Getting Your Head Right – The Importance Of A Positive Mental Attitude For Fighters

Getting Your Head Right – The Importance Of A Positive Mental Attitude For Fighters

Published on December 6, 2011 by The Editor in Opinion

I know one of the fighters who appeared at the ONE FC event in Singapore and after the event and a disappointing loss he basically admitted that he had given his opponent too much respect and that in his head he had effectively built up his opponent so much that he did not fight to his own strengths, but instead tried to avoid his opponents.

Well of course the fight did not go in my friends favor how could it? He was off plan and fighting in a way that was not natural to him. All those years of training and Natural Muscle Memory built up and then at the last minute a change of plan!

The importance of a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) in many walks of life is important. If you are a salesperson and you approach your day with a can’t do attitude then surely you will fail and as you fail you will go into a downward spiral of negativity and it will just eat at you, every-time you fail to sell something, you will beat your-self up more and it all becomes a self fullfilling prophercy.

Well, this fighter after the fight knew why he had lost the fight or at  least spoilt his chances of putting on a credible show against a solid opponent. So, he should be on the right road yes? Well in this case NO!

So moving on and this same fighter returns from his next fight which ended in an easy first round knockout for him.

Now, at this stage what you do is rebuild your confidence and play replay the positives of the fight and your performance.

But, my friend comes back and says it was not a fair fight, his opponent was not very good and basically took nothing positive from his victory.

This is a problem, if all you do is take negatives from a loss and negatives from a victory then you really need to look at your self and rebuild you attitude. You have to create a PMA.

How do you do that?

You have to build a physical file showing all your victories, all your achievements, all your successes in life and  visit it regularly, you have to enforce positives and celebrate them and do it regularly.

For your losses and lets be honst even the MMA greats lose fights, you just look at what happened, look at what you did wrong and what you need to improve and then you improve it. You take a positive stance against the negative outcomes to create positives.

If you find it hard to create positivity talk to a friend who you trust to tell you the truth, not the friends who always tell you how good you are, they are not helping. You want somebody to shake you and say ‘YOU ARE GOOD! but at the moment you are not giving your fans or yourself the best of you’.

Without recognising the problem you cannot change your attitude, you first have to recognise it and then work to defeat it.

In a cage it’s just two of you fighting but the reality is you are the tip of a team, behind you are trainers and sparing partners plus of course at a higher level maybe nutritionists, masseurs, and more.

But, once you enter that cage you are alone and if your mind is negative when you start, everytime you get hit, taken to the floor, whatever, your mind will work against you.

If you approach a fight with a PMA then when things go wrong you are still thinking about a positive outcome, rather than embracing a negative one, you will not win every fight but you will win many more than if you expect to lose.