Let's Play Like Yourself

Have you ever walked away from a game and thought, "I just don't feel like myself anymore"?

Maybe you're still working hard. Maybe you're still showing up every day. But something feels off. You're overthinking, hesitating, second-guessing yourself, and playing in a way that doesn't feel natural.

In this episode, Coach Jojo shares a personal story about losing confidence in her own sport and the frustrating cycle of trying to force herself back to the player she knew she could be. What started as one of the best performances of her career quickly turned into a realization that many athletes experience: the harder we try to force confidence, the further away it often feels.

Coach Jojo breaks down what athletes really mean when they say they don't feel like themselves and explores the biggest reasons this happens. 

1. Pressure

2. Fear

3. Earning confidence

Athletes often become disconnected from the version of themselves that plays freely and trusts their abilities.

This episode challenges one of the biggest myths in sports: that you need to "find yourself again." Instead, Coach Jojo explains why you haven't lost yourself at all—you've simply gotten in your own way.

You'll also learn practical tools to help you reconnect with your game, define what your best self actually looks like, stop constantly evaluating your performance in real time, and start acting like the athlete you want to be before confidence arrives.

If you've ever felt like you've lost your confidence, lost your instincts, or lost the player you used to be, this episode will help you realize that the athlete you're searching for might still be there—and much closer than you think.

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jojo@mindsetcoachjojo.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

