To fear or not to fear

Being your normal everyday bloke I don't let on when fear grips me. After all we can't admit we feel a emotional weakness can we. Especially not fear. Well if you are striving for improvement and success you must embrace the "F" word. In fact if used to your advantage, it may become your friend in a funny sort of way. You may find you already use fear to motivate yourself. The key is to make it work positively for you. To take this action you definitely require mental strength, discipline and ambition. Add some fear and manage it appropriately you have all the ingredients for improvement and ultimately enhanced performance.

Here's how the fear factor can present and I am pretty confident every cricketer will be able to relate to this. You will often have visions or minor anxiety attacks about failing. You need to take those fearful thoughts and visions and use them to catapult you into action. If you empower yourself to want a desired outcome strong enough you will positively direct your energies away from fear. Whether it be fear of injury. Or not being able to perform at your best because of your fitness levels. You could just have the fear of letting your team down. There would be literally millions of fearful thoughts and visions floating around in cricketers heads. By grabbing hold of fear and keeping it in check and taking action to keep it at bay you are positively driving yourself to improvement.

You can either sink in the hollow depths of fear and just don't try and accept defeat. Or let it drive you away from failure. Don't let it get hold of you. Keeping it in the background is where it belongs. Because you know what happens if you allow it to consume you. Not having fear around can also be detrimental. Your preparation will be too comfortable and you won't improve any more than where you are at now. So the question for you is to fear or not to fear. The choice is yours.