How to Stop Freezing up During Games

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to The Success Starts Within Podcast, a podcast dedicated to teaching you all the tools and techniques you need to master the mental game and take your performances to the next level. Here's your host, Eli Straw.

Eli Straw (0:19)

Imagine there's a basketball player running up the court and somebody passes her the ball. She catches it on the wing, she goes up for the shot, but in her mind, there are a lot of thoughts that shouldn't be there. Thoughts about her form, thoughts about her release, thoughts about whether or not she should even take this shot.

All that does is it creates more tension, more forcefulness. She's freezing up because she's overthinking. Now, let's take a baseball player who's standing in the batter's box, and the pitcher throws him a great pitch right down the middle.

But he doesn't swing. He freezes.

He's not sure if it's the best pitch to hit, so he just freezes up.

Now, both of those two stories highlight the two main forms of freezing that I see within my work. And that's what I'm going to cover in today's episode. I'm gonna break each of these down, explain what's going on within the mind, why it happens, what's really driving this, and then I'm gonna go through two different mindset shifts that you can apply for each of these. But then also at the end, I'll cover some general mindset shifts and principles that you need to help stop freezing during games. So with that first one, the first main pattern is what I would consider over control and over thinking. And this creates freezing when we play. Now the reason that this over control and over thinking creates freezing is because there's so much happening within our mind that our performance has now become cerebral instead of athletic. So let's go back to that basketball player example. This actually comes from an athlete that I'm working with right now. She and I were talking about this just the other day. So, after she misses a few shots or if she didn't feel great during warm ups, what ends up happening is that when she gets the ball past to her, she immediately thinks about her form.

Especially if she's been missing, she'll think about what she wants to fix.

As she does that though, there is a split second delay and that causes the defense to close in, but it also keeps her from just being free flowing and as athletic as she needs to be when she shoots because she is overthinking so much. Now, with the hesitation piece, you know, it's not always because they're overthinking at that point, you know, it might just be freezing up because they want things to be perfect, but I'll cover that a little bit more here in a second. But with the over control and the overthinking, the word that I want you to really remember is forcefulness, trying to force something good to happen. And we generally try to force something good to happen because we're doubting ourselves or because we are so afraid of what will happen and we're really anxious about something bad happening. So we end up trying to force it. Now I know on the surface, the hesitation piece and the example I gave where the baseball player is just taking the pitch seems more like traditional freezing. But I really think that overthinking and over control is also considered freezing because the athlete, whether they're a basketball player or whether they're a tennis player or a soccer player or a baseball player, there's this moment where they're not in the game anymore. They are having a split second freezing or hesitation or pause because they're overthinking, overthinking, overthinking. They can't be in the moment, so they freeze because their mind is trying to figure out what is happening or what to do.

I think the what are they trying to do piece, right? So going through the different breakdown I want to go through for each of these, the what are they thinking piece, it's obviously going to change and vary based on the sport. But it's generally, I have to get this right. Mainly that will be in terms of their mechanics or their technique, but I have to get this right. The reason they think that is because they're seeking a guarantee, and so then they're going to try to control every detail. Trying to control every detail is where we find ourselves freezing up. We find ourselves second guessing a step behind. With that basketball player, she was not sure that she could make the shot. One of the things that she had expressed to me, and this is something I hear from so many different athletes, is when she makes a lot of shots in a row, she has confidence in herself that she'll make the next shot.