Managing Emotions for Success
Emotions can be your enemy in sport and critically impact consistency, sustainability and viability of performance.
The strength and depth of Positive Attitude, including the reality of individual’s depth of core belief and outcome visualisation are impacted by learned belief systems that are individual and have deep emotional linkages.
Attitude and Belief are supported by your conscious and unconscious (sub conscious mind).
Success is a disciplined and focused journey that requires balance supported by a successful appropriate, necessary process to contribute all the necessary required elements. For example, fitness, training, work ethic & effort, rejuvenation, recovery and following an essential diet / nutrition. Also necessary are essential elements including range of skills, range of technical ability and tactical awareness at player level and a management level. These elements provide both individual and team standards of operandum that are non-negotiable, that becomes a group culture that is supported by a clear transparent, accountability including effort measurability and performance feedbacks.

- Process supports cohesion, culture, bonding.
- Sum of Individuals commitment determines the effectiveness of group effort and cohesion
- Your Brain is the most powerful muscle in the body
- Clear focus process provides foundation and framework
Advantages Of Training Psychologically
- Training Psychologically = Mental Conditioning
- Emotional Intelligence
- Role Of Psychotherapy as distinct from Sports Psychology
Such necessary process elements are formulated to deliver success, rely on foundations of honesty, integrity within a buy-in framework of unity of purpose, clear shared objective and targets which the processes are fully relied on to deliver.
- Clear focus process provides foundation and framework, supporting belief and confidence.
- Process supports cohesion, culture, bonding.
- Successful process focuses always on what is within your control.
- Following clear process is key to high performance, provides for satisfaction and enjoyment along essential measures and target points that lead to mini goals that lead to ultimate goal.
- Each individual panel member signs up to his role and in fulfilling his commitment is fulfilling his primary obligation to the team. Each individual commitment is to strive to be the best he can be. This manifests into the Team being the best therefore enjoying the united force of the sum of the parts.
- Sum of Individuals commitment determines the effectiveness of group effort and cohesion.
- Collective Identity & Shared Purpose requires structured, consistent communication and is supported by prevailing culture and tradition with its inherent capacity to enhance further.
- Muscle memory (physical) and Mind memory (emotional) are interlinked and have capacity to empower and disempower in moments of anxiety, stress, frustration, provocation. In such moments, the depth of belief and level of mental toughness to maintain positive attitude, maintain belief, maintain performance control are critically tested.
Your Brain (mind conscious and unconscious) is the most powerful muscle in the body and requires its own exercise, training, fitness, conditioning including appropriate supports such as mental nutrition and mental diet.
ADVANTAGES OF TRAINING PSYCHOLOGICALLY
Beyond intense physical training and preparation – are you prepared to go further psychologically to create edge & advantage?
- Training Psychologically should be integrated in all stages of Performance including Preparation & Planning, Actual Performance and Performance Review.
- Training Psychologically contributes to making best choice for maximum and impact in critical moments including being fully receptive to Positive Self Talk and Visualizations.
- Training Psychologically supports mental conditioning and is as essential as physical fitness to deliver in high levels of intensity. Fatigue can be psychological and not psychological. Fatigue can be in your head and therefore needs to be addressed as would muscle fatigue.
- Training psychologically means to understand your players more and for individual players to understand their self to obtain optimum performance and access ideal performance state.
How Psychological Conditioning can affect your performance:
- Psychological Conditioning minimizes emotional Energy and Focus leakages impacting Pre-Match Preparations and Game time, particularly in settling in periods.
- Psychological Conditioning can support trait and state stress management.
- Psychological Conditioning leads to better anxiety management.
- Psychological Conditioning creates and supports Positive Self Talk.
- Psychological Conditioning supports accessing use of instrumental aggression as distinct from hostile aggression.
- Psychological understanding and Analysis provides knowledge and data that can benefit and inform process.
Training Psychology and Psychological Conditioning support growth of emotional intelligence
For example, understanding motivations and emotional connections to ensure cohesion – i.e. a motivation fuelled by disliking losing more than liking winning will impact and undermine.
Emotional Intelligence facilitates your head ruling your heart at critical points and enables:
- The ability to recognise different emotional states;
- Understanding and Assessing the effects of emotions on subsequent behaviour;
- Identify when and how our emotions are influencing our performance -Emotions can be positive and negative on performances;
- Identify thoughts linked to emotions determine if emotions are motivational or demotivational;
- An individual’s ability to switch into his best state to manage a particular situation once historic patterns are identified, can be reprogrammed to maximise performance;
- Emotional Intelligence facilitates selective thinking and manging energy efficiently;
- Emotionally intelligent people can get themselves into the appropriate emotional state for the demands of a particular situation;
- Emotional Intelligence supports mental toughness impacting Commitment, Confidence, Concentration, Challenge and Control;
Research confirms that Emotional Intelligence can be learned, can be improved and is more present with age and maturity.
Psychotherapy Techniques go deeper than talk, mantra and have capacity to influence individual embedded beliefs, change patterns, individual emotional links that impact sporting performance.
Psychotherapy goes deeper than presentation fronts and accesses the unconscious thoughts that ultimately control and influence the conscious.
Psychotherapy can access deep understanding of individual emotional make up to inform maximising individual performance. Psychotherapy can assist in greater emotional balance and contentment as individual that will translate into Athletic Performance.
Supporting techniques include Relaxation Skills, Breathwork, Mindfulness and Focus Skills, Embedded Trigger Words, Positive Self Talk, visualisations.
Psychotherapy can access individual deep belief systems and support embedding of new beliefs, remove defeating beliefs, leading to improved individual performances. Techniques such as Hypnotherapy and Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing (EMDR) which are individually Psychotherapeutically informed and attuned can significantly reinforce Performance Belief , Control and Confidence ultimately performance.