Pre-Match Nerves

Handling our nerves and maintaining equilibrium during performance is one thing, but what about that other perennial comment I encounter, couched usually in terms like this.

“Pete, I get really bad nerves before a match. How can I deal with them?”

In my book Mind How You Play, I explore Equilibrium and where and how the balance of our performance is arrived at, or how it is in being.

Of course, if we could just sail through our pre-match build-up then starting out in a state of equilibrium would be just a matter of getting the motor running, heading out on the competition highway and looking for adventure. And, to be honest, a lot of the pre-match work with teams I am involved with on game days is about just that. Getting their motors purring through not over revving-up, and feeling grounded in Mind through being not wound up.

We are all prone to, and most of us get pre-match nerves to some degree, but here’s the thing - Some of what we are feeling is emotionally draining, scrambles our brain and is physically debilitating, and some is just plain excitement and anticipation of the contest.
And if we only got the thrill, the anticipatory tingle, the frissant of electricity that flashes around the body, then we would never describe any of that as bad nerves.

No, in the mix of all the stuff that’s going on for us there is good and bad – some more useful and some less useful. It is the bad nerves that do nothing positive for us at all - which is why it makes sense for us to want to deal with them!

Getting started

It starts with Equilibrium. Once we have an understanding of Equilibrium, then we’ll realise that there needs to be zero nerves – both good AND bad! Since nerves are a manifestation of our thinking, then - in an ideal world - there needs to be a state of zero thinking.

So, after the philosophical angle, the understanding, what is the next step?

To put it simply, there are two approaches to dealing with Bad Nerves – you can either
DO SOMETHING or DO NOTHING.
The do something approach requires a strategy, while the do nothing approach merely requires an understanding.

A strategy you will have to learn and carry out – while an understanding is just a felt sense of knowing; what we might call wisdom.

Now, don’t get me wrong – they both work!

And in all honesty I coached the strategic approach for years, after first applying to self to judge how straightforward and beneficial things would be.

Strategies

Some players do visualization, some play music on headphones, some set up an inner calm place beforehand and go there, some meditate. All these strategies for pre-match nerves are designed to bring about one thing in common – a state of reduced thinking, of feeling calm and grounded.
And these are, on the face of it, quite sensible things to do!

Whichever strategy we have, it's designed to take us from our present state (nerves) to our desired state (grounded calm) and we use these vehicles, these means of transport, to get us there.

Now I'll come back to feeling - for feeling, in this regard, is the operative word.
Bad nerves – feeling bad – happens when there is an apparent overload of Kinaesthetic experiences going on in the foreground. And the more the overload, the worse the badness of feeling gets.

However, I’d like you to notice how these strategies are all geared to turning down the Kinaesthetic experience by overloading more Visual and Auditory sensual experience into the foreground. The trouble is we’re using other overloads to deal with the first overload, and you know what – the first overload is not actually reduced, it is just masked.

The headache

We don’t take paracetamol for a headache, we take it to mask the kinaesthetic perception of headache pain. The cause of the headache is still there causing pain, yet we’ve changed the balance of chemicals in the brain to ‘trick’ our perceptions. Of course we are knowing and willing partners in this act of ‘trickery’, without really knowing the precise details of what is going on for us – on the inside!

We can also take this subterfuge further, and ‘trick’ our perceptions, when a placebo is substituted for the paracetamol. It is important we don’t know it’s a placebo however, for obvious reasons – but we need to know what is going on in our heads when the headache goes this time. In this instance the masking of the pain is done by releasing some of our own neuro-chemicals, and the perceptual trigger for this ‘trick’ was that we THOUGHT we were taking paracetamol! And because we “know” that paracetamol deals with headache then the end result of our thinking is ... no headache!

For some people there are certain “drugs of choice” for nerves, from narcotics and alcohol across to beta-blockers. They all deal with the feelings, the kinaesthetics, of the nerves and not the causes of those feelings. I know some players who even use stimulating drinks to help them deal with their nerves, which has to be about as bizarre as eating toothpaste to combat gum disease!

Do you follow, are you with me here? Are the mists clearing yet? Is the mask slipping – for you?

Understanding

What is it that lies behind ALL our feelings? Thought.

We see a wonderful sunset, or hear a great song, and the way we feel about those experiences has been generated by our perceptive powers, our thought processes. How easy is it to imagine how exciting some upcoming event is going to be? It is SO easy that we can experience a felt sense of how it will be well in advance. Similarly, our perception of a headache is driven by thought. And our bad nerves, too, are driven by our own thinking.

Just consider what thoughts are going on behind your feelings of bad nerves.

“I’m worried about my performance; I’m worried whether I’ll play well or whether I’m good enough; I don’t want to let others down so I’m worried about that; I’m worried I’m carrying an injury; I always worry because I want to do things right; What will people think of me if I don’t do well?;If I wasn’t worried one particular day I’d probably be worried about that too.”

There are many issues going on in that montage of reasons – all sewn together by the word “I”!
Logically, your intellect tells you that all this worry is a bit pointless – but your body is telling you something else. “I’ve still got the jitters, the butterflies, a tight, wrenching knot in my gut,” you’ll be saying, as your heartbeat pounds fast, your breathing gets shallow and faster, your mind seems to race or be spinning out of control, your palms get sweaty and your mouth goes bone dry.

