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😨 Fear keeps many top athletes and leaders from reaching their potential.
☑️ How unchecked fear shows up in your performance—and what to do about it.
🛠️ Tools and exercises to help you face and manage fear effectively.
🪜 Practical steps to “Know Yourself to Lead Yourself” with confidence.
Coaches - what follows would be an excellent team or individual exercise for your players.
The Idea: Addressing Fear
When you view your performance correctly, it is viewed through a lens of LEARNING. The primary reason so few view their performance correctly is because of FEAR.
Anecdote: Talent that Never Reaches Its Potential
We’ve all heard this sentiment.
“Everyone has the same skill level when you get to that level. It’s the mind and the mental game that sets people apart.”
We can all think of an athlete, a team, a coach, or a program described this way.
Just the past two weeks, I heard the following:
“They’re always dominant in the regular season but always flame out in the tournament.”
“They’re the most talented out there, but will never win. They’re happy with finishing in the Top 25. If they get too high, they know they’ll choke under the spotlight.”
“I know I’ll choke under pressure.”
“They can’t handle being relied on by their teammates.”
It’s such a common part of the athletic performance conversation that we’ve just accepted many of these sentiments. We talk about ourselves as athletes as if we cannot change or improve. It’s just how we are.
We can’t change.
Well, at BETTER, we refuse to believe that. Because it’s not true.
What is true, however, is that most people, even top performers in professional sports, are unwilling to look underneath the surface to examine what’s really going on and to address their fears.
We call it “open heart surgery.” Before you can provide any bandaid, strategy, or actionable takeaway for a performer, you must address the “why” underneath it all.
Research: Why does Fear exist? What is it doing to us?
Fear is a natural thing. It’s our “fight-or-flight” survival mechanism kicking in.
But, when our emotional system becomes overactive, it shuts down our brain functions.
Said differently, we aren’t able to think straight. We can’t make decisions well. We lose our ability to understand what’s important and what’s not.
This is illustrated by the Yerkes-Dodson Law.
The premise is that there is a “zone of optimal performance” where an appropriate amount of stress actually brings out the best in us.
But if you become overly stressed, your brain will activate its fight-or-flight response. Unfortunately, we’ve seen it up close quite a lot with both coaches and players. Here’s what happens:
Your mind goes blank
You miss important information
You focus on the wrong things that don’t impact performance (refs or a call)
You fixate on information that isn’t important
You know what the logical solution is, but your brain feels like it’s in a “fog”
You default to poor habits that have been developed for years in these situations
But the reason this kicks in during performance is likely a deeply ingrained fear we believe about ourselves off the field. It’s the insecurity we need to address before we try on-field strategies.
It’s open-heart surgery.
Putting it all together:
So, how can we do this for ourselves and begin asking the hard questions to address the fears that affect our performance?
Today, we have two tools and two exercises that we use to help athletes and coaches address these. They come from two tools we’ve written about before.
When we start to act out of fear, our defense mechanism kicks in, and it comes from a response to one of these three questions.
As we advocate for in the post linked above, we encourage you to answer the questions first. In general, what are you afraid of losing? What are you trying to hide? What are you trying to prove? And to whom?
These questions help you “hold the magnifying glass” up to yourself to identify when you act out of fear and those bad habits kick in. Where is it coming from inside of you? What is the source of the fear?
Take one answer above to take it around the Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool.
The fear that you wrote — your answer to the question goes to the tool's bottom (Tendencies).
Work around the tool. What is the most common action or pattern of behavior that shows up in your performance as a result of that fear?
What are the consequences of that action on your performance?
What reality does that create for you?
Write those answers down.
Now, go back to the bottom of your tendencies. When you feel that fear start to creep in, what is a better pattern of behavior? How can you manage that fear (you will never fully “control” it)?
This is the first step toward addressing your fear. What have we done in this newsletter?
We’ve admitted our fears out loud. The second you “say” them, you can view them more objectively.
We’ve examined how those fears impact performance.
We’ve devised at least one idea of how to manage it better.
We will remind you of what we remind every athlete or coach. This is not a “silver bullet.” It will not happen in one day. Just like open heart surgery, it will take months, maybe even years, of physical therapy.
But until we address it, no plan of daily discipline and no strategy will ever be fully effective.
🏁 A BETTER Thought:
Fear is a natural response, but letting it control your performance isn’t inevitable.
You can lead with greater clarity and confidence by identifying and managing the underlying fears that hold you back.
Growth starts with honesty; face your fears today to unlock your potential tomorrow.
