How To Play Better In REAL Games (Stop Holding Yourself Back)

This is one of the most important videos you will ever watch. Let me know in the comments down below if you relate to the situation. You're someone who works really hard. Basketball is what you love to do. And every single day you're practicing. Maybe in those practices, or when you're just messing around at the gym or at the park with your friends, maybe you play really, really well. You play free and you play up to your potential. But when you get to real games, it's different. You don't play free anymore. You're afraid to make mistakes or to let your teammates down. And so you play way worse than you do in practice, even though you know you're capable of way more. I understand this frustration and so many players go through it, and I've personally been through it as a player, so I understand the feeling. And so in this video, I'm going to give you the keys to finally playing as well in real games as you do in practice. And make sure you stick around until the end, because I'm going to give you some super important mental exercises and habits to build that's going to completely transform your mind into a weapon for you on the court and help you to overcome the things that are holding you back. Let's get into it. This is an example I've used before, but I think it really works well. Imagine that there's a balance beam. Say it's about 10ft long, and I put it right on the ground and I say, okay, I'm going to give you $100. If you can walk across this balance beam, every single one of you watching would at least attempt it. Whether or not you have the balance to do it, I don't know. But you'd at least attempt it because you know, you step off, who cares? You're on the ground now. How about I raise that balance beam 10ft in the air and I ask you to do it? Maybe a good amount of you would still do it, but I'm sure there'd be some who now wouldn't do it or who would think more about it would be a little bit more nervous to do it. Now, how about if I took that balance and I put it 100 stories in the air, the majority of you are probably not going to try it. Now I say all that because the challenge never changed at all. Whether it's on the ground or 100 stories in the air, it's the same exact thing. You're just walking across a balance beam. And where a lot of players struggle is now when they're in the air right when it's actually a real game and there's pressure. The difference between that balance between being on the ground and it being 100 stories up is the consequences for failing. There's not really a consequence for failing if you're already on the ground. But if you're 100 stories in the air, there is a much, much, much bigger consequence if you do happen to slip up a little bit. And it's the same thing when you talk about practice versus games. Games are just happens to be a higher level of consequence for failing or missing a shot or this or that, whatever you want to insert there. And the worst part about it is that because the consequences become higher as that bar raises and you get to a game. Just like with the balance between example how a lot of, a lot of you wouldn't even attempt to cross it if it's 100ft in the air. A lot of players don't even attempt to make an impact in games to their highest potential because of the prospect of failing. So maybe they're capable of it, right? You might be able to cross that balance team on the ground and in the air, but you might not even try it in the air because of the potential of failing. And this is something that I want to help you get rid of. Is this fear of failure and this fear of the consequences of failure holding you back from even giving that attempt towards doing your best. Now the pressure of being 100 stories in the air or the pressure of trying to make an impact in a game situation where there's wins and losses and playing time at stake and things matter, that's not going to change. But the way that we handle pressure and the way that we view it and overcome it absolutely can. And the way that you prepare yourself mentally to deal with it can absolutely, absolutely change. That's what we're going to get into right now. Now the first thing is how do you take care of your mind specifically what do you say to yourself throughout the context of a game? I think this is something that's really important because basketball is a game of mistakes. It's a game of mess ups. The only reason that team score is because the defense messes something up, doesn't do a good job of stopping some sort of advantage, right? They mess up on a screen and someone slips to the basket and they're open. They don't do a good enough job closing out and someone hits a three. You can play the best defense ever and get scored on, right? You've You've probably all been a part of sequences like that where you play great defense, your team plays great defense, and the other team just makes the shot anyway. And it was all that work for nothing. Now let's look at that possession, right? If you play great defense the whole time and you get the stop, they miss the shot, you pull the rebound, your coaches are going to be super happy. Hey, guys, that was great defense. But the only reason that it was great defense at the end of the day is because they met, they missed the shot, somebody messed up and didn't put the ball in the basket, right? So everything in basketball is just mistakes. So it's important that you are mentally prepared to handle yourself in these situations where things go wrong. So what is it that you say to yourself? A lot of players speak so negatively to themselves and bad things happen. They miss a shot and they immediately just, oh, I suck. Like, I'm terrible. I can't do this. And