{"id":4704,"date":"2013-03-14T11:37:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T18:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drjimtaylor.com\/2.0\/?p=4704"},"modified":"2013-03-14T11:37:26","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T18:37:26","slug":"dont-have-woulda-coulda-shoulda-in-your-sport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/dont-have-woulda-coulda-shoulda-in-your-sport\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Have Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda in Your Sport"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few decades, I have worked with many athletes, from juniors to weekend warriors to pros and Olympians. One thing I have noticed is that the most powerful work I do with them isn\u2019t your typical mental training where I teach them about positive thinking, mental imagery, routines, and how to stay intense and focused (though I certainly do that).<\/p>\n

Instead, the most valuable work I do seems to involve the attitude that athletes have toward their sport. No matter how good your mental skills are, if you don\u2019t have the right attitude, you aren\u2019t going to perform your best.<\/p>\n

This article is going to focus on several key ways you should think about your sports participation to not only perform your best, but, perhaps more importantly, to enjoy the competition and gain the most benefits from your athletic experiences.<\/p>\n

I see athletes express many different emotions after competitions. After a good performance, I see joy, excitement, pride, and inspiration. But, after less successful competitions, I see frustration, anger, and sadness. Yet, the one emotion that I consider to be perhaps the worst of all emotions for athletes to experience is regret.<\/p>\n

What is regret? That you wish you had done something differently. The sad reality is that there are no dress rehearsals in life, there is no \u201cWay Back\u201d machine (can anyone give me that cultural reference?) for do-overs. You get one shot in a competition, so you might as well take it, otherwise there will be a whole lot of \u201cwoulda, coulda, shoulda\u201d when you look in the rearview mirror of your day on the field, course, court, hill, or what-have-you.<\/p>\n

When have you felt regret in your sport? If you\u2019re like most athletes, it\u2019s when you didn\u2019t go for it in a competition, when you held back and performed tentatively and played it safe. When you cross the finish line or the whistle blows and reflect on your performance and the score or time, you want to kick yourself because you wished you had gone for it. When I speak to athletes, I always ask whether they would rather perform safely and do okay or go all out and either have a great performance or crash and burn. With almost complete unanimity, the answer is \u201cI would rather give it my all and see what happens.\u201d But when I ask them what they typically do, many athletes say rather sheepishly, \u201cI usually perform cautiously.\u201d<\/p>\n

The irony is that when you play it safe, you have little to no chance of having a good performance because sports require that you take risks to be successful. And therein lies the regret. Before you begin, you just want to not fail. But when you perform poorly and fail to live up to your expectations, you wish you had \u201cleft it all out there,\u201d even if the risks didn\u2019t pay off. For you to perform your best, you must make the commitment to go for it before you begin.<\/p>\n

What prevents athletes from laying it on the line in competitions when they know consciously that they should? Plain and simple: fear of failure<\/a>. This unconscious, yet potent, force causes a mindset that goes against just about everything that you need to think, feel, and do to perform your best and achieve your goals. Most basically, to perform your very best in most sports, you must take risks, whether going for a winner in tennis, aiming for a birdie putt instead of laying it up in golf, or running at a pace you\u2019re not entirely sure you can maintain in a 10K race. At the same time, when you take risks, your chances of failure increase as well; the nature of risks is that they are uncertain. If you have a fear of failure, you\u2019re not likely to take those risks because you are more concerned with avoiding failure than you are about pursuing success.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know many athletes who have regrets for when they went for it in a competition even if it didn\u2019t work out (though there is certainly disappointment). I do know many athletes who have immense regret for what they didn\u2019t do, for when they failed to give it everything had when the opportunity arose. Yet, when you play it safe in a competition, regret is what you will surely feel.<\/p>\n

I think you should go for it in every competition. Of course, many of those opportunities won\u2019t end well; that\u2019s the uncertainty of sports. You will naturally feel disappointment that things didn\u2019t turn out the way you wanted. But that feeling of disappointment will be mild and short lived compared to the intense and long-lasting feeling of regret you may feel if you don\u2019t compete all out. Also, with that sadness at the failed opportunity, there is an upside. You will feel a certain pride in knowing that at least you went for it and gave it your all because that\u2019s all you have within your control. As the saying goes, \u201cIf you don\u2019t take the shot, you can\u2019t score.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with regret is a question that may gnaw at you for every missed opportunity to leave it all out there that passes you by: \u201cI wonder what could have been?\u201d You don\u2019t have a crystal ball in which you can gaze into the past to see what would have happened if you had let go of your fears and gone for it. Of course, good things don\u2019t always happen when you put yourself out there, but I\u2019m going to argue that more good things will happen when you go for it than when you play it safe. There\u2019s another old saying that \u201cIt\u2019s better to make errors of commission than errors of omission.\u201d Even if things don\u2019t work out as planned, at least you tried and know what happened and, with that knowledge, you don\u2019t spend your days filled with regret wondering what could have been.<\/p>\n

At the end of a day of competition, a season, career, or when you are lying on your death bed, I want you to look back on your sports experience, whether you won Olympic gold, competed in college, or just had a ton of fun, and be able to say \u201cI left it all out there.\u201d You can only do that when you aren\u2019t afraid to fail. And one important way to not fear failure is to believe that regret is far worse than failure. And, based on my experience as a athlete and as a person who\u2019s been on this planet for quite a while, I can assure you that it is.<\/p>\n

By the way, there might just be an important life lesson beyond sports here!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few decades, I have worked with many athletes, from juniors to weekend warriors to pros and Olympians. One thing I have noticed is that the most powerful work I do with them isn\u2019t your typical mental training where I teach them about positive thinking, mental imagery, routines, and how to stay intense and focused (though I certainly do that).<\/p>\n

Instead, the most valuable work I do seems to involve the attitude that athletes have toward their sport. No matter how good your mental skills are, if you don\u2019t have the right attitude, you aren\u2019t going to perform your best.<\/p>\n

This article is going to focus on several key ways you should think about your sports participation to not only perform your best, but, perhaps more importantly, to enjoy the competition and gain the most benefits from your athletic experiences.<\/p>\n

I see athletes express many different emotions after competitions. After a good performance, I see joy, excitement, pride, and inspiration. But, after less successful competitions, I see frustration, anger, and sadness. Yet, the one emotion that I consider to be perhaps the worst of all emotions for athletes to experience is regret.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1517],"tags":[74,285,58,199,61],"class_list":["post-4704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","tag-athletes","tag-athletics","tag-competition","tag-regret","tag-sports-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}