Help Control your Emotions to perform in Sport
Where does emotional intelligence fit in sport? What does it take to really excel in the world of sport? The ability to deliver your best when it matters the most is a fundamental part of performing under pressure. Can this ability be taught, learned and developed? Coach Tim explores.
In sports, athletes have to deal with many expectations and demands. Differences in performance aren’t just due to physical training and nutrition but also to mental states. When you’re playing sports, you have to control your emotions or redirect them so that they don’t negatively affect the outcomes. In sports, you have to make quick and appropriate decisions.
The ability to experience and express emotions is more important than you might realise.
As the felt response to a given situation, emotions play a key part in your reactions. When you’re in tune with them, you have access to important knowledge that helps with:
decision-making
relationship success
day-to-day interactions
While emotions can have a key part in your daily life, they can take a toll on your emotional health and interpersonal relationships when they start to feel out of control. Any emotion, even elation, joy, or others you’d typically view as positive, can intensify to a point where it becomes difficult to control.
With a little practice, though, you can take back the reigns. It’s suggested that having good emotional regulation skills is linked to well-being and performance. Healthy emotional expression involves finding some balance between overwhelming emotions and no emotions at all.
To perform at any level, you need to build resilience and determination to thrive in high pressured environments. This can be developed through life experiences or learnt through exposure on a development pathway to several stressors. What does this mean? It means you need to make the road bumpy, don’t make it smooth and learn through failure.
As St Francis of Assisi preached, ‘Start by doing what’s necessary; then what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.’
Emotions are part and parcel of life; intense emotions aren’t all bad; they make life exciting. It’s perfectly normal to become overwhelmed by them on occasions, from crossing the finishing line to having a puncture or losing your goggles in the swim. How you deal with these setbacks can help to limit the effect. Can you relate some of these emotions to affecting your everyday life? So, how do you know when there’s a problem. Emotions that regularly get out of hand might lead to:
relationship or friendship conflict
difficulty relating to others
physical or emotional outbursts
Find some time to take stock of just how your uncontrolled emotions are affecting your day-to-day life.
To help find a resolution to controlling these emotions, aim for regulation instead of removing. You can’t control your emotions with a dial. You wouldn’t want to leave them running at maximum all the time. You also wouldn’t want to switch them off entirely, either. Healthy emotional expression involves finding some balance between overwhelming emotions and no emotions at all.
Identify what you’re feeling. Taking a moment to check in with yourself about your mood can help you begin gaining back control. You’re in a race and puncture; what do you do? Calmly fixture the puncture or take the bike and throw it across the road? Ask yourself :
What am I feeling right now?
What happened to make me feel this way?
Does the situation have a different explanation that might make sense?
What do I want to do about these feelings?
Is there a better way of coping with them?
By considering possible alternatives, you’re reframing your thoughts, which can help you modify your first extreme reaction. It can take some time before this response becomes a habit. With practice, going through these steps in your head will become easier and more effective.
Accept who you are and your emotions, what or whoever they are. If you’re trying to manage emotions better, you might try downplaying your feelings to yourself. If you hyperventilate after that puncture, it might seem helpful to tell yourself, “Just calm down,” or “It’s not that big of a deal, so don’t freak out.” But this invalidates your experience. It is important, and it does matter to you.
Accepting emotions as they come helps you get more comfortable with them. Increasing your comfort around intense emotions allows you to feel them without reacting in extreme, unhelpful ways fully.
Take a deep breath. Don’t underestimate the power of the breath. Slowing down and paying attention to your breath can help you ground yourself and take that important step back from the moment and that reaction you are trying to avoid. Situations, however, call for some restraint. No matter how frustrated you are, screaming at spectators watching you fumble with the tyre levels won’t help. Being mindful of your surroundings and the situation can help you learn when it’s OK to let feelings out and when you might want to sit with them for the moment. Once you are back on the bike, getting back up to speed with regulated breathing and focused will help you more!
Stay on top of stress. When you’re under a lot of stress, managing your emotions can become more difficult. Even people who generally can control their emotions could find it harder in times of high tension and stress. Reducing stress or finding more helpful ways to manage it, can help your emotions become more manageable. Mindfulness practices like meditation can help with stress, too. Getting enough sleep will help the body and mind to recover and relax.
As you can see, emotional intelligence in sports has many benefits. The little things matter; those marginal gains, a second or a centimetre, can mean the difference between winning and losing. Understanding your emotions can make a big difference.
Qualified as a coach in 2010, in 2014 began coaching with a local Triathlon Club, in 2018 completed BTF level 3 coaching course. Now he is still enjoying the training but now concentrating on the coaching. Tim takes a lot of time over his professional development and then aims to share this knowledge, helping and supporting athletes achieve the best they can be.
Since joining Tri Training Harder Tim has worked hard in helping mentoring other coaches and run training camps abroad.
Visit Tim's
Coach profile
We’re here to help
Tri Training Harder are one of the leading Triathlon coaching providers in the UK, using our wealth of experience to unite scientific and technological research with already well-established and successful best practices, to create a formula for triathlon and endurance coaching that works.
The result is an honest, dynamic, yet simple new way of constructing an athlete’s training to allow them to reach their potential.
If you’re planning your next season, just starting out in the sport or are looking for extra guidance at the very top end of the field, we are here to help, and our coaches would be delighted to hear from you. You can contact us via the website, and one of the team will be in touch.