How Athletes in High Stress Positions Can Build a Better Performance Mindset
Some roles in sport come with a different level of responsibility. Goalies, pitchers, batters in crunch time, field goal kickers, quarterbacks. These are the athletes who feel the weight of a team fall onto their shoulders in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has never been there.
This article discusses a few principles that help athletes in high stress roles build a performance mindset that holds up in the moments that are the most mentally draining.
Pressure Is a Signal, Not a Threat
Athletes in high stress positions often feel pressure before others do. That is not a flaw. It is a sign that your environment and goals matter to you.
Pressure becomes a problem when your brain interprets it as danger instead of information. The brain wants to protect you (in this case, it’s not quite survival like the old days of our ancestors, but instead social survival or achieving something that will help you reach or maintain a lifestyle you want), and it does that by getting loud. Thoughts fire faster. Muscles tighten. Vision narrows. These are symptoms of that fight or flight instinct, but it oftentimes backfires for the modern day person and athlete.
One of the most helpful mental patterns to cultivate is treating pressure as a cue to get anchored. My best trained athletes take this pressure as the cue to reach into their mental skills toolkit. My athletes who are newer to sport psychology are usually still in the negative spiral when this pressure mounts and forget about their tools or can’t summon the effort or confidence necessary to reach in.
Decision Making Improves When the Mind Has a Job
Whether it is a goalie reading a rush, a batter timing a pitch, or a quarterback going through progressions, high stress positions require sharpness more than calm. Calm can actually be misleading. What you want is direction. Those controllable pieces to focus on instill confidence and replace thoughts of anxiety and stress. A mind with no job oftentimes defaults to anxious “what-if” thinking.
Give your mind something specific to do in your pre performance routine. Something that lines you up with the moment instead of asking you to fight it. That could be:
• One external cue you always return to. We refer to this as a “focal point” in sport psychology. This external cue is always there and has an impact on your mind when you look at it (this impact is either natural, as in it happens automatically when you look, or you pair this focal point with a reminder).
• One part of the body you check for tension. Checking for the tension, then intentionally releasing that tension can calm the mind.
• One piece of information you scan for before the play begins. Again, this can instill confidence because you are building confidence, sometimes in very small pieces, that you are increasing your chances of success.
Performance and Self Worth Need to Be Separated
Athletes in high accountability roles tend to confuse the two without realizing it. A bad outing feels like a bad identity. A mistake feels like a character flaw. This connection creates fear of failure, and fear of failure creates hesitation.
The goal is not to ignore the importance of your role. Athletes in these positions are incredibly important, and if we lie to ourself that this isn’t the case, it backfires. The goal is to shift the meaning of mistakes. A mistake is data.
Athletes who grow the fastest are usually the ones who can look at errors without attaching them to their value as a person. They free up more mental bandwidth and adapt faster under stress. It’s difficult when things are going poorly for weeks on end. But an athlete who is generally performing well and spirals because of a mistake or two - this kills me!
Actively practicing self-talk that separates your worth from your performance is key to everyone, but especially athletes in high pressure positions.
Recovery Is Part of Being Clutch
Being clutch is not about rising to the occasion. It is about returning to neutral quickly. It’s just, understandably, more difficult to be neutral when pressure mounts.
“Returning to neutral” could come up in many different ways. It could be after you make an error that leads to a goal against, conceded run, or interception. Or it could be on a much smaller scale, like your thoughts start to snowball during a timeout and you need to return to neutral before returning to play. The best athletes are the ones who can reset quickly.
This can be as simple as the sequence of:
Short exhale (remembering the ways to breathe for calmness - read this essential article on breathing and how it lowers nerves that I wrote by clicking here!)
Quick physical release (finding the tension, then focusing on releasing it)
One clear intention for an upcoming opportunity (the next rep in practice, the next pitch, the next shot you may face)
Your sequence of recovery may change, but it should also be personal and creative. It will also become more habitual as you get your reps in.
The Best High Stress Athletes Train the Quiet Moments
Everyone trains the execution piece. Fewer athletes train the in-between spaces:
The moments between pitches.
The seconds in between letting in a goal and a faceoff.
The slow jog back to the huddle after a mistake.
These moments are critical for your confidence. They shape your emotional momentum. Training them can be as simple as running reps with intentional resets, or reviewing film while practicing how you want your internal voice to sound in those small windows. It builds familiarity, and familiarity creates confidence (a big reason why the best athletes use routines!).
High stress roles are all about confronting the intensity this role brings, then developing methods to manage that stress. Along with those methods, no athlete survives getting to the big leagues without developing the right relationship between their performance and identity. This can’t be done alone. Athletes have relied on coaches, teammates, parents, and friends in the past. Now, the most common way to do this is by having a mental performance coach on your support team, though all types of people in your support system should be leaned on if possible.
