Why Athletes Become Afraid of Making Mistakes

0:00Welcome 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. Why are athletes afraid of making mistakes and for yourself why are you afraid of making mistakes? Well in today's episode we're going to dive into this idea of why athletes are afraid of making mistakes and toward the end I'm going to give you a simple tip that you can use if you are currently playing scared of making mistakes. Hey there, I'm Eli Straw, a mental performance coach who works with athletes from around the world within a structured 12 week mental performance coaching program. Most of the athletes I work with are afraid of making mistakes and that's one of the main reasons why they are under performing. But why are they afraid of making mistakes? I'll simply put, mistakes are not what we want to do as athletes. Mistakes signify that we didn't play well.

1:03But what I'm referring to here when I'm talking about the fear of making mistakes is not just saying, oh I'd rather not make a mistake, it's not just understanding that mistakes lead to losing or to you know your team not doing quite as well, it's an actual fear. And so a fear of something means we don't just see this thing as something that you know maybe we don't really want to have happen. We have fears because something is extremely negative. We think that we need to avoid it at all costs. So in other words, whatever we are afraid of, we perceive to be extremely negative. With mistakes, we perceive the mistake to be very negative. Now again, it's not just simply seeing a mistake as something that you know is bad within a game. Seeing whatever is going to happen as a result of that mistake as something that is terrible and you need to avoid at all costs. So I always tell the athletes I work with that it's not just the mistake that we are afraid

2:07of because when we think about a lot of our fears, just as human beings, we fear things that will either lead to pain, physical pain or emotional pain. We fear things that will put us in danger. As you know, striking out at the plate, the act of doing so is not really dangerous. The act of missing a basket or missing a shot in basketball. It's not something that we necessarily need to be afraid of in the sense that we are afraid of something physically harming us. It's more of the emotional pain that we see attached to mistakes that we fear. Now another fear that develops in sports is the fear of contact or the fear of injury and that is more physical, but the fear of mistakes is emotional. Now why would I be emotionally afraid of making a mistake? This is where we start to see the perceived consequence of a mistake truly drive this

3:08fear. So what I mean by this is if I make a mistake during a game, the mistake itself happens. But then there's something that results from that mistake that I'm truly afraid of. Maybe it's embarrassing myself. So I feel embarrassed if I make a mistake. Maybe I know that when I make mistakes, I have no control over my emotions and my confidence just completely plummets and when my confidence plummets, my play follows. So now I'm afraid of my confidence dropping if I make a mistake. Or maybe I play on a team where my coach will pull me immediately if I make a mistake. And I'm afraid of being pulled from the game because that's embarrassing and also because I really like playing. So I'm afraid of not getting to play out there. In each one of those scenarios, what we see is that there is an emotional feeling attached to some sort of consequence that will occur if we make the mistake. The reason I frame it like this is because when we are working to overcome fear of mistakes,

4:08because when we play with the fear of mistakes, we tend to play cautiously and hold ourselves back. We have to focus on this emotional attachment to the consequence because that's what we truly need to start overcoming in order to get ourselves to not be so afraid of making mistakes. So I want to give you a couple examples, a couple of examples of what I mean by this to really help illustrate this idea. The first example is a basketball player who gets pulled from the game if she makes a mistake. So as she goes into a game, she is worried constantly that she's going to make the wrong decision, whether it's the wrong pass, turn over, taking the wrong shot, missing a shot. So she's experiencing a lot of stress during the game because she's thinking, if I mess up, coach will pull me. When she gets pulled from the game, she feels like she let herself down. She feels like she let her parents down. She feels like she let her team down. It's also very embarrassing for her to be pulled from the game. That's what she's trying to avoid. She's trying to avoid those negative feelings that she gets when she's pulled.

