YOU ARE WHAT YOU TELL YOURSELF
Are you aware of what you tell yourself in a race---or even in a workout? Are you listening to faint, nearly subliminal messages that keep you from reaching your goal or keep you from winning?
If so, things won't improve until you become aware enough of what you are subconsciously telling yourself so that you can stop listening to the negative messages.
That awareness can be difficult to achieve. When your mind is occupied with getting to the start and racing, or doing one more max rep or staying on the bike without slowing down, it's hard to listen to what you're really thinking. One good place to start hearing what you tell yourself is on the way to the competition or the workout. Here's a helpful image to use: think of your mind as a river flowing by while you are sitting on the bank watching. Don't concentrate on the river, merely notice what flows by.
It may take a number of attempts before you slowly become aware of what you are saying to yourself as you travel to where you are going. You may become aware of feeling anxiety, but don't automatically assume it's just the stress of the race, or the workout, and dismiss the anxiety. Instead, trace the anxiety to its source. Is there a tiny message coming through that you may make a fool of yourself? Or that you're not as good as someone else? Or that you're going to screw up---again?
Allow your thoughts to flow, without grabbing onto them. Gradually, you will become aware of the underlying message.
The next point to examine is what you tell yourself during the actual competition or workout. One mountain biker began looking for subliminal messages to find out if they were the reason she wasn't doing well, even though she was a better rider than her competition. It took her four races to realize that she was constantly telling herself during each race, "I can't make this drop-off, I can't make the next downhill section." The message "I can't" always got through, causing her to lose confidence and hesitate on the difficult sections. She started deliberately wrenching her mind away from the loser messages, forcing herself to think, "I can do it, and I won't fall." Within two more races, she had moved so far up in the results that the entire field of racers was astonished.
There is often an underlying fear that is part of these self-messages. A man who wanted to increase his bench press by 50 pounds for reps couldn't seem to go up by more than ten pounds. When he began looking for what he was telling himself, he became aware that he was worried about dropping the bar on his neck. It didn't matter that he had a trainer spotting him, the subliminal fear kept him from lifting a weight outside of his mental comfort level.
Results of hearing what you tell yourself and eliminating the negative messages, can come quickly, or it can take months. But hearing your subconscious, self-defeating messages will take deep self examination. Over-riding them with positive, winning messages will take concentration and a lot of mental control. But the hard work will be very much worth it. The most important part to remember is that there is no ending point; there must be constant monitoring for the return those negative thoughts. They are a mental habit pattern which will come back if you allow it.
You may feel that becoming a better athlete depends on better physical training, but any sports psychologist will tell you differently. It's ongoing mental discipline that marks the difference between champion and also-ran.