Luke here. Evolving Athlete Academy’s and Her Power Academy’s Mindset Coach.

I often ask my student-athletes, “Do you have anxiety? Or does it have you?”

A majority of student-athletes get anxious before their sporting events, school tests, and social events.

Some have a strategy for handling anxiety, and that strategy allows them to control it.

Others lack a strategy, and the anxiety controls them.

In this email, I aim to give you a deeper understanding of why an athlete gets engulfed in the flames of performance anxiety and leave you with some tools to help your athlete put that fire out.

My aim with all my student-athletes is to teach them strategies for how to control the anxiety they experience and use it to fuel performance, instead of damaging their performance.

A little anxiety is a very normal and natural thing to experience before going into an event we care about, where the outcome is not within our complete control.

When a student-athlete really cares about the outcome of an event, it’s natural to think about all possible outcomes coming true: the outcomes they want and the worst-case scenarios.

A small amount of anxiety tells me that the athlete is considering all possibilities and it shows they care about getting the best outcome possible.

It is a healthy mix of fear of not getting the results they want and excitement about the possible rewards if they show up and perform with excellence.

This amount of anxiety is like a small flame burning within.

It illuminates possibilities and makes them aware of the consequences.

This flame of anxiety fuels the fire of competitive drive within an athlete and pushes them to go that extra mile in practice and competition.

It pushes them to do the extra work.

It gets them out of bed 15 minutes earlier to get a few extra repetitions done before school starts.

It’s a power that when within their control, can be sustainable, and help fuel their excellence.

It is an awareness of what could go wrong, that drives them to refine their skills and is kept under control by focusing mostly on the outcomes they want to happen.

This type of anxiety is a sustainable, joyful-anxiety, and It is best when blended with self-belief and optimism.

It’s just the right amount.

Without it, there is no emotion, no motivation, no consideration or care about the outcome.

Thus, there is no drive to prepare in an excellent way.

The problem is when that controllable flame of anxiety becomes a roaring blaze of uncontrollable performance anxiety.

This is when the anxiety has the student-athlete.

This type of anxiety has the student-athlete feeling out of control and overwhelmed.

It boils up self-doubt, burns down confidence, and smokes joy out of the activity.

This type of performance anxiety is very destructive to a student-athlete’s performance.

Performance anxiety can be about academic tests, sporting events, social events, their future in college, and beyond.

In a lot of young athletes, on the surface, their performance anxiety manifests as a fear of not getting the result they want or a fear of making mistakes.

They become fixated on the “what ifs” of worst-case scenarios.

They suffer from an incredibly unresourceful use of their imagination.

They imagine these outcomes vividly in their mind’s eye.

And they get sucked into that imagined reality as if it’s really happening.

And more often than not, It’s out of their conscious awareness. Until we begin asking the athlete the right questions, they are not even consciously aware that this is how they are creating the anxiety.

A coach or parents might ask them, “What is wrong?” And they say, “I am afraid of making mistakes.”

Then the coach or parent will often give a well-intentioned but unhelpful answer, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

What Is Driving Performance Anxiety?

Let’s use the most common one I work with athletes on, THE FEAR OF MAKING MISTAKES.

What we hear on the surface is, “I am afraid of making mistakes” but underneath, it is much different.

To use a garden metaphor, imagine a green weed popping out of the ground, this is performance anxiety.

All you see is the weed (performance anxiety > about fear of making mistakes) but what is feeding this weed and keeping it alive?

When we dig deeper down, underneath the fear of making mistakes, we get to the roots.

What is at the root of all performance anxiety?

Unresourceful meaning.

The meanings we give and the thoughts we represent in our mind are what feed and give nutrients to the fears (performance anxiety) we experience.

The “roots” are the meanings that the athlete has associated with not getting the result they want to get.

Because each of us creates our own meanings about things, we are the meaning-makers who construct our own unique Matrix (map of the world). – Dr L Michael Hall

The meaning we give is the instinct we live. – Dr L Michael Hall

When we dig up the old roots (unresourceful meanings) and replace them with more fruitful roots (resourceful meanings) the athlete will get much more fruitful results.

Ideally, the meanings will allow the athlete to perform to their highest potential, while at the same time maintaining a sense of calm confidence, and joy.

A Case Study: “My Parent’s Love Is On The Line”

One of my student-athletes was experiencing performance anxiety.

She was a 13yo, single child, and an excellent young student and athlete.

On the surface, she was afraid of making mistakes, so she tried to stop making mistakes, which is impossible, and this attempt resulted in added stress and anxiety, ironically causing more performance anxiety, and lowering her confidence.

It is obvious on the outside that it is impossible to stop making mistakes because mistakes are a normal part of any skill development.

But because the real reason behind their anxiety (the meanings they are giving) is so unconscious and not obvious to the athlete, they try to stop the trigger of their anxiety, the mistakes.

As a result, the athlete develops “perfectionism.”

Perfectionism is an attempt to “trim the weeds down.”

