When we play hockey, most of us want to do our best, and when we push ourselves, the game doesn’t always go our way. There can be many times when we can look back and say; “I should have done that, I can’t believe I didn’t score, I wish I was in a better position” and so on. We also get a lot of advice from our teammates and try to implement the changes.
The hardest part of hockey can be changing our game for the better. It is because when we play, we react, we act unconsciously. We play with our clothes. A common mistake can be not seeing the game well enough to miss creation opportunities. How do you teach someone to keep their head up?
It’s about having confidence in hockey moments, that’s the difference between making something happen or getting close. That is the difference between not scoring goals and scoring them. That’s the difference between being on a hot streak and just playing average.
The thing about trust is that we can’t have it just by thinking it, and if that works at all, it only works momentarily. It is not about our thinking, but about the mentality we have and that has to come naturally. We cannot force confidence in ourselves, we must earn it. But what we can do is remove the obstacles to trust.
What interferes the most with our confidence in sports are our fears. Fear can come in many forms, such as intimidation, fear of failure, fear of losing the record, fear of getting hurt, etc. A great way to start is to stop being so hard on ourselves when we mess up. This rewards fear that does not improve confidence. Then, to put that aside, we have to understand why we are so hard on ourselves, what we really have to prove and why.
We also love success in sports and when it happens it’s a huge confidence boost but we don’t want to let that go to our heads because it will pressure us for next time. Because we love success, we can be hard on ourselves when we miss opportunities and again this will put pressure on us. The pressure increases the fear of failure, which is another obstacle to confidence.
It is also possible that after suffering a recent injury or simply the discomfort of the pain itself, we can play under that fear. And again, not good for confidence. We can also intimidate ourselves when we focus too much on the other team instead of our game.
Confidence is most rewarded when we don’t play for our own ideals. These ideals have created all the pressure and fears for us. This means that we do better when our minds are free and therefore we have fun. This is when we are most creative and make the best decisions.
If we want to up our game and open up to trust, the best thing we can do is free our mind from these fears. If we are underperforming during a game, our conditioning will cause us to try harder and try harder not to make mistakes. What happens is that our minds are controlling our actions more than ever, our minds are not free and we can’t get into the free flow of the game where we do best. If we want to change our performance, it is best to take a few deep breaths and release the negative energy within us that is causing the poor performance.
Understanding how our mind works with hockey can help us understand many other situations in life. When we learn to improve our lives, we can also bring these changes to sport and perform better. The key is knowing how to deal with fear. When we can do that, we can not only do better in sports, but we can also do better in our lives.