that's where they go immediately on a mistake happening. But if that's how you respond, and in a game that is predicated on mistakes, you're. You're going to struggle to ever be consistent unless you get one of those games where everything goes right, which is not going to be the majority of games that you play. So a couple things to think about here is speaking to yourself in terms of what you want to have happen, right? So we're going to get into this later. But being able to speak to yourself in a way that, okay, I've got the next one, right? Being able to get yourself in the moment and away from what just happened, focusing on making a positive impact going forward. So I think a really great way of doing this is just by adopting the next play mantra or next play mindset. So whenever you catch yourself being frustrated about a missed shot or a turnover or a defensive mistake or something, just saying to yourself, next play, next play. Getting to a point where you can cue yourself and say, hey, next play. And your focus goes on to, okay, what am I doing right now going forward? How am I going to make an impact? I got to get myself back into this moment. And if you're really good at drawing yourself out of that past mistake or mess up, right? Or even away from the anxiety of the future, like, oh, what's going to happen the next time that I get the ball? What if I miss the next shot? What if just getting yourself into the mindset of, okay, next play, I'm focused on. I'm focusing on what is happening right now. That's going to lead to much better success for you because all that you can control is what you're doing right now. So all of your mental energy, your mental focus has got to be on what is happening in this moment, what you're about to be doing, because that's all that you can control. And if you can be in that moment, more often than not, you're going to have better results than you would be if you were focused on what just happened. You're frustrated about that, you're anxious about what's going to happen two plays from now, two quarters from now. Get yourself into a point to a point of being focused on the next play and reminding yourself, hey, next play. And that's what I'm saying all in on. And you're going to see much, much better results in real games. Now the second thing that you need to ask yourself is, do I control the controllables? So let's talk physically. First of all, are you making sure that you're prepared in terms of a warm up? So does your shot feel good going into a game because you took time, whether it was getting to the place early or just making sure that you, you got the shots you needed right as a warm up? Like, do you make sure that you take care of that? I can make sure that my shot at least feels good because I warmed it up and I make sure that I get that done. I'm not lazy with what I do. I control that part of it, your body as well. Did you make sure that you got there early enough that you could warm up so that physically you feel like you're moving? Well, those are two things that you just, you shouldn't have to worry about if you control, if you, if you prepare yourself, you control the controllable things. So don't let that be. Another potential cause of anxiety or fear of failure is you not properly preparing when you have the ability to control that right? So make sure you're, you're setting out a time, okay, this is my routine. I'm going to make sure I get here at this time so that I can take care of all those things. Know what you're going to do before you get there so that you're prepared, you can start to build that habit. And then when we talk about mentally prepared, are you focused? Are you locked in on what you need to do? You know, are you using different meditation and breathing techniques so that again, you're focused on the present moment and you're not in that super anxious fight or flight state? You're relaxed, you're calm, you're focused on just being in the moment and making the most of what you have. Are you able to do that? And that's something that we're going to touch on in a minute here. So again, stay tuned for that. Like I said, a lot of these mental exercises are coming up. And then just preparing yourself from a game perspective, did you visualize what you want to have happen this game? Have you seen your success before it's actually happened? I think that's an important thing for players to start to understand is that you have to see your own success maybe before it actually physically appears. Right. We can do that through visualization. And there's. Visualization is such a powerful thing and there's studies behind it proving that by you just mentally creating a picture in your mind of what's going to happen or of any sort of situation, it actually makes a physical effect. But they've done studies where they've taken groups of basketball players and had them just visualize shooting free throws. Right? They'll have a group that won't work on anything, the control group. They'll have a group that is going to just visualize shooting freedoms, but not actually physically go do it. And they're have a group that goes and just shoots free throws. And they see like significant increases in free throw percentage from that visualization group. So there is actual power in just being able to visualize a situation and your body responds very similar to that than it would like actual practice. So we can use that as a very powerful tool to prepare ourselves for games. On top of that, if you have the ability to watch film and prepare yourself that way. Right. Not every player is going to have that. And obviously if it's like AAU or pickup or something like that, you're not going to have it. But if you do have that, that goes back to