5 strategies to help you stop doing self-doubt in and around your sport

Here are 5 strategies to help you stop doing self-doubt in and around your sport.

When you’re consistently doing self-doubt in your sport, your neuropathways for self-doubt are strong and fast, making it easy for you to trigger and feel/think self-doubt.

This also means you have a strong narrative around self-doubt, from visual images/video to your self-talk, when you’re just thinking about your sport to actually doing it.

It may feel like you’re stuck in a frustrating feedback loop of self-doubt.

Stop doing self-doubt in your sport, start doing what you’d love to do instead and create an unstoppable performance feedback loop with these 5 strategies:

STRATEGY #1 CHANGE YOUR NARRATIVE

One of the most powerful ways to stop doing self-doubt is to change your narrative.

Instead of doing self-doubt, what would you love to think, feel, believe and do instead? State only in performance and life-enhancing language.

For example:

“I would love to love swimming, and feel really good about it and my progression”

By creating a performance-enhancing narrative and thinking this consistently, you’re bringing the neuropathways for love, enjoyment and fun closer together with your sport - making it easier to activate these positive feelings.

STRATEGY #2 LOOK FOR EVERYTHING YOU LOVE AND INSPIRES CONFIDENCE

The brain edits your reality according to what you consciously and unconsciously tell it to look for.

So if your main narrative is self-doubt, it will highlight to you everything that reinforces this feeling and belief - and dulls out anything that goes against this, so you don’t notice it.

I want your brain to edit your reality according to your love for your sport and confidence.

Write down all of the reasons you love your sport and what you do really well, there will be at least two.

I love [your sport] because....

E.g. I love swimming because it’s meditative, low impact, can swim outdoors in amazing places, get into flow, do it with friends etc.

I am great at [your sport] because....

I am getting better and better at [your sport] because…

STRATEGY #3 RE-FRAME UNHELPFUL STUFF

When you notice an unhelpful thought that is based around a fact, re-frame it in a performance and life enhancing way.

For example, if you swim a 1500m time trial and your time compared to everyone else’s was slow, but for you was a personal best, instead of thinking bloody hell I'm so slow, think; wow my training really is making me faster, I’m getting faster and faster every day.

Or if you’re getting down about lockdown and pools/gyms being shut, instead think, I’m doing really well with all my other training, I’m doing my best and as I’ve not been able to swim for so long, I’m no longer doing any of this bad habits! And when I do start again, I’ll be able to install all the amazing good habits I need!

STRATEGY #4 ONLY PERFORMANCE AND LIFE ENHANCING LANGUAGE

All of your language around your sports needs to be performance and life enhancing.

The more you use this language and less and less you say unhelpful things, the more you strengthen the powerful performance enhancing pathways, and the weaker and weaker the unhelpful neuropathways become, making them harder and harder to activate in and around your sport.

STRATEGY #5 1-3 KEY FOCUS POINTS FOR GREATEST PERFORMANCE GAINS

When you’re doing self-doubt, part of the reason is usually because you are focusing on ALL the many overwhelming things you need to do to be great at your sport.

But when your energy and focus is on many things, it’s too spread out and you can’t give the level of attention each action needs.

This leads to losing the positive momentum that will take you towards unstoppable performance.

Chose 1-3 actions to focus on in your training that will give you the biggest performance gains, and assign 1-3 words to represent that action. Your coach will be able to help you here.

For example:

A swimmer will ask themselves; what 1-3 things do I need to focus on to swim as fast as I can?

Positive self-talk - your focus word could be POSITIVE
High elbows
Shallow kicks

Every time you notice yourself distracted or focusing on the wrong thing, bring yourself back to the present moment with your focus word/s, and repeat as often as necessary.

Let me know which strategy gives you the greatest performance gains below!

Adelaide

P.S. Ready to take your performance to the next level? Here are 4 ways I can help you:

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Adelaide Goodeve

How to stop doing self doubt around your sport