Get familiar with those feelings - whereabouts do you feel them? Acknowledge them – because you remember what happened all the other times you tried to make them go away by denying them, or overloading them, or by ingesting something to mask them, or by just wishing and hoping.
Notice what is different this time, for out of the noticing will come your understanding.

Are the feelings in your body or in your head? The answer, curiously, is a particular pointer as to where you are ‘living your life’.

It is as if those bad nerves, for each and every one of us, have a sixth sense as to where we are most vulnerable!

Feelings noticed in the body are more straightforward for you to combat – while if you feel the nerves in your head, it’s because you are living your life in your head, driven by a logical perspective from your intellect.
‘In the head’ people don’t want to feel grounded, they want to feel in control – and the control they want to feel in control of is – at the end of the day - their thinking!

Once you acknowledge your nerves AND have the understanding of what is behind them, driving them, then you have made that first shift towards the non-strategic approach – the do nothing approach. The realisation, in the moment, that your nerves are a result of your reactions to your thinking, is the quickest, surest and best long-term way of every future dealing that you’ll have to make.

 

Kick Me!

When you were at school, did anyone ever stick a note on the back of your jacket saying “Kick Me”? It’s a very ‘old style’ practical joke!

Now imagine someone had, and first of all you were blissfully unaware of being kicked –

Until, that is, you began to wonder why you had a sore backside. You’d be sat on that bruised posterior contemplating the source of the discomfort, racking your brain for reasons why and yet never knowing!

Until, that is, the day you noticed someone in the act of kicking you there.
“Please don’t kick me there,” you’d say. “It’s very sore for some reason or other. I think I must have something wrong with me. Guess I need to visit the doctor." Even then, you still wouldn’t realise they were actually just carrying out the instructions from the note on your back.

Until, that is, the day you went to the doctor and told him the story. "Take off your jacket," says the doctor and then he shows you the note pinned there. “People have been kicking me – that explains everything,” you’d then say.

Of course you’d still need to act upon the knowledge, the realisation you’ve just encountered – for if you left the note pinned to the jacket, people would still kick you. You'd then know WHY you had a sore behind, however you WOULDN'T yet have actually taken any steps to change anything!

The choice about getting to grips with Bad Nerves is entirely yours, of course. You have all the ways and means of making your performance a great one. However, if there is anything you’ve overlooked or left behind - you may just feel something in that left behind!

Then you’ll realise why and you’ll Kick Yourself!

 

 

"Pre-Match Nerves" is a shortened version of the same-named chapter from Mind How You Play, which is now available in eVersion on Kindle here:-  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-How-You-Play-ebook/dp/B00E82Q0KA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1375170216&sr=8-2&keywords=mind+how+you+play

Mind How You Play

Sport offers us many gateways in life, and the entire range of sports in the world are a reflection of man's almost endless ingenuity in creating a field for Play.

Now sport can be both a love and a frustration and, to be fair,

we aren't all like Forrest Gump was with ping pong.

There are issues that are faced both by international champions and beginners alike - they (and we) all suffer from things that aren't coming easy to us in the moment. And these complications make our game much harder to play at times.

Pre-match nerves, scoreboard pressure, choking at crucial moments, talking ourselves down, tensing up and degrading our motor skills, making poor decisions - are just a number that spring to mind. And it is very much in the mind where these complications come along to plague us.

Performance in sport isn't all about being technically accomplished - it is more about becoming masters of our inner selves.

In my latest book "Mind How You Play - Enhancing your Sporting Performance from the inner perspective", the approach is not so much about providing you with a bag of tools to apply when the going gets tough - it is about enabling you to change your way of being in your game, and through that helping you discover greater and more enduring pleasures and rewards from it.

"Excellence in Sport has no beginning and no end;

it IS merely about developing.

No one can ever know it all, yet we can always progress.

There is no such thing as the ultimate victory;

everything is just a step along the way."

When I coined this quote a few years ago, part of my understanding about developing excellence was well ahead of its time - and other parts of my understanding were well behind, playing catch-up. A lot of my philosophical beliefs, ideas and approaches crystallized during this time of catch-up and I gained an understanding that performance is about being and not doing. I also discovered that understanding is much more than just knowledge or expertise - there's a big difference. 

Knowledge can be the currency of wisdom, but is like money - we can earn it, put it in our memory banks, and then just leave it there. Like other currencies, knowledge is worthless if left lying in our vaults, because there it earns no interest, and serves no purpose.
So we need to SPEND it, and spend it wisely. Only by spending our knowledge do we start to discover its value; its value in helping us see the path to true purpose; its value in giving us a deeper understanding about the sporting life we desire, the one that we are striving for.

"There's gold in them thar' hills!"

Mastering our Inner Game is rather like prospecting for gold. We can take the well-worn path to the stream of uncertainty, and spend years panning for few nuggets and little reward ...

Or we can tread the less ordinary path along the river of understanding, discovering rich seams along the way. At the end of the day the hills certainly are full of gold - and the more you Mind How You Play the more you'll get the success you deserve!

Mind How You Play (paperback) is currently available from Lulu Marketplace and AMAZON. You can access the LULU link by clicking on the link on the right hand side of the page. 
The eVersion on Kindle is available here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-How-You-Play-ebook/dp/B00E82Q0KA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1375438972&sr=8-2&keywords=mind+how+you+play
plus if you want to buy the paperback at Amazon, then you can transfer to the paperback edition page from the Kindle edition page.