the controllable things. Are you controlling that? I can prepare myself and I can know my matchup is going to look like. So I'm going to make sure that I. I do that. Like I watch what I can watch, that I feel prepared and I know it's coming in this game. Now. This part is such a massive key and I don't hear a lot of people talk about it. And I think it's something that a lot of players over. I know I overlooked it for sure as a player. And that's just the question of are you built to handle pressure? Right. All this comes back to pressure. The reason that you don't play as well in real games you do in practice is because there is an added level of pressure to an act, to a real game. It's different, right? It's not the same thing. So you have to be prepared to handle that. Like I said, the hundred stories in the air, that ain't changing. You just have to prepare yourself to handle that. Handle the fact that, hey, there are more consequences, hey, there is more going against me right here. You just have to learn how to handle that and become built to handle that sort of pressure. You can do all the mental exercises that you want, and that's going to make a huge impact on how you perform. But at the end of the day, if you aren't constantly learning how to play with pressure, you're going to be lacking a little bit and you're going to crack when those high pressure moments arrive, which is going to be often. So what I mean by this, when a lot of players work on shooting, right, there's never any pressure associated with it, right? So ask yourself, am I working on being able to make shots in the face of pressure? So I don't just mean making shots at the end of the buzzer to win a game. That's obviously a pressure shot. But I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about just your every, your normal shot in a game, right? Every single shot that you shoot in a game, there's pressure riding on that shot because the games mean something. There's an actual scoreboard. There's. There's wins and losses associated with it. There's playing time associated with how well you shoot, you know, or how well somebody else shoots. So there's. It's more than just a shot. The problem is a lot of players will practice in a way that there is never any sort of pressure associated to any shot they shoot. They'll go and they'll shoot 200, 300 shots, but every shot is just the same. They make a shot, they miss a shot. Nothing, nothing's different about it. Like, whatever, like you made it, you missed it, who cares, right? I went, I got my 200 makes today. It's all that matters. But that's not true because you need to make sure that the shots that you're shooting are actually preparing you to be successful in games when there is something riding on every single shot that you're going to take, people are counting on you and you have a certain level of expectation for yourself. So are you prepared to hit that catch and shoot three in the corner in the second quarter when the game is tied. So many players, like I said, just work on shots where I shoot 10 shots at a spot, I move on, and then I go to the next spot, I move on and. And they never have to deal with any sort of pressure. So when you do that, you're going to struggle to ever really feel confident in games when that, that's what's demanded of you every single time that you shoot the basketball. Okay? So you have to add shots to your workouts that simulate this sort of pressure. And it's really, really simple to do. The simplest way to do it is think about this, right? Instead of just shooting 10 shots or just going for 10 makes, maybe you have to make four shots in a row. And now there becomes an added level of pressure on every single shot that you shoot. A. A great thing that I like to do. And I'll just give an example from a workout I had today. So one of my players had to make three threes off of the dribble in a row, and then they had to make a catch and shoot three right after that for that set to count. So essentially was four shots in a row. But there's a huge level of pressure on all those shots, especially when you get to that catch and shoot, on making that shot because it matters. It means something, right? If you miss that shot, there's consequences to it. So instead of avoiding consequences and feeling, you know, scared of them, you have to add consequences to your training. And just forcing yourself to have to make shots in a row is a great way to do that. And train yourself to be prepared to make shots in the, in the face in spite of that pressure. So you can think about that for any shot that you might work on. If you want to work on mid range pull ups, you got to make three in a row and then a catch and shoot three for that set to count. Maybe you got to get three or four sets of it, and that's one of your drills that you do. Maybe, you know, you're working on shooting shots off of like a snatch or a punch or some sort of stop. And you've got to make, you've got to go at least two for three, and then you have to make a catch and shoot three for that set to count. And you got to get three, four, or five sets of that, right? So we're finding ways to add that pressure to what we're doing. I think that's a really important thing to be able to do. And once you start doing this and seeing yourself succeed in the Face of pressure. You become so much more confident when you get to games. The other thing, the other aspect of this that I want to touch on real quick is just making sure that you play against defense as much as you can, right? Something that I harp on a lot. But obviously in a game, there's five defenders whose goal is to stop you from scoring, right? So as often as you can, whether it's in the off season, in season, just play