Ready to level up your game?!
Mental Skills Toolkit:
Finding your optimal performance zone;
How to stay calm and play with focus & composure
Playing calm and composed on a consistent basis is no small feat. Numerous things can happen that leave players feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or upset during matches. Not only that, the weight of expectations can easily create pressure that prevents many players from playing their best soccer. When this happens, self-defeating mentalities and negative thoughts take over and impede focus and concentration leading to frazzled play. Whether you are the one putting the pressure on yourself, or it is coming from an outside source, performance anxiety is a hard thing to navigate and can feel almost impossible to overcome in certain high-pressure situations and big moments.
Being able to self-regulate your attention and narrow your focus is the key to getting yourself into your optimal performance zone where composed play happens. Learning to stay in this zone means being your own best inner coach and staying levelheaded by eliminating distractions. You can do this by choosing to focus on the things you can control: teaching yourself to stay in the present moment, developing emotional control, and mentally preparing before the game to get yourself into the right headspace for peak performance.
Soccer players can learn how to self-regulate and stay calm, composed and focused using many different tools, both on and off field. Interested? Let’s dive in.
