Nerves before a competition, or competitive anxiety can be identified into two categories:
1. Psychological (cognitive) OR 2. Physiological (somatic) An example of psychological anxiety could be an internal dialogue in your head, highlighting all of your concerns, whereas an example of physiological anxiety could be that flutter of nerves you feel in your stomach. Self-awareness The key to coping with nerves, first starts with self-awareness. We need to notice when these feelings or thoughts start to occur, what triggers them and how we are currently coping or are we just hoping they’ll be gone by the time we finish the test or course. It is about knowing your beliefs, your values and your identity. This can be protective to our self when we are in potentially anxiety inducing scenarios. Self-regulation Once we are aware and noticing our anxiety, then this gives us the power to adopt a self-regulatory approach, which allows us to develop individual coping skills, reducing the likelihood of the potentially undesirable behaviour being the result, such as forgetting our dressage test. There are many methods of self-regulation, such as breathing and relaxation techniques which are routed in mindfulness, or cognitive behavioural techniques such as self-talk, thought stopping, thought restructuring or even simply humour! A simple framework for self-regulation: Problem identification – Returning to competition after a break: nerves over how you will perform Commitment – motivated by the opportunity to compete again and improve your previous score (intrinsically motivated – task focussed) Execution – Strategy for emotional control – self talk Environmental management – Controlling the controllables by designing and planning a pre-performance routine which incorporates moves that you are confident with Generalisation – Rehearse this pre-performance routine in training Once we are self-aware and self-regulating, then we can start to self-monitor! Self-monitoring Self-monitoring allows you to evaluate and asses your response to a potentially anxiety provoking situation and then reinforce your new coping method. This allows you to focus on the process which helps to build motivation and belief in yourself and your own unique process. What self-monitoring looks like: Monitoring – “How am I doing?”, “Do I feel the wayI would like to before I perform?” Plan and select responses – “I notice tension in my arms and shoulders” “I can hear myself thinking “all of the other horses have better paces than mine”” Organise and execute a response – “I will go back to warming up a skill I am good at which relaxes me” “Self-talk. Focus on myself. Trust my process and training. I can’t control what the other horses look like or ride like. I can control mine and how I present myself and my horse” Evaluate the consequence – For example “I feel better now” “Now I feel ready to take on that challenge of warming up that skill or move” Learning – Utilise reflection as part of your post competition routine so that you can look for trends and start to notice sources of confidence so that you can work towards these on competition day. In this scenario, the learning is that you notice tension (physiologically) and an internal dialogue of negative self-talk (psychological). By becoming more self-aware, we can start to learn what are the most effective coping strategies for ourselves to self-regulate. When it comes to self-monitoring, I like to think of the rider being like a race horse with blinkers on. We create our own blinkers by preparing ourselves for these potentially anxiety provoking situations and therefore allow ourselves to regulate and monitor accordingly to allow for the best possible and most controllable situation. |
|