Do you remember the pure joy of your first hit in baseball or softball? Or, maybe your first goal on your AYSO soccer team? For some, the greatest joy in sports was the weekly pick-up hoops game with great friends where every point was competed like it was an NBA final.
Now, compare that to your current sport. Is the joy still there? If not, how can you get it back? Why is that important? It’s important because it will help you to perform better.
On a GameChange Livestream Forum, high-performance mindset coach Dr. Michael Brown made a bold statement. He said, “When joy disappears, performance is soon behind. We have to protect the love of the sport.”
Why is that?
There are several reasons. Probably at the top of the list is that many people start losing the joy of playing when they let the fear of failure cause them to have anxiety, which creates a negative cycle that leads to lower performance. It’s ironic that wanting to win so badly can often actually cause you to lose.
Dr. Brown stated, “I want our athletes to have high expectations plus a light heart, so then you’ll actually have performance without suffocation.” This might seem contradictory because wouldn’t the fear of not meeting the high expectations cause you the anxiety that robs you of your joy of playing?
The point is not to eliminate high expectations, it’s where to place them.
So, where do you place them? You place them in the here and now. The actual process of playing. If it’s at practice, focus on the drill you are doing that will make you better at the sport you love. Athletes who find joy in the process of honing their craft become less dependent on the outcome that the scoreboard shows and less fearful of failure.
Ok, that’s all fine and true, but there is a scoreboard in the arena, and a big part of the joy of playing sports is to compete like crazy to win the games we play and the championships we pursue. Doesn’t it sort of feel like the guy (or gal) who says things like, “let’s just have fun out there,” lacks the fierceness that we admire in great athletes? It might seem that just playing for fun can rob you of the desire to be great, but Dr. Brown disagrees. He stated, “Joy and fun of the sport isn’t softness, it is fuel for greater performance.”
You can have fun and still be fierce.
Notice that we didn’t say that the joy of sports was winning games and championships; we said competing like crazy to win the game or championship is what brings us joy. It’s a subtle, but massively important difference.
Competing like crazy means that you are fully present in the moment of playing. Your joy comes from being fierce in every single play of the game and loving the competition of trying to beat the player across from you. You are not wasting time, energy, and needless anxiety by worrying what the scoreboard will show at the end. You are having way too much fun in the exact moment of competing to care.
That, my friends, is the true joy of sports – and when you can put your focus there, your performance will follow.