This doesn’t work. Instead, it validates and strengthens unresourceful meanings they are holding in mind.

When I dug a little deeper into the meaning this student-athlete was giving, I came to discover that this girl believed that her parents would be upset at her and love her less after the game if she made too many mistakes.

Whenever she makes a mistake she imagines her parents upset with her on the drive home. She sees her parents angry and disappointed with her on the drive home, which, in her experience, is them taking love away from her. And to her, this is incredibly painful.

No wonder she is getting anxious! Her parents’ love is on the line every time she plays!

This might seem strong, especially because this girl has very loving parents, but she came to this conclusion because, 1) She was “Mind Reading”, a cognitive distortion we all do to some extent, and 2) because of how she experiences love as an individual.

When I asked her, “How do you know your parents love you? What do you see and hear them do that tells you they love you?”

She said, “They give me hugs and they are non-judgmentally supportive.”

I said, “Okay. And how do you know when they are non-judgmentally supportive?”

She said, “They ask me what I think, they let me talk, they give me advice in a positive way. I can tell by their body language and tone of voice. It is more calm and relaxed.”

This is how she experiences love from her parents.

And when I asked her, “How do you know when you are unloved by your parents? What do you see and hear that tells you they are loving you less?”

She said, “They are more critical of me, rather than asking me what I think. They go quiet and don’t say much, or, they get loud and have intense body language and tone of voice. When they do this I think they are disappointed and angry at me. And I feel like they don’t love me.”

This is her experience of them taking away love.

And this is what her perception of their behavior would tend to be after she had games that didn’t go so well.

In her mind, her experience of reality, her parents’ love was on the line for her in each game.

Each mistake meant a little less love from her parents after the game which was excruciating for this girl. She was not conscious of the fact that this is what she was worried about until I got into the deeper meanings she was holding.

As you can imagine, this perceived loss of love put a lot of pressure on this young girl to perform.

This girl’s parents are very loving and are genuinely amazing people. They never would intend to take love away from their daughter.

They love and believe in her so much they would do anything to help her reach her potential.

From the parent’s perspective, they have so much love and care for their daughter, and they want her to reach her highest potential so she can live her best life.

This is part of why they would get “intense” after a game that didn’t go so well.

Their post-game emotions and actions were fueled with loving-passion and care. But that’s not how the athlete perceived it.

In this case, the athlete experienced “unloved” in a different way than what her parents realized.

The approach to resolve this is two-fold:

1. We help the athlete create more accurate and useful mental maps. With the new more accurate maps, she can counter her older ways of thinking that distort her perceptions and instead experience an expanded, higher level of consciousness.

A few ways we do this are:

1. We help her change the meaning she is giving to her parents’ reactions to “bad games” by teaching her that her parents are emotional about her behavior within a game, not about her as a person.
2. We help her become conscious of her habit of mind reading (projecting thoughts, feelings, and intuitions onto others and jumping to conclusions without checking her guesses with the person). And teach her how to counter this habit with sensory thinking.
3. We help her consider emotional distinctions. Those emotions are not anger, they are intense-passion, and caring-frustration because they love you so much and want to see you reach your potential.
4. We teach her how to permit herself to make mistakes. Because mistakes are a normal part of life and a very normal part of the path to mastery.
5. We teach her how to become a high-level mistake-maker. How to learn from mistakes like a pro.
6. We teach high-performance self-talk. So she can begin defining these moments instead of letting the moments define her.
7. We help her gain greater self-awareness and develop a higher level of mindset control by teaching her how to take ownership of her mind, emotions, speech, and behaviors.

2. Help the parents create a new response that is more in line with how the daughter experiences love (so love is not taken away), while still being able to hold her to a high standard of performance.

By understanding their child’s love strategy, the parents can consciously maintain that connection of love while having post-game conversations about performance, learning from mistakes, etc.

They can help shift the athlete’s thinking to “They love me, and they care about my performance getting better. They just want the best for me.”

In Summary:

Performance anxiety is the manifestation of the meanings the athlete is holding in mind. When we replace the old meanings with new, more resourceful meanings, the athlete will get a new, more resourceful result.

Everyone experiences reality differently. Ask your student-athlete questions about how they experience their reality to 1) help them gain greater self-awareness, and 2) help you understand them on a deeper level.

Transforming an individual’s mindset often does not always happen overnight. When we introduce a new way of thinking, it requires repetition and confirmation for it to settle as the new default way of thinking. Consistent effort and patience are of utmost importance.

If you are a parent, discovering how your child experiences love can be an interesting experience.

I invite you to ask them the following questions:

• “How do you know when you are loved by me? What do you see and hear that tells you I love you?”
• “How do you know when you are unloved by me? What do you see and hear that makes you think I love you less?”

You are looking for empirical evidence with these questions. If you get, “I know you love me when you support me.” You will want to ask them, “How do you know when I am supporting you? What do I say or do that tells you I am supporting you?”

This way you can get their unique strategy for how they experience love from you and you can be more conscious of that moving forward.

To your highest and best,

Luke Bunder