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We’ve all seen it. An international soccer player (who of course is highly experienced) just crumbling under the pressure of taking a penalty kick. The crowd, the team, the manager, the fact that the whole match may be won or lost on their penalty shoot can unnerve, distract and even devastate the performance of the coolest player.

The right mind for the job

The more a player physically practices their penalty shots, the better their body ‘remembers’ how to do it. Thinking will just interfere with this process. One of the biggest myths in sports psychology is that you have to fill your head with ‘positive thoughts of winning’. Not so. When you are standing there about to take your penalty shot, you should have no thoughts at all – negative or positive. Why would this be?

In the zone

To do anything really well, we need to be in the right frame of mind. We need to be process focused rather than outcome focused so that we can go into what’s known as ‘flow’. So when the soccer player is taking a penalty he needs to be not focused on any possible outcomes of the shot, such as what others might think of him if he scores or misses, winning or losing, the team’s place in the league, etc. All that is not the shot. All that is outcome. Connected to, but not the same as, the penalty action itself.

Process is just about being ‘in the moment’, with no thought, just instinct. Being ‘in the zone’ or in a state of flow means total focus to the point where the whole of outside reality disappears. In this state, there is no crowd, no match, no other players. There is only the ball and the net and the self. And all these three merge into one at the crucial moment.

This state of mind is akin to a profound wide-awake hypnotic trance state. In the new psychology sports section download for hypnosisdownloads.com Perfect penalties I have aimed (if you’ll pardon the pun) to train the brain to reliably enter the zone state when taking penalties.

If a soccer player is good enough to score when taking a penalty, if he can score, then he should do so reliably.

I’m looking forward to some feedback on this one.

All the best.

Mark