Awareness

Emotional regulation is one of the most important skills a performer can develop. Leveraging proper emotions to fit environmental demands allows for optimal performances.  For those that struggle in this area there can often be a pattern of thoughts or images that can be linked to negative outcomes.

One of the best ways to build your regulation skills is to develop your emotional awareness.  In particular focusing on emotions that lead to negative performances is advised.  Take the emotion anger.  Anger can be helpful in certain contexts but it often leads to hyper-arousal and stress.  A simple awareness practice can help.

First, do not treat anger as an enemy.  Even though our goal is to reduce its overall negative impact, understand that it has emerged to serve a purpose.  The problem is that purpose may not be related to the task at hand.  Treating it as the enemy will only make things worse. Instead take time to sit with your anger and offer it your attention.  Without judging it just be with your anger, what purpose does it serve?  Is this anger productive or counter productive?

Second, identify what you can learn from this experience of anger.  Taking this step helps separate the emotion from the person.  I am experiencing anger vs.  I am angry. 

Third, craft a game plan around reducing the negative emotion, anger in this case, that offers cognitive, emotional, and physical support.
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This simple exercise takes time and the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh compared it to cooking potatoes.  He explained that if you under cook potatoes they will not be edible, but proper cooking time makes them so.  Unlike potatoes our emotions have no set time frame for being digestible, but by continually coming back with a curious attention we can learn more about how they impact us.  This knowledge is a gateway to improved performance.