Girl, I get anxious too…
It’s mid-July, and USA Field Hockey’s penultimate selection event is in full swing. EVERYTHING is palpable in the thick Virginia Beach air. It’s like you can smell the stress… yup, there it is… the goalkeepers.
As if their job isn’t stressful enough, let’s toss in evaluation/selection and the opportunity to compare yourself to 10x the number of goalies you’re used to measuring yourself against. The mental and emotional load of the position is hefty. An entire team’s success is based on your failure - you actually have OPPS. It’s personal. Beating a midfielder has no payout compared to beating a gk. You very clearly succeed or fail - and the impact is felt by your entire team.
Many goalkeepers take themselves out of the race before it’s even begun. It’s too much - the anxiety debilitating. Despite a physical presence, we mentally see gks sort into two dysfunctional camps:
“Everything is chaos, but if I’m MORE chaotic - I’m in charge.”
OR
“I’m overstimulated, overmatched, and panicking, but if I shut my feelings down and JUST BE CALM, everything will be fine.”
The nature of the role breeds anxiety. You’re being hunted - if you’re not anxious, we might have a problem!
If we look at anxiety as an energy source (albeit potentially unstable), we open up opportunities to leverage it. The first step to this is shifting our energy out of the amygdala (fear center) to the prefrontal cortex (reasoning and perspective). You have to SEE the problem to solve the problem.
Instead of keeping anxiety in its purest form (unstable) - and only giving yourself the options of “I will become just as unstable to create a false alignment” or “I must extinguish it and everything it’s touched”, there’s a not-so-secret third way. Let’s break it down and name it. You recognize what degree of control you have or don’t have over the variables causing the anxiety. If you can control it - action plan. If you can’t, have a loss-reduction plan and shift the resources to something you can control. That in itself, is control.
There’s also overflow anxiety that refuses a bucket. Defer it. Tell yourself that you will unpack it fully and with all the emotions and intention it demands, later. “Hey pal, it’s a date, after I do this important thing and get showered and can give you the time you demand, I’ll circle back.” Plot twist, you usually don’t have to circle back - by freeing yourself to act, you don’t have to battle the hypothetical “what ifs”.
By self-regulating, taking out the self-inflicted knife in your back and adding it to your arsenal, you’ve taken the first step towards high performance. Maintain this practice to move the energy productively from brain to body. This is your first signal to yourself that you might be on your own team.
The only one coming to save you is YOU, and this is the start.
