Athletes. Have you ever felt nervous before you compete? What kind of question is that? Right? Of course, you have every athlete feels some sort of nervousness before they go out and do something that's important to them. In fact, if you don't feel nervous, then I'd probably question if it really matters to you. And here's the deal, sometimes those nerves are there and they feel way too overwhelming and they start to impact how you actually play and compete, right? And I'm gonna teach you a hack today that you can be doing. So simple that will help reduce some of those nerves so that you have just the right amount so you can show up and play how you wanna play without going overboard and having those nerves impact your performance. Before I do, I wanna give a shout out to an athlete in our community. Her name is Rose. She is going through our program, the Elite Mental Game. This is our mental training program. For athletes teaching them the mental skills that they need to give themselves a competitive advantage in their sport. So Rose the other day texted us and she said on Saturday I broke seven minutes in the 1600 on the track for the first time, and she told us her time. This was something that Rose had been working toward. And honestly, when you get to that point as an athlete, where you are working, you are grinding, you are putting in the physical effort, it typically is not the physical side that gets you to that next level. It's the mental side. So I know Rose had been working on visualization when it comes to this. She had been working on her affirmation. She had been working on what to do when the pain cave starts to set in, especially in sports like track. And so Rose, I'm super proud of you for breaking that time, and I know that's just the first of many more prs that you have coming up this track season. Alright, athletes, when you're feeling nervous before a game, here's what you can do. Instead of saying, I'm nervous or thinking I'm nervous, I want you to think and say this instead. I'm excited. Now you're like, what? What? What? What does that mean? Okay, here's the deal. When our body, it was recognizing something important in our environment that we're about to do. So the game is important. The practice is important to you. It's going to respond to help you kind of rise up to be able to meet the challenge of whatever you're about to do. So if you're about to play in a competition or play in a game, what it does is it widens your pupils a little bit, dilates them so that you can focus. It sends blood to your muscles, so your heart is gonna beat faster. Your hands are gonna feel a little clammy.'cause it's like, we don't need, um, you know, any, any blood over there. And so all of these things happen and we typically feel that in our bodies. And then we think it's something bad. We're like, oh, this is nervousness, but here's the other thing. Excitement and nervousness actually feel the same in your body. We just label it differently. So when you're really excited about something, like say you're excited about, I don't know, going on a roller coaster Christmas, if you celebrate like something that you're super pumped about, your body actually responds the same way. Your heart is gonna be faster, your mouth is gonna get dry, your hands are gonna eat. Clammy. Like all of that is going to happen, but we typically label that as excitement and that's a good thing, right? And so you can actually use that as a hack before you compete and say out loud to yourself, or say out loud or say to yourself, I'm excited, I'm ready for this. And that will help you compete better and view your nerves as something that will help you. Now there are times when the nerve, the nervousness, gets to be a little bit too much. And insider program, the one that roses in that I just. Explained, uh, the elite mental game. We teach athletes their strategies, their pre-game routine to make sure they're at the right level of nervousness, if you will. So we teach them what their hype number is on a scale of one to 10, and then a couple of routines to help them get to that number. Um, say you need to get to an eight in order to compete your best. And if you're over that number, so say you need to get on two, an eight, and you're at a nine, that's not gonna make you play well. You're gonna be too jittery and you're gonna make silly mistakes. We teach athletes some skills to bring them back to the right number so that they can actually play their best. And the best athletes do this, like the best athletes in any sport, especially college athletes, Olympic athletes, they all have access to mental performance coaches or sports psychologists who help teach them these skills. But also our middle school and our high school athletes that are in our program, the elite mental game. Those are the things that they're learning too, so that they can show up and compete confidently. So if you're interested in learning more about the elite mental game, I've got a couple resources that I will link below so that you can check those out and see kinda what this is all about. How your mental game is actually your competitive advantage, because eventually talent becomes the same with you and your opponent, or you and your teammates and your mental game is really what gives you that advantage. So I'll link those resources below so that you can check that out, and I will see you in the next episode of the Athlete Tip.