You may have noticed that there are some players who play great in practice , but when they play in official game, they block themselves ?
Maybe you have experienced that you are excellent in qualifying matches and in the really important game,match or race you just fall to performe well ?
Something happens and you just freeze and block.You are making the rookie mistakes and you feel like you can’t achieve nothing ?
At the European Championships in volleyball in Germany in 2003. , we have entered the semi-finals easily and we played with the French team to enter in Finals. Then we were much better team then France . We played after the other semi-final match Italy – Russia . When we saw the Italians get the Russians, all our thoughts were already in the final match. We were already in the final game against Italy and thinking only how to beat Italy and become champions again. Our most important semi-final game against France wasn’t even started. „Water went in our ears.“ 🙂
How many times have you seen a team that is winning the match and seems to be afraid that they will. Team stops to play good and loose the game. There is a phrase that is often used for this situation – “ The water goes in the ears .“ When „water goes in the ears“ in most cases, the team or athlete loose the match , race or fight .
This phenomenon has long been known in sports psychology ,when the athlete does not know how to deal with a lot of pressure and stress and therefore has a lower performance than usual.
The good news is that there are a lot of very effective techniques to overcome this situation and to get rid of the „pressure “ that you create to yourself , and that affects you in a negative way .
As the expression says , “ the water in the ears “ prevents you from hearing anything except your inner voice and you begin to listen only to your inner voice , that distracts your focus and doing you no good. It tells you how you will win, how will you celebrate afterwards, who will interview you , how you’ll go out in the newspaper article, how you ‘ll be interwied by press and similar tought, even the game is still going on and nothing is finished. Then comes a decline in focus, decline in the quality of your performance and if the opponent is good, most of the times the game has bad ending.
Getting back to my story , and the European Championship .
That semi-final match against French team , we played very poorly , performing badly and we lost 3-2 .
The day after we lost against the Russians , waved to the bronze medal and finished at fourth place .
We paid for “ the water in our ears “ high price, as 2 months of sweat and practice were thrown away , even though we were the best team at the European Championships .
Drain the water out of your ears and do not let water enter inside in first place. Only then your attention will be fully in the game , fight or race that is in progress.
As Eckhart Tolle said: “ “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”