I'm gonna tell a story about my experience in my sport, and I really want to see if you guys can relate to this. I remember feeling so sick of how I was so obsessed with how I was going to perform. And I was just like, it's consuming my life. Like it's consuming my mind. I'm just it literally got to the point where I was accepting giving up in a way, but it was also more just like me just wanting to relieve myself. I was just like, let's just not care. And let's if I play bad, I don't even give a fuck anymore. Like I'm just gonna go out there and just play however I'm gonna end up playing, and who the fuck cares? And you know what's hard about this is that why couldn't I just do that for every game? But I couldn't. Like this was a moment where I was like, finally, my brain has come to an acceptance that we're just finally not gonna care. This wasn't something that I could just do all the time, it just got to that point. This was one of the best games I have ever played in my career, but then I didn't realize that the reason why I played so well was because I wasn't caring and wasn't thinking and wasn't obsessing over my performance. So then I went back into like, oh my god, I played so well. I'm still confident, like this is amazing. And I went back into that cycle of me obsessing over my performance. So my next game played terribly. And you know what's funny is that I actually didn't play so-called bad. I just thought it was bad because I wasn't playing to my full potential. And when I say full potential, I don't mean that I wasn't working hard. That's not what full potential means. It means my full capabilities. I was still working hard, but I wasn't connecting my mind to my body. So when I would play games when I wasn't playing to the potential that I knew I could, that's when I felt like I wasn't myself. And that was the worst feeling, one of the worst feelings that I ever had in my sport. And so I think that anybody that's clicked on this podcast today is somebody that has related to a story like that. Of course, it's not going to be the exact scenario, but maybe you are somebody that is struggling with confidence to the point where you were like me and you were overthinking every single game. You were worrying about the game, you were worrying about, you know, the preparation of everything, and you were just analyzing everything about yourself, and you just wanted those games where you're just like, forget it, I don't care anymore. Just give me whatever I got. But it's funny because those are the games that we would show our best self and like we were playing like ourselves because when we let go of all those overthinking thoughts, our instincts could finally kick in. I don't know if you guys have a relation to the second part of my story where I finally got to that point where I didn't care and then I had a good game, and then the cycle continued. It's like I thought I was free of the cycle, and then I was just gonna perform well every single game after that. And I still had damage within me. I still was broken inside. I do have a happy ending for my story and where my confidence was able to lead me. I was able to actually heal and gain confidence, and I ended my senior year of college getting that the whole entire year and keeping it. And that's a reason why I'm a mindset coach today is because I know the feeling. I know what it's like to go day in and day out and just have inconsistent weeks and inconsistent days back to back. It's so painful to go through your sport never feeling like yourself. And it could literally happen for seasons and seasons, and it happened for me for three seasons. Well, two to three seasons, but that's that's still a long time. That's two to three years that I'm not feeling like myself. But I do have to say that I I know how to get to that other side where I'm finally being consistent with my confidence, and that's what I'm here to talk about today, and that's why I have made a podcast, and that's why I'm a mindset coach. I'm here to help you. So let's get into it. I want to dive deeper into what it really feels like to not feel like yourself in your sport, and there are some points here that I'm going to hit that maybe I didn't hit in the story that I told, because there are so many emotions out there. And so let me list a few of them for you. If you are at any point consistently, week after week in your season, feeling like you are playing tight, you are overthinking, you're hesitating, you're second-guessing, you're just emotional all of the time, and I guess a negative type of way, and you feel robotic, and you're just not trusting your game. That is some of the bullet points, right? There are so many bullet points and words we could use to describe to not feeling like ourselves. But these, when these emotions come up, we think that it defines us, and we think that that's the new athlete of who we are. A couple of podcasts ago, I talked about how we never lose the knowledge of the capabilities that we have. Once you learn to do something over years, I mean, even if you learn to do something over months, right? It's like creating a habit, you're not going to forget or you're never going to unlearn something. The only thing that you do is that you put almost like a second brain on top of your first brain or over your first brain, and you learn other things. And sometimes those are negative things. What we need to do is get you to that first brain again. We need to unravel that second layer that you've built on your first layer because you are still you. You have not lost your talent, you have not forgotten how to play your sport, you're just disconnected from the version of yourself that knows how to play freely. And if I were to hear this and I was in a position like you are right now, if you have lost all your confidence, your overthinking, you're all of the bullet points that I just said, hearing that could be super, it's not gonna motivate you. I don't think I wouldn't have been motivated if somebody told me, yeah, well, you just learned a bunch of bad habits, and actually we're gonna have to try to get rid of those because obviously those habits are there because you've repeated them over time, and that's your new normal right now. It's not because you know that it's gonna be a process to get rid of all of these bad habits and to find your good habits that you've learned in the past again. But I will say, on the bright side of you learning bad habits and you putting this second layer on your first brain, it is good that you have actually learned these negative habits because it's almost like when I talk about how making mistakes is actually good for humans and we will make mistakes no matter what. And the reason why we're going to always make mistakes is because we're designed to learn. So if we think of that concept of making a mistake and learning from the mistake, and we call our bad habits mistakes, then we're learning from them. You're learning from all of the bad habits that you've created, and you're like, okay, well, I'm not gonna do that anymore. And oh, I'm overthinking right now. Well, I know how it feels to overthink. So let me see how I could fix that. And when you gain more knowledge, even if it's bad knowledge, so-called bad, right? I do air quotes, it's actually good knowledge because experience means that you know more. Your capacity to learn is more. Your capacity of having a better IQ about yourself, not even in your sport, right? I was gonna say IQ in your sport, but to have as much knowledge and experience as we can is always going to be something good. It's always going to be a gain. But let's talk about these so-called bad habits and why we start to develop feeling these bad bullet points, right? That I named. Also, let me just say, because I keep saying bad habits, I keep saying bad things, blah, blah, blah. I say that because these are bad feelings, like these are bad negative emotions. Although we are going to feel negative emotions