Have you had negative past experiences within your sport?
These can include bad games you’ve played or injuries you’ve experienced.
These negative experiences are tough to deal with in the moment. But it may be the lasting effect of the negative experience we really need to look out for.
In this article, we’re going to examine how past experiences impact your athletic performance, and what you can do to manage them.
The Impact of the Past on Future Performances
Past negative experiences leave a lasting impression on your mind. They can result in fear and anxiety moving forward. When this fear and anxiety are present, they cause you to underperform in games.
But why is it that negative past experiences lead to fear and anxiety?
It has to do with the intense emotions that accompanied the experience in the past and your subconscious desire to avoid experiencing such negativity in the future.
Two prime examples of negative past experiences that impact your performance in the future are poor performances and injuries.
Poor Past Performances
When you play poorly, sometimes it’s easy to let it go. The game fades into memory and you don’t think about it much.
Other times, the poor performance is difficult, if not impossible to let go of. You hold onto the memory and it stays with you, impacting your performances moving forward.
What’s the difference?
The emotional intensity you experienced. And this will be closely related to how bad the performance was, how much embarrassment you felt and how much importance you placed on the game.
The more important the game was, the more likely you are to beat yourself up and feel negatively about it. The same is true for coach yelling at you and teammates getting upset with you.
As an example, let’s take a look at a baseball player who has a really bad game. He plays second base and makes a few errors during the game. At the plate, he struggles as well and strikes out a couple times and goes hitless on the day.
The team loses and the coach yells at him after the game. He singles him out and screams at him in front of the team.
Not only were the errors and at bats embarassing for him, but to add to the embarrassment coach called him out in front of his teammates.
On the bus ride home he is feeling depressed, embarrassed, and extremely upset with himself.
This is the type of negative past experience that could be held on to subconsciously and negatively impact performances moving forward.
Because the experience was so negative, the baseball player will want to avoid such negative emotions in the future. This is where fear of failure and performance anxiety develop.
He ends up playing games in a scared mentality because he is playing to avoid mistakes. Unfortunately, this leads to more poor performance and a vicious cycle of worsening fear and anxiety.
Past Injuries
In addition to poor performances in the past, injuries can also be past experiences that leave a lasting impression on an athlete and impact future performances.
This occurs because the athlete is scared of getting reinjured and so they play cautiously. They may also not trust in themselves fully after recovering from an injury.
An example is a soccer player who tears her ACL. It happens halfway through her season, so she misses the rest of the season and is set for a long and grueling recovery process.
The injury itself caused her a lot of pain, and the recovery process added to the pain in the form of frustration and irritation at the lengthy recovery process she must endure.
When she does return to play, she is timid. She’s afraid of hurting herself again so she hesitates on cuts and doesn’t go full speed. This worsens the confidence she has in herself.
In addition, because she was out for so long, she questions whether or not she still has the skills she used to have. This only adds to the second guessing that’s taking place and further worsens her play.
Avoiding Negatives in the Future
Athletes who play to avoid negatives consistently underperform. They feel as though they are holding themselves back. mainly because…they are.
When you play to avoid a negative, such as avoiding making mistakes, you will find yourself playing it safe. Playing it safe limits performance.
Not to mention the fact that when you play it safe, you actually increase your chances of messing up.
Unfortunately, past negative experiences lead to such an avoidance mindset.
Whether it’s due to a past injury or an embarassing experience in the past, dealing with such trauma leaves a strong imprint on the subconscious. An imprint that tells the mind: avoid these situations in the future.
Because the experience was so negative and was viewed by your mind as a traumatic experience, there is a strong emotional attachment to the memory.
When we have a strong emotional attachment to a memory, our minds will work to keep us safe by trying to avoid having to experience such a thing again.
With the experience for you having involved your sport, this presents a major challenge. Since the way to avoid (or at least the way our brains seek to avoid) experiencing such negative emotions again is playing it safe, playing tight, and holding ourselves back.
This is why past negative experiences have such a strong effect on future performance.
How to Manage Negative Past Experiences
There are many techniques I use in one-on-one mental performance coaching to help athletes work through their past negative experiences to ensure they don’t negatively impact their future games.
But these are very personalized and work best in a 1-1 setting.
If you are interested in one-on-one coaching to help work through any mental blocks you’re experiencing, click here to schedule a free introductory coaching call.
There is one technique that is very straightforward I want to share with you now, though, that I believe will help.
It is one I have many athletes use and it’s one I personally used to work through some struggles in my own baseball career.
Processing Past Experiences
Our goal when it comes to managing negative past experiences is to reduce the emotional attachment we have to them. We cannot erase the memory, but we can reduce the emotional attachment we have to the memory.
There are many techniques, as I said, that work well at doing exactly that. But one you can begin using on your own is a self-reflective writing process.
We are wanting to allow the mind to work itself through what happened. That helps reduce the attachment.
What you can do is set yourself a timer for five to ten minutes. Then begin writing about what happened. Allow your thoughts to flow freely onto the page. I recommend using a blank, loose leaf piece of paper, or typing on the computer.
Because once your time is up for the day, you want to either throw the piece of paper away or delete what you’ve written.
The goal with this exercise is to allow your mind to process through what happened. The more you can come face to face with what happened and feel okay about it, the less you will be emotionally attached to the memory.
Mental Coaching to Manage Past Negative Experiences in Your Sport
A common factor I see among athletes I work with in one-on-one coaching is having dealt with a negative past experience. Whether it was an injury or a bad game, a negative experience has occurred and is impacting their future play.
One of our goals within mental coaching is processing through what happened. In addition, we will focus on building mental skills to help equip you with the ability to manage such negative experiences in the future.
If you are interested in learning more about 1-1 coaching, please fill out the form below or click here to schedule a free introductory coaching call.
