Soccer players – have you ever wondered if your perfectionism may be holding you back and limiting your ability to maximize your potential on the field? Are you constantly beating yourself up for mistakes and critical of your game play, week in and week out? Do you often compare yourself to teammates or get in your head a lot, worrying about what others think about you? Do your feelings of self-worth tend to get directly tied to how well you perform on the field?
If so, then perfectionism may be negatively impacting your ability to progress and improve. And this isn’t good! Both for your mental health or for your long term soccer goals.
{If you’d rather skip the reading and get right to it, click here for the perfectionism quiz}
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Perfectionism when it negatively impacts your game
Perfectionism in sports can have positive aspects – especially when it shows up in the form of commitment, strong work ethic and self-motivation. But more often than not, our perfectionistic tendencies tend to get a little out of control and can go way beyond what is healthy, leading to a negative, anxious, low-confidence mindset where we are overcritical of our performance and unable to accept anything from ourselves that is less than perfect.
Unhealthy or toxic perfectionism is when a soccer player fixates on flawlessness and sets impossibly high standards for themselves. Since perfection is not possible, perfectionists get trapped in never-ending feelings of inadequacy and failure. This impacts confidence greatly, resulting in players not being able to play their best soccer or maximize their potential on the field.
Perfectionism when it helps create healthy striving mentality
Sometimes though, even when you have perfectionistic tendencies, perfectionism is NOT holding you back in soccer. In fact, it might even be helping you!
Healthy perfectionism is having a healthy striving mentality. Soccer players with a healthy striving mentality can use their perfectionistic traits to their advantage without letting them completely take over their game and become self-defeating. For example, many perfectionists typically are very disciplined, have a strong work ethic, and are good at goal setting – all of which are fantastic for something such as fine-tuning technical skills with self-regulation, commitment, and hard work.
When the intention is set right, players can actually use their perfectionistic traits to work toward growth. When players combine this with being accountability and taking responsibility for their development, they can harness their positive perfectionistic traits and use them to achieve great things.
Take our perfectionism quiz now!
Quiz: is your perfectionism holding you back?
Is perfectionism negatively impacting your soccer game
OR is it helping you stay focused to fine-tune your skills?
How to overcome perfectionism in soccer
The key to overcoming perfectionism in soccer? Embracing imperfection on the soccer field and working to develop a healthy striving mentality is how to overcome and combat perfectionism so that you can help yourself become a stronger player.
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Here are 7 pieces of advice overcoming perfectionism:
- Make self-reflection and self-exploration priority. Get curious about what’s going on and develop a genuine desire to WANT to change things. Growing your self-awareness and being able to confront hard things like this openly and honestly is how to get over perfectionism.
- Redefine success as something OTHER than playing perfectly. Sit down and think about this long and hard. What OTHER things could you use as a gauge for a successful day? Learning something new? Trying something new? Being encouraging to a teammate? Make a list and then start implementing on game day, and reflecting afterward.
- Try really hard to be nicer to yourself and have compassion for yourself. A great way to do this is to preplan for mistakes. What will you say to yourself when you mess up or things don’t go as planned? (Because it will happen). Have a piece of motivational self-talk ready to go for these moments {Related read: Positive SELF-TALK can improve your soccer game}
- Replace your current, limiting beliefs with new, empowering ones. Majority of the things you believe to be true about yourself are not true. They just aren’t. Belief in yourself is typically a self-fulfilling prophecy, as-in the more you believe in yourself, the better you perform. Regardless of talent, if you don’t believe you can do something – you can’t.
- Shift your view of feedback towards a more positive, growth-minded view. If you can start to see feedback (both from yourself and others) as a positive thing that can help you grow, and not as a personal attack on your core, essential being, you’ll be much happier and play much better soccer. Taking a growth-minded view to self-reflection is also critical.
- Let go of comparison and start to appreciate individually. Both you and your teammates: each one of you brings something valuable to the team. And if your teammates are better than you? Embrace it. Use it as fuel to drive you and motivate you to work harder. Healthy competition is a FANTASTIC way to build your mental toughness AND expand your skills. {Related read: The value of healthy competition & how it INCREASES motivation}
- MOST IMPORTANTLY TO OVERCOME PERFECTIONISM – acknowledge that your soccer journey is going to include setbacks, challenges, mistakes, missed opportunities and difficult situations. It just is. If you expect it to not, then you are setting yourself up for continual letdown and never-ending feelings of inadequacy and failure.
Hi everyone! I’m Jenn and I create content to help female soccer players and coaches maximize individual and team potential by developing healthy mindset skills. Join other subscribers and sign up for the newsletter for all my best tips and advice!
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