10 common athlete thinking errors

We’ve worked with sports psychologists and experts to list some of the more common traps athletes fall into when assessing their own performance.

If you find yourself agreeing with the points brought up in this guide you have a good starting point to finding ways of breaking down these thoughts and challenging your internal monologue. In this infographic we look at 10 common athlete thinking errors.

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  1. Jumping to conclusions – you start predicting the future or mind reading.
  2. Mental filtering – you focus on the negatives and filter out any positive aspects.
  3. Personalisation – you blame yourself for something that was not your fault.
  4. Catastrophising – you start to blow things out of proportion.
  5. Labelling – you assign labels to yourself or other people, ‘I’m stupid.’
  6. Over generalisation – you take one bad event and generalise it to other areas of your life.
  7. Disqualifying positives – you dismiss or discount any positive experiences.
  8. Should and musts – you think about things in terms of should, musts, and oughts.
  9. Black and white thinking – everything is seen as good or bad or a success or failure.
  10. Emotional reasoning – because you feel a specific way you believe it to be true.

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