against defense as often as you can. So whether it's playing more pickup or one on one or two on two, there's a certain level of pressure when you know you're trying to not lose, right. The goal is to, you know, win against somebody, against another team, when there's that aspect of winning and losing, that that's an important thing to be able to handle as well. So not only should you be adding pressure to your own workouts when you're by yourself, but play as much as you can because there's a. There's. That's another level of pressure. And I don't. Now, I don't just mean the, the. The like mental pressure of making shots or scoring or getting stops, but like physical pressure, right. If I struggle to handle the ball against, you know, a pressure defense, the best way to improve that is to work on doing that. So can you go play more so that you have to do that more often? And as you do it more often, you're going to mess up, you're going to make mistakes, but you're going to find ways to succeed. And eventually you're going to become much more confident doing. And now you get into a real game and, you know, you've worked on your ability to handle pressure, you've seen yourself be successful. So you're going to feel like, yeah, I'm capable of doing this now, and you're probably going to play a lot better because of that. So, again, two big things is just add pressure to your workouts and find ways to play against defense as much as you possibly can. And just doing those things on top of the exercises we're about to go through right now is going to completely transform who you are as a player. So now I'm going to go through three steps to take that are going to help you to eliminate that fear of failure that you play with and allow you to start to play in games as well as you play in practice. So the first thing is being able to control your breathing and understanding how big of a role breathing plays in you as not just an athlete, but As a person, right? Our breathing essentially regulates how we feel. So if we feel super stressed and super uptight, the way that we breathe can actually change that, right? It's sympathetic state versus parasympathetic. Think about sympathetic state is when you're super, like, fight or flight mode, right? Your heart's beating really fast, you feel really tense, you're ready to, like, sprint. Like, that's what would happen. If you're just out walking through the woods and you see a grizzly bear jump onto the path in front of you, you're going to go immediately into fight or flight mode. And that's the feeling that a lot of times you might also have before a game, right? Where you're super amped up and you're stressed, and you probably aren't going to perform the best when you're in that mode, right? Some players, maybe they do, but a lot of players, like, for me, I couldn't be in that mode and play at my best. I had to find ways to relax. So we can do that through breathing. So super simple, first thing to think about is we're going to do this all through our nose. So as you're doing this breathing, your mouth just stays closed. You're in through the nose, out through the nose. But this is called 4, 7, 8 breathing. All that it is is you're going to inhale through that nose for four seconds, then you're going to hold it for seven seconds, and then you're going to exhale slowly for eight seconds, and we'll repeat that two or three times. And you're going to feel like if you pause the video right now, you do this, you can do it one time, right? Just in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. You do that one time, you're going to feel yourself way more relaxed. Way more relaxed, right? So again, we want to make sure we do this through our nose. And again, this is gonna take you out of that stress state, put you into that parasympathetic state where now we're relaxed, we can think clearly, and it's gonna take away some of that inherent pressure that our body just kind of physically builds up when it's in a stressful situation. Like a game would be, okay? So just. It's gonna allow you to feel looser and more in control. So the first thing to understand is how to control your breathing. And the next thing we're gonna do is visualization. So I mentioned this earlier, but this is such an important thing. And so the first thing we do is this can be before any sort of game. You can do it before practices, before you play pickup, whenever you just. You kind of want to prepare yourself mentally as much as you can. You're going to, first of all, get into that breathing for like at least two or three. So that deep breathing. Do go through that, you know, two or three times just to relax yourself a little bit. Then you're going to close your eyes and you're going to visualize five successful plays that you've had. So you're going to put yourself like in that situation. Like you're looking through your own eyes like you're replaying it, right? So, you know, maybe it was a catch and shoot through you had in the corner. So you're going to close your eyes. You're going to put yourself in that situation where you caught the ball. How'd that ball feel in your hands? How did that release feel? What did it look like when the ball went through the net? Right. How do you. How did your shoes feel on your feet? Like, that's how you know that you're actually taking in that environment and you just want to play through that. So you're going to pick five successful plays. Maybe one was that catch and shoot three. Maybe you had a really nice take to the basket. Maybe you did a great job handling defensive pressure up the court. Maybe you made a great pass, whatever. Maybe you played great defense on somebody and you pulled a big rebound. 