FEATURE. The Formula To Performance
Hey cricketer, welcome to the monthly column on mental performance for the NPL and all its cricketers.
All cricketers want performance. Whether it is for yourself and your career or your team or a tournament win… cricketers want to perform.
How do we know a cricketer is any good?
Stats.
They don’t lie.
What do stats measure?
Performance.
How do you make a team? Build a career?
Performance…
But… and this is a big BUT.
Performance does not happen when you focus on it.
In fact, for most cricketers, the more you want it… the less you get it. This makes cricketers, at times, even more desperate for performance. This desperation eventually actually reduces the joy of the game… when taken to an extreme… I have even heard cricketers say they want to quit the game rather than experience the agony of sports performance.
I also see parents being very tough on their children and when parents are not happy with what they see in their children’s performance, you can hear them saying their children ‘are a disappointment or wasting time and money’.
Coaches scream and shout at cricketers with disgust as their egos are dented when the cricketers they work with perform at less than they expect.
For all involved… focusing on performance can be quite a vicious cycle.
So what can we do instead to make performing in cricket a more enjoyable experience?
Allow me to let you in on a secret or two…
Secret 1 – Performance comes precisely when you don’t care for it.
Oooh this is a tough one… if everything that you want (teams, accolades, career) sits on the other side of your performance, it is really hard to not focus on it.
But when the performance is not the main thing, and say learning or enjoyment is given more value… then there is less pressure to perform, freeing you up to take the game on, rather than worry about how you are going to go.
Secret 2 – Performance comes as a by-product of present-task focus.
Performance doesn’t happen because you focus on it, or worry about it.
It happens when the process of batting or bowling becomes the thing you get lost in. When ‘playing the game’… the planning, thinking and strategising become more important than simply how many runs or wickets you got.
Secret 3 – Performance = Potential – Interference
Performance – the outcomes we want come from Potential – the optimising of our physical, technical, tactical and mental game while removing Interference – the things that stop you from being at your best.
In essence, it’s about becoming insanely good at your skills (physically, technically, tactically & mentally), not necessarily about removing weaknesses, because the things that interfere are not always a weakness.
Each cricketer knows what stops them from performing to their best.
Often it’s a fear, a doubt or a feeling before a game. Sometimes it’s a technical flaw. It can even be a ‘bad’ decision…
Learning to grow yourself and your game while also removing the things that hold you back, is how you raise your game.
