Gaining an Edge: Tackling Performance Pressure

Welcome to the second edition of Gaining an Edge. This series empowers Socceristas to own their growth and maximize their potential by expanding mental performance skills, reframing limiting beliefs, and uncovering authentic drive.

To level up in anything, it’s important to clearly understand where you are now. This means being able to step back from a situation and look at it objectively. In other words, you need self-awareness to see the impact something has on you before you can work on changing anything.

Today, we’re working on getting a clearer picture of the very real, very BIG thing that every Soccerista deals with. PRESSURE. 

The Ever-Present Pressure

Performance pressure. Nerves. Pressure to perform. Performance anxiety. So many different ways to describe the same thing. However we label it, it’s all the same. It’s all PRESSURE. 

Where does pressure come from? Pressure comes from expectations. It comes from judgments or demands that we place on ourselves and our performance that are tied to achieving a certain outcome. These expectations can be external, internal, or a combination of both.

What does pressure do to you? While a little pressure can be healthy (to keep you alert), too much pressure isn’t good for your game or your mental health.

Why? Well, when you are dealing with a lot of pressure, you can easily end up in a situation where you only feel good about yourself and your play if you produce that ‘correct’ result–meaning you met the expectation. Conversely, if you don’t meet the expectation, your confidence and self-worth take a big hit. And when the expectation is impossibly high–an unrealistic one that you can never meet (such as your expectation of yourself not to make mistakes and have a perfect game), you can end up in a never-ending cycle of feeling inadequate and like a failure. This is not a fun place to be.

Second, the anxiety caused by performance pressure can derail your game. This is because the pressure causes a lot of negative self-talk and self-defeating thoughts such as overthinking, replaying mistakes, thinking about missed opportunities, etc. All of these take your mind out of the present moment. When your mind is thinking about all these things and not about the game in front of you, you cannot play your best soccer. It’s just not possible.

The Dreaded Loop

The truth of the matter is that pressure isn’t going away. Pressure will always be there, in one form or another, throughout the entirety of your soccer career. The trick to dealing with pressure and not letting it negatively impact your game or mental health is to learn to work WITH it. Accept that it is a part of the game, and then commit to learning the skills you need to stay composed and levelheaded when it shows up.

Understanding the relationship between pressure, expectations, and confidence is a great start. The pressure/performance/confidence relationship is a loop, and when you are unaware of the loop, it’s HARD to get out. But once you see it for what it is, you can actually start to make some changes.

Here’s how the loop works: high expectations lead to pressure. Pressure floods you with self-defeating thoughts which hurt your performance. A bad performance lowers your confidence, which unleashes more negative thoughts. And then it starts back from the top because dealing with high expectations when you already feel bad about things just perpetuates it.

The external expectations from others to win, combined with the impossibly high, unrealistic INTERNAL expectations not to make mistakes, keep the cycle going and going and going.

How Confidence is Affected by Pressure

Looking at this, it’s easy to see why it can feel tough to build confidence during all this, right?

Most soccer players have inconsistent confidence–meaning we feel good when we’re playing well, but our confidence tanks as soon as something happens. This happens because your confidence is attached to those expectations we’ve been talking about. Therefore, your confidence will never be stable when you NEED to meet expectations to feel good about yourself. Instead, it’ll bounce around depending on the state of the exact moment.

But, Socceristas, there’s a trick to moving away from inconsistent confidence and getting real, stable, deep confidence and belief in yourself: focus on the process. You build trust in yourself by giving attention to the controllable pieces of your game instead of the heavy expectations that are impossible to live up to. You set game-day goals based on things you can control, and then you allow yourself to feel good when you give your all in that area, regardless of the game’s outcome.

Steadfast confidence comes from having a deep, underlying belief in yourself. A belief so strong that even when things go wrong on the field, you still know you are a good player, and you still believe in yourself even though the current situation is not going your way. This is what happens when our confidence is attached to the PROCESS and not to the  EXPECTATIONS.

Up next: The tools you need to grow your confidence

Follow Girls Soccer Network, so you don’t miss the next edition of Gaining an Edge. The third edition will provide the tools, tips, and tricks for how Socceristas can coach themselves through moments of high pressure and self-defeating thoughts on the soccer field by focusing on the smaller, controllable aspects of their game.

Till next time,

Jenn Ireland, Mental Skills Coach + Founder of Expand Your Game

Gaining an Edge is a 10-part series from Expand Your Game’s Mindset Mastery Academy, a transformative 1-on-1 mental skills mentorship experience for female soccer players.

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