players who compete with a scared mindset hold themselves back and play it safe.
We must change that. And the way we do so is by changing the goal of your performance.
Instead of having the goal be to avoid a negative, we want it to be an achieving goal. However, it must be a goal you want to achieve that is 100% within your control.
This is where I recommend athletes set a controllable goal for the game. For example, giving 100% effort during the competition.
By setting a different type of goal, you give yourself a target to achieve instead of a target to avoid.
Changing How You Talk to Yourself
Self-talk in sports involves the way you think and the way you talk to yourself out loud. Your self-talk directly impacts your emotional state and your behavior.
When an athlete exhibits a scared mentality, their self-talk will be full of worries and fears. They will have many what if thoughts about the game.
If you want to go from playing with a scared mindset to playing with a more aggressive mindset, you must change your self-talk.
You want to reframe negative thoughts into positive thoughts. We will classify all thoughts that lead to a scared mindset as negative thoughts.
For example, if you think, “What if I make a mistake,” you can reframe it to, “I know I can play well today.”
It’s a simple shift, but works wonders when it comes to generating a more confident and aggressive mentality when you play.
Change What You Focus on During the Game
This last tip involves what you need to be focused on during the competition. It feeds off the previous two tips, as you need to have already set the correct goal for the game and you need to be speaking to yourself in a constructive way.
During the game, we need to be sure your focus stays in the present moment. A scared mentality is based on thoughts about the future. You are scared of what will happen.
We need to change that to where you are fully focused on what’s happening right now.
The way you can do so is by setting yourself objectives during games that are simple and 100% controllable. These will be very similar (if not the same) as your goals you set before the game.
What I’m referring to right now is placing your focus on those objectives/goals while you’re competing, instead of allowing your thoughts to drift into the future.
Final Thoughts
A scared mentality in sports is one where you are worried about what will happen and you play to avoid negatives. This type of mentality will cause you to underperform and hold yourself back.
Instead of a scared mindset, you want to play with an aggressive mindset. One where you are playing to achieve what you want.
To do so, focus on changing your goals pregame, change how you talk to yourself, and change your focus during competition. Doing so will help you go from playing with a scared mindset to playing with an aggressive one.
If you’re interested in a more personalized approach to changing your mindset when you play, click here to schedule a free call to learn more about 1-1 mental coaching, or fill out the form below.
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do