no matter what. So even though I feel like I'm really emphasizing, oh, these are bad habits, like you need to get rid of them. I don't mean you need to get rid of them because you're still gonna feel them, but we're going to learn how to move with them and to play with them and to adapt with them. So, with that being said, why do athletes start to stop feeling like themselves? Start to stop feeling that was kind of a weird sentence. Why athletes stop feeling like themselves? We'll just keep it simple. First on my list, I have pressure. Pressure could change all of your behaviors. For example, usually athletes that are fine and have confidence and you know have mastered a way of how to handle their emotions, they are able to easily react to anything that happens in their sport because sports happen very quickly. So they're able to just play freely, play with their instincts. But if you are somebody who feels pressure as a very bad thing and you can't, you don't know how to handle it, then instead of reacting, you're gonna start to try to control certain things. So, like, for example, if I'm trying to not make a mistake and that's in the back of my head, then maybe like in a basketball example, if I'm going to think about making a pass to somebody, I'm thinking about, oh, well, I need to control everything. I have to make sure that this pass makes it to this person and that it's a good pass and that I look really good. But athletes who just know how to have confidence already and it's within them, they're just gonna make the pass. They're not gonna think twice about it. But that pressure gets to us and we end up not trusting ourselves, and that's why we try to control everything. And then instead of competing, you know, that too, you are trying to protect yourself. You're trying to protect your emotions and making sure that you're not gonna feel negative emotions. So that could also be avoiding making a mistake. So you're trying to avoid turning the ball over, but then maybe you're starting to play super timid and super hesitant, and that's not competing. The second reason of why athletes stop feeling like themselves is fear. What I just said. Like you are feeling timid, you're scared of making mistakes, you're scared of judgment, you're scared of disappointing people, you're scared of failure. Fear creates a whole different athlete. It's not who you are. You do not play with fear. That's not how you practice everything in years coming. Like if you are playing in fear, you're not playing like yourself. Like it doesn't feel like yourself. And I know that I say that we're gonna feel negative emotions, but we're also gonna feel positive emotions. But it's like the example that I say about how, you know, like if you're meeting somebody new, maybe you are going to be a lot kinder to that person and you're gonna have a good first impression and you do act a little differently than you do with your best friend, right? Like maybe you could joke around with your best friend, you could be a little so-called mean, you know what I mean? Like you could do things that you wouldn't do with a person that you're just gonna meet. You would define yourself as who you are with your best friend rather than who you are when you first meet somebody. So it's the same thing, like when you are playing in fear, like yes, that is a part of you, but that's not how you would define yourself. You would define yourself as somebody who wants to play confidently because that's your full potential. Who you are with your best friend is your full potential, is everything that you are, because you know that they're not gonna judge you. And even if they do, you don't care. And so that that ties to being an athlete and that ties to how you feel with yourself and whether or not you do feel like yourself in your sport. Your skills don't change, your actions change. And when you're changing your actions to somebody that you're not, if you're doing something, if you're making a mistake that you never have made before, that's because you're driven by fear. The third reason I wrote down to why athletes stop feeling like themselves is that you're trying to earn confidence. It goes back to my story that I told. Once I play well again, I'll feel like myself. And that's exactly what happened when I went into the game thinking, like, I'm just not gonna care. I don't care about my outcome. Like, who literally who gives a fuck? And then I did play well. And so I thought, oh, finally I feel like myself again and I'm confident again. And then I went out the next game. And guess what happened? I put so much pressure on myself and I was playing in fear, and I was doing all the things that I wouldn't usually do because I was trying to earn my confidence. I thought that I earned it, I thought that I was, I mastered it. The thing is, is that it actually usually works backwards. You have to start acting like yourself first in order for it to come later. The biggest myth, or I don't know, I don't know why I said myth. That was so dramatic, but like the biggest perspective that we need to change in our mind is saying, I need to find myself again. You don't need to find yourself again. You need to stop getting in your own way. You're the only person that puts pressure on themselves. You're the only person that puts fear on themselves, and you're the only person putting so much worry into whether or not you have confidence again. And you could be sitting there saying, No, I don't put pressure on myself. My coach puts pressure on me because he says that if I don't do X, Y, Z, then I'm not gonna play and I'm gonna get benched. But it's how you interpret it because you could be person A. And person A is somebody that takes that sentence of your coach saying, Well, if you don't mess up, then you could play, and they could be like, Okay, well, I know for a fact that I'm gonna play my game this way. I'm gonna keep being aggressive, I'm not gonna take what he says too seriously. And you know what's crazy is that when I struggled with confidence, I would have not believed that that was something that athletes could do, like where they could be like, oh, that doesn't bother me. Not for a single second would I have believed you. Then I gained confidence. And when coaches would say stuff to me, I'd be like, I feel so confident in myself that they could say anything to me and I still am gonna play well. So I know the difference. I know what it's like to hear sentences like that and be like, there's no way that that's true. But you could then be person B, which this is probably what happens, is that your coach says, Well, if you make no mistakes, then you could play. But if you make mistakes, I'm gonna bench you, and then you start to put pressure on yourself because that's a circumstance and it's whatever interpretation we take and it's whatever thoughts we're gonna think from that circumstance. And, you know, like I've said in my previous podcast, once you think a thought, it's going to create a feeling. And in person B's case, it's going to create feelings of anxiety, of fear, of it's you're gonna start overthinking everything and you're going to ultimately feel pressured. But person A doesn't feel any pressure, it's a whole different, whole different story for person A. So now that I've named the problems, let's get into tools because that's what you're really here for, right? You're like, yeah, okay, you said everything that I'm feeling. You said everything that I'm dealing with right now. How the fuck do I fix it? But before I get into tools, let me tell you guys and remind you guys, for those who have seen my social media pages, that I am coming out with a course to help with your guys' confidence. It is called the confidence playbook, and it is designed for athletes who are tired of overthinking, second guessing themselves, and letting pressure control how they perform. Inside, you'll learn how to build real confidence, handle mistakes, trust yourself, compete freely, and stