The slump is one of the most dreaded situations in sport. It occurs when an athlete seems to be in an unbreakable streak of failures, stringing together 10 if not 100 missed opportunities. Nothing seems to be helping, coaches are starting to bench you in favor of other players, and you can’t figure out what is wrong. Everyone experiences a slump in one shape or form during their career regardless of their sport. It’s a period of time where you feel like everything you touch turns to s*** and there is no end in sight. The momentum seems to have turned against you and everything you try to break the slump falls up short.
Fear not, the slump is temporary and we are here to help you break it’s grip on your game with a few tips and tricks. The first thing to think about is reframing what success and failure are in your sport context. Success and failure are not monolithic features of reality, rather, being successful is the ability to control the outcome that benefits you within the rules and points system of your sport. Failure on the other hand is the inability to do so. In other words, a baseball pitcher who feels they are in a slump may see every pitch as a capitol-F-failure. They are unable to hit the strike zone with consistent accuracy, but this is simply an inability to operate within the confined rules of competitive baseball. For friends playing catch, his execution of a pitch would be deemed a success. Success and failure are not concepts rooted in reality, they are only rooted in the confined ecosystem of your sport. It is important to move away from black and white thinking while in a slump and focus rather on the control you have over the outcome.
Focus on controlling your action and employ a technique called counter queuing to start. Counter queuing is shifting your goal to intentionally ‘failing’; throwing a ball for a pitcher, or shooting at the rim for a free throw. If you can’t seem to control your action to the positive outcome, control it to the negative outcome. Only employ counter queuing during practice situations, not games or competitions obviously. We often put a lot of pressure on ourselves to succeed in a given task, and it is this pressure that can detract from your ability to control your action. By ‘trying to fail’ you remove that pressure and it will be easier to focus on your action.
Let’s discuss and example. Take Dan, a golfer who is unable to sink a putt and has been in this slump for a few weeks. He is starting to get frustrated and discouraged from playing. He meets with a mental performance coach who suggests he starts counter queuing so that he misses all of his putts in a practice round by an inch to the right. During his practice round, Dan focuses on pushing all his putts to the right, and by the 18th hole, has gotten very comfortable shooting an inch to the right of the cup. His confidence has gone up, and he has had some success achieving a set goal. He feels he is able to control his putts to a much higher degree now. He meets with his mental performance coach who now tells him to work on maintaining that same level of control over his putting but now aim at the back of the cup. With his new sense of control over his putting, Dan is now able to sink more putts with more confidence and control.
Once you begin to conditionalize your ‘failings’ you can begin to distance your ego from the outcome and can begin the work of slump-busting. Instead of internalizing a ‘failure’ you can say I was unable to control my action to a positive outcome in the confined context of my sport. Focusing on controlling your actions rather than the objective outcome will allow you to break your slump. The simple idea of focusing on control rather than the outcome, is often enough to psychologically shake us loose of a slump. Utilizing counter queuing appropriately can be enough of a change over a short time frame to develop a greater sense of control and ultimately break our slump.
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