How do I control my emotions when I bat?

Pre-match nerves can be particularly uncomfortable to experience.

Those thoughts of failure starting to enter your mind the night before the match.

That feeling in your stomach as you drive to the match.

You get out into the middle, and you push hard at the ball with your hands outside off stump in a way that you don’t in training.

You think to yourself, ‘what’s going on? Why did I do that?’

The clinical nature of batting in a match can cause us to do odd things.

Most of the time, it’s as fatal as making one mistake and we’re done for the day (or sometimes even weeks).

So, in reality, it’s no wonder we tense up and can struggle for rhythm in the middle.

Emotional control is a skill that can be improved.

Our emotional experiences outside the game, with family and friends and our inescapable genetics for example, impact the way we handle stress and therefore our approach to batting under pressure.

Our desire to do well can also be an inhibiting force if we let it overwhelm us.

It’s possible to try too hard.

Things can become forced and robotic and lacking in fluency when we place too much importance in the outcome.

The secret is enjoying the process.

Being so caught up in the contest with the bowler and taking care of one ball at a time that the outcome simply takes care of itself.

When you do that well, everything seems simple.

It is often easier said than done.

Putting the outcome into perspective is important too.

While it may be a crucial part of your life and goals, in reality it’s only a small part of who you are as a human being: your other interests in cinema or music or gaming or your educational leanings towards history or physical strength and fitness, not to mention your relationships with family and friends.

Ensuring you live a balanced life is part of this.

While you may devote a high proportion of your week to training, ensure that you’re giving time to other things like socialising with friends, progressing with your education and getting some form of entertainment.

When you do this, a smaller chunk of your self-worth is reliant upon how many runs you scored on the weekend.

The topic of emotional control is a complex one.

Meditation is one technique that can help you reset your nervous system and give you an enhanced ability to handle stress.

For example, the type of stress you feel in the middle when there’s a bowler testing your defence and for whatever reason the ball just isn’t hitting the middle of the bat.

Acknowledging that emotional control is a key weapon in your arsenal when it comes to run-scoring is the first step.

Next you need to trial a few different techniques such as meditation and mindfulness for example to understand what resonates with you.

Following that, spending time every day or so doing these exercises outside of your physical training is going to give you a better chance of success on the weekend.

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