5:10Now this is formed because it's happened in the past and that's something that we'll see a lot when athletes are playing with the fear of making mistakes. They may have experienced something negative in the past that then makes them feel like, okay, I need to avoid that. I don't want to experience that again. So then they start becoming afraid of a situation where that would then occur once more. Another example is a baseball player who attaches so much identity to his batting average, to where if he gets out and his batting average goes down, he feels not just like less of a purse or less of a player, but less of a person. Now that is a severe emotional attachment to his stats. Because of that, he fears striking out or getting out so he fears having a bat at bat, not just because he'll simply get out, but because there is this emotional attachment to getting out that then takes a direct hit to his identity. Both of those scenarios show that these players are not just viewing mistakes as something

6:12that either does or doesn't happen during a game or something that is just part of the game. They're viewing mistakes as something more, something deeper, something personal, something that will lead to a negative emotional consequence. This is where we start to think, okay, how can we get the athlete? So how can you get yourself to not feel so scared of that consequence occurring? Now I'm going to be very transparent with you. This is incredibly difficult and this is something that I spend weeks working with athletes to help them, you know, change because I'm not meaning that you need to get to a point where you don't care about the result. I'm not saying that you want to get to a point where you don't care how you do or you don't care what people think. What I'm really referring to is we need to get to a point where we aren't so emotionally attached and scared of the consequence and there are a couple different ways that you

7:15can do this. So what I'm going to share with you right now are two different strategies that you can apply. You probably need to apply both of them together to help you work through this fear of the consequence of a mistake. The first is getting to a point where you are a little bit more confident that you can handle the consequence. Now the truth is probably that you've experienced something negative in the past within your sport. You've likely been benched, been yelled at, made a mistake in a big moment, but you're still where you are right now. You're still playing your sport. You're still working to improve. So in other words, it was uncomfortable, but you handled it. So then I want you to ask yourself a question. Is avoiding that negative thing again at all costs worth me never reaching my full potential as an athlete? Because the truth is when we allow fears of consequences to control our play. So we just play to avoid those bad things at all costs. We are holding ourselves back and we are keeping ourselves from reaching our full potential because we're constantly playing cautiously.

8:15So when you start to think through the result of a mistake and you start to ask yourself, number one, can I actually handle that? And the truth is you probably have handled it before. Now, it doesn't mean it's not uncomfortable, but it means you can handle it. And then you start to question and ask yourself, is this avoiding this worth me not allowing myself to play my best? And I would imagine the answer to that is, well, no, of course not. That's going to get you closer to letting go of this fear and being able to play more confidently and freely. The second strategy that you can take or the second strategy you can apply is working to reframe what your goals are during a game. And athletes play with the fear of making mistakes, so the fear of failure. And again, this fear is driven by the perceived consequence and that emotional connection or attachment we have to that. Avoiding mistakes becomes their main goal. But what we're trying to do is shift that. So you're not playing to avoid mistakes. You set yourself smaller targets, more controllable goals that you want to achieve. This could be something as simple as giving full effort and staying present throughout

9:18an entire game. That's what you want to begin focusing on, instead of thinking so much about these consequences. And the reason I believe that identifying what is truly driving this fear of mistakes is helpful is because you can start thinking about, you know, it's not just making a mistake. Making a mistake is going to happen. It's this consequence that we are afraid of. But the consequence that we are afraid of is likely something that we can manage. But also, it's not worth keeping ourselves from playing aggressively, freely, confidently during games. So we need to try to shift that goal going into games and focus on those smaller controllable goals instead of simply trying to avoid these mistakes at all costs. Now again, those are just a couple simple strategies that you can apply based on this episode. However, if you are interested in a more personalized and in-depth approach to helping you work through your fear of mistakes, I've put a link to my one-on-one mental performance coaching program below for you to learn more. You know, in that coaching, we're going to work together one-on-one where I'm helping

10:21you personally work through this fear of mistakes, build confidence, and get you to a point where you can play freely. So again, to learn more about that, click that link in the description below. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and please feel free to share it with any athlete who you know is struggling with the fear of mistakes. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening, and I wish the best of success in all that you do. If you want to hear more mental game tips, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the Success Starts Within YouTube channel, follow Eli on Instagram, the handle is at Eli Straw, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at successstartswithin.com.