Turning The Tide Mid-Game

What can you do when you need to quickly forget about your mistake, in the middle of a match, and perform well again immediately? 

Remain Calm & Carry On

After making a mistake in a fixture, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with emotions such as anger or upset. It’s important as a referee to try and manage your emotions and just focus on the game and what decision you must make next.

Remember, sport is unpredictable; it can change in an instant. You don’t know what could happen in the coming minutes. Either team may make a mistake, a player may commit a foul, or a player may take a great shot. So, just carry on doing what you know is important.

The key to this, no matter what you are feeling, is to be able to manage your emotions in order to not affect your performance negatively. Some ways to do this mid-match would be:

• Relax your body – By clenching and then relaxing your muscles, you will feel calmer.
• Take deep breaths – Lowering your heart rate will help you relax.
• Self-talk – Take control of how you talk to yourself, making it positive and rational.

Refocus On What You Can Control

Focus on what you actually can control. These include your processes, your thoughts, your feelings and reactions.

It can be easy to look at your colleagues, compare yourself, and get hung up on what they are doing. When this happens, your confidence can drop and it is no longer within your control, leading to an increased fear of failure.

Stay focused in the moment and on what you are doing. This will boost your confidence and ensure you can perform to the best of your ability out in the middle. Something we tell our officials to help them is: “Be where your feet are”. To help you focus, you should think about the process.

Consider The Process

As a referee, you should think about the process and what you want to achieve when you are performing. Getting emotional and focusing on the outcome instead can throw you off and lead to a drop in performance.

Two ways stay focused on the process is to:

• Ask yourself: “what do I need to do to officiate at my best?”
• Focus on your strengths by reminding yourself what you are good at and use them.

Think About Your Words

Your self-talk following a mistake will impact on how you feel and, subsequently, how well you will perform. Research has shown that how you talk to yourself can affect your persistence, concentration and stress levels.

Referees need to ensure they say “stop” to negative thoughts. You may not be able to control the first thing that pops into your head, but you can control the second. Saying “stop” right after you get a negative thought is an easy, great strategy that allows you to proceed with more helpful thoughts.

But it’s not all about avoiding negative self-talk, you should engage in helpful and positive self-talk too. Negative self-talk leads to a poor emotional state, which in turn hurts your officiating performance. In particular, catastrophising things can be very damaging. For example, saying, “This always happens” or “I’ll never be able to do this” should be replaced with positive self-talk such as “I know I can come back from this” or “I’ve succeeded at this before, I know I can do it again”. This counters negative emotions and creates positive ones too.

Don’t Take Unnecessary Risks

Fresh after making a mistake is not the time to be trying new things or taking risks. Risk taking is important is sport, especially for creating a psychologically safe environment, but they should be encouraged within certain parameters. After a mistake is the right time to be focusing on what you are good at and the skills you know you can perform well.

The odd mistake is normal and inevitable as a referee, you can’t be perfect every time. However, officials don’t want to be compounding mistakes with more and more mistakes. Often, a referee will try overly hard to chase after a good performance. This is not helpful because it can cause them to overthink and then inevitably lead to more mistakes.

Instead officials should try and focus on reaching a state of flow. Flow is a psychological state of total absorption in a task. It is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, where your feelings and performance are at their best. Referees are not overthinking, they are instead at peace and feel completely in control, performing their skills automatically and effortlessly.

Final Reflections

It is important for officials to remember that mistakes are inevitable, but they aren’t the worst thing that could happen, they allow you to learn and improve your performance. What really matters is how you respond to these mistakes.

Using these 5 tips will help you overcome your mistakes and bounce back to performing at your best. But do you know what would help even more? Working with The Third Team. So, get in touch with us today to chat about how we could help you perform at your best.

At The Third Team I work individually and in collaboration with different professionals where I have developed workshops and 1-2-1 sessions associated with Resilience and Mental Toughness Development to help referees. The workshops and 1-2-1 sessions are interactive, where referees are encouraged to open up and share their experiences to help themselves and each other.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more about my workshops or 1-2-1 sessions and how I could help you or your officials.

Best Wishes,