Great athletes possess a burning desire to be the best. Their inner drive keeps them going when the going seems impossible. They continuously keep pushing themselves outside their comfort zone.
A very important part of their mental buildup is their dissatisfaction with mistakes and mediocre performances. Wanting to be nothing short of perfect, these athletes keep dwelling on their mistakes and try to keep correcting them on a continual basis.
Now, strengthening your weaknesses is a sure fire way of progressing towards perfection. Moreover, when you are not tolerant of mistakes, it helps you raise the bar on your overall performance. If you constantly expect yourself to be perfect, sooner or later you will be, right?
May be, may be not! Though there is nothing wrong with fixing your mistakes, there is something very wrong with being obsessed with being perfect! If your coaches, your parents and your friends keep telling you that you are doing well, and you tell yourself that you aren’t good enough, you are setting yourself up for big-time failure!
All great athletes know that perfectionism is a two-edged sword. When used positively, perfectionism can help you harness your strengths and open a path to your dreams. Healthy perfectionism will take you to personal excellence. However, when you are so obsessed with perfectionism, you fail to see the distance you have covered, the progress you have made, you are cutting your self-confidence and your self-esteem to shreds. You will stop enjoying your sport. You have to remember that all great men, whatever field they have excelled in, have had fun while striving for perfection. No fun, no excellence! It’s that simple!
Unhealthy perfectionism has three components, which you have to be careful of. 1. Do not focus on your failures so much that you forget what you did right. 2. Do not measure your imperfect performance against a perfect ideal that in reality does not exist. 3. Do not beat yourself up emotionally for your failures.
Your job when you make mistakes is to learn from, and then forget them. When you fail, you must forgive yourself and then leave that failure in the past. Accept the fact that you're going to make mistakes. Accept the fact that you can always be better. Accept the fact that there is no perfect. Accept your humanness. Strive to be perfect while at the same time forgiving yourself for your imperfections.
