Why do athletes get in their own way? Under pressure, the challenge to play with freedom is even greater. Often times, athletes want so badly to perform well or win that they think if they try harder, be more serious, and focus on technique they will execute better. Ironically, it’s the exact opposite.
When athletes can’t get out of their own way, the mind interferes with what athletes have trained their bodies to do. Most of the time, athletes who can’t “get out of their own way” try way too hard, force their game, think too much, or over-analyze.
I have spent a lot of time researching the best athletes in the world and how it is that they are able to perform at their peak. These athletes report having the ability to enter the zone by trusting their skills and avoiding excess thinking that interferes with their performance.
Trust in your skills is the ability to let go of controlling thoughts during execution and rely on what you have already trained in practice. Trust is not the same mental skill as confidence. Trust happens during execution, whereas confidence precedes execution. The more confidence you have in your ability to hit the jump shot in basketball, for example, the greater likelihood of you trusting your shot.
Professional athletes described an almost out of body experience in which they felt like observers (of their own performance) allowing their performance to just happen. As if they were performing on autopilot. When you allow yourself to flow, you trust that your body will execute successfully without over-thinking the movement.
Professional golfer, Stewart Cink spent over 40 weeks in the top 10 of the Official World Golf Rankings and understands the concept of getting out of your own way well. Cink believes that in order to be successful you must shut off your mind and let muscle memory (actually motor memory) take over.
Cink knows that when athletes feel pressure to perform well, they tend to over think. “The pressure, it can get to you, it can get to everyone, and it does, and you have to be just prepared, muscle memory will take over. I think it’s important to let your body swing the club because the muscles don’t forget how to do it. It’s when your mind gets in the way, and it starts trying to control things, that’s when you have trouble. So the best way to approach pressure situations to me is to have as much of a switched off mind as you can, just blank mind and just let the body do everything, and let it happen naturally,” Cink says.