5. Five successful plays that you've had and you're just going to replay that like you're actually reliving it. Okay. Once you do that, you're going to visualize five successful plays in this coming game or in this coming practice or in this pickup or whatever. Just five plays that you want to happen in that game. Again, we're going to. We're going to visualize our success before we might actually see it. And so, you know, maybe you know that you're going to get some. Some open threes. So you want to just visualize hitting open threes. That can be an example what you want to do. You know, maybe you know that the guy you're going against is a really good defender. So you're just focused on, you know, handling that pressure. That's what you visualize, right? So five things in this upcoming game, practice, whatever that you want to have happen, that's the next thing we're going to do. And then the third thing, the last thing we're going to do for visualization is you're going to visualize a Situation in which something goes wrong. So maybe you miss a shot or you turn the ball over or you get scored on whatever it is that ordinarily, if it happens to you, like you really. It can sometimes kind of take you out of things and really frustrate you. Put yourself in that exact situation where that happens to you, and then what you're going to do is you're going to focus on, okay, that happened, but then immediately getting to that next play mindset, going and getting a stop on defense or pulling a rebound, and then something positive happening that very next possession. Okay, so maybe, for example, is, you know, you catch the ball, you're open in the corner, you miss a three, but you sprint back on defense, get a stop, pull a rebound, outlet it to somebody, you're back down the court, ball gets swung back to you and shoot it again, and now you hit that three. So we're taking, essentially, we're visualizing just our ability to overcome adversity. And again, insert any sort of situation you want. Basketball is a game of overcoming adversity. So if we can get really good at having bad things happen to us, like a miss shot or a turnover, but being able to immediately flip that switch to the next play, go make a play then, and then be ready to go the next time and still have that same confidence, you're going to be able to be really successful in a game that is full of mistakes, right? As I think a great. A great quote that I saw is that basketball is not about who is at their best when they're at 100%. Because throughout the context of a season or even a game, you know, injuries happen, stuff happens. So the best team, the best players, the ones who are, are great at like 70%. So across the board, when we get to. Let's take it in the context of a season from November through March, by the time we get to February, everybody's a little banged up, everybody's a little bit sick. So if every team on average is at like 70 of what they could be at their peak, who's the best at that? Right? So when you make a mistake, how good are you at getting over that and making the next play? Right? That is what categorizes bad players or inconsistent players from great players is being able to do that. So that's our third level of visualization. So first visualizing five successful plays that you've had, and then the next thing we're going to do is five successful plays coming up in this game. And then number three is visualizing a something bad happening, you just getting on to the next play and then something good happening right after that. Last thing we're going to talk about is just things you can do in game to make sure that you're playing at your best. And first thing is building your self talk habits. So like I said earlier, just being able to give yourself that cue of next play, something bad happens and you start to feel frustrated and you start to maybe talk negatively to yourself. Just being able to snap out of and saying, hey, next play, right? Or it doesn't even necessarily have to be that specific, that specific phrase, but it could just be, I've got the next one right? If you're someone who you know you can shoot the ball, you know that you're a shooter, your coaches know it, your teammates know it, you miss a couple shots. Just being able to tell yourself like, hey, I got the next one, next one's going in. Even if you know you might not truly believe it, just saying that to yourself is a powerful thing to be able to do. And eventually you'll start to believe it if you say it enough to yourself. And eventually you're going to make one, right? So you know that a make is going to happen. So just something like that, I've got the next one or the next one's going in. Maybe something bad has happened on offense. Being able to say to yourself like, hey, let's just get a stop right here, right onto the next play. Now you're on defense. Okay? I just got to focus on what I'm doing right now, which is getting a stop. Being able to just remind yourself like, hey, I'm good, like it's fine, we're cool. Like just being able to relax yourself and keep yourself in the moment is super important. You need to speak to yourself and most importantly is support yourself, right? Don't be your own biggest enemy. Support yourself and you're going to play so much better. Take those three things, apply them to what you do. You guys are going to see massive, massive results in what you do. And then on top of that, in your workouts, just working on being able to handle pressure, you're going to become a whole new player. Hopefully this helps you guys out. Click the top link in my description below to get my free elite perimeter score program that's going to help you guys take your skills to the next level. I appreciate you guys watching. Talk to you guys soon. Peace.