How to Manage Your Emotions in Sports

How to manage your emotions in sports: Encourage self-awareness and mindfulness.

With the increased emphasis on sports psychology, mindfulness is becoming more mainstream in sport. Mindfulness often teaches athletes to recognize personal thoughts/feelings and to pay attention to them before taking an action. We can’t expect youth players to always demonstrate excellent emotional control in the field. But we can help them to understand and manage their emotions. Because it is just as critical as the tactical and technical aspects of soccer.

Players' performance suffers when they are angry or disappointed. However, practicing mindfulness allows them to buy a split-second to think before acting. It helps children to concentrate on their body and environment first, and then turn their energy to what will help them perform at their best. 

There are multiple ways to practice mindfulness. First is the body scan exercise — paying attention to specific areas of the body such as the shoulders, neck, feet, knees, stomach, and others one by one. The second is doing breathing exercises which include deep and rhythmic breathing. The third is practicing meditation. There are a number of excellent applications available from organizations such as Smiling Minds that are specifically tailored for young players in a sports context.

For children, the key is to teach them how to recognize negative thoughts and emotional reactions, not to judge themselves for having them, and to be able to distinguish themselves from those thoughts — enabling players to recognize their emotions before they become behavior.

They won't be able to do it every time, but that's okay. Through practice, we will improve our mindfulness skills.