Having fun performing
If you have fun you perform better, if you perform better you have fun! So how do we create fun in performance?
Fun creates benefits and we can create an environment that stimulates it in order to apply it in various contexts. Often, too much pressure is felt and therefore sport, work or creative performance is perceived as only a big commitment and sacrifice.
Creating fun during physical and mental training in order to deal with situations and challenges is possible using techniques of imagination.
In creating fun there are many benefits, some are obvious such as excitement, joy, positive emotions, and a desire to continue practicing that sport or activity.
As far as sports are concerned, young athletes often stop practicing around the age of 13 when the sport ceases to be mainly fun and starts to become a responsibility. It becomes something that leads to guilt, fear and frustration, or something that evokes strictly negative emotions.
Having these feelings and thinking too much about the consequences are all distractions that weigh down your performance.
Questions such as "will I be good enough?", "Will I make it?", "Will I be able?", “Will I be up to it?” highlight insecurity, lack of confidence in ability and value and increase the likelihood of implementing the typical comparison with others.
This attitude will lead to a dysfunctional comparison with selective attention aimed at confirming one's "weaknesses" thus creating an emotional weight and a lower probability of success of one's performance and self-image in relation to others.
Thus counteracting all negative emotions becomes very tiring. Fun is not a foregone conclusion, nor is it a method that is implemented "with the autopilot", indeed it also becomes a challenge.
Having fun increases motivation and creates synergy and teamwork both in the workplace, in sports and in creativity.
During and before performance, instead of thinking about what mistake I can make in the future, or "what I did wrong in the past and what could still go wrong", it would be useful and effective to keep the focus on the present and have fun at that moment of time.
Staying in the present and living in the "here and now" allows you to fully savor performance. Fun prevents distraction and cultivating it increases the passion for the activity we are doing.
We must remember to experience the variable of fun in what we perform. Fun is a mental tool.
Relieving ourselves from heaviness could be facilitated by simple strategies such as looking at something "light" the night before the race, a military or precise clinical intervention, or before a musical and creative performance. You could listen to music or a specific song that puts you in a good mood. Alternatively you can use more sophisticated techniques such as visualization.
The latter can be taught by a mental and performance coach in a precise, specific and effective way, with the aim of helping to achieve set goals. www.performanceexpansion.com
Then you need to ask yourself the following question "What makes this activity fun for me?" Asking what makes the performance fun is crucial in order to feed and enhance those variables.
An athlete can define this as the aspect of moving quickly, while a dancer can say that fun is related to moving one's body in harmony with music and in a creative way.
For some business men, work can be a source of fun if it is linked to the opportunity to teach others. Surgeons can find satisfaction in being helpful. Musicians love being able to create new sounds or improvise, or to be in harmony with others. Therefore exactly knowing for each performer what it means for the body and the mind to have fun, helps develop and maintain this state of mind.
In order to have fun, lightness must be created. Sometimes, however, the lack of lightness has deep roots in conditionings that start from early childhood experiences.
In this regard, it is therefore necessary to "decondition" the mind by doing a "reset" with very sophisticated techniques supported by research such as the performance expansion program,
www.performanceexpansion.com, and to precisely access the subcortical and emotional part to prevent the performer from risking the burnout effect.
In some countries like the United States there is particular pressure on children to be perfect at high levels of sport in order to obtain scholarships and consequently a high social status.
This attitude on the part of the parents occurs despite research demonstrating that only a small percentage are able to access this opportunity independent of these sacrifices.
Most children just want to have fun and not experience this activity with high pressures.
In Italy there is a different system, but despite this there are parents who transmit elements such as perfectionism, control and rigidity which do not allow for the insertion of the "ingredient" fun in life. This type of ‘teaching’ from parents conditions the person even in their adulthood.
Sometimes, in addition to parents, even sports coaches and teachers in schools and academia invest heavily in the ‘perfect’ performance of children instead of focusing on lightness and the process of a positive learning experience.
When people perform at high levels, both regarding the task to be performed and for conditioning, they are subject to forgetting the aspect of fun in performance.
Remember moments of lightness in your life. Apply the same methods such as "try to give and receive unconditional support" with other people in the team.
Other options are even with positive self-referential statements, having a "younger and carefree" mind and practical visualizations in which anchoring techniques are incorporated. These can all be strategies which can help to recall an emotional state functional to the performance. Be amazed, look at the result, notice the experience process, notice the beauty of the factors involved in the performance for fun.
The performance expansion program, not only aims to achieve the desired result, but aims to get it while having fun.
What are we waiting for? Let’s create a mind free from conditioning, a mind that feels with a child's enthusiasm and sees with an adult's awareness. It's time to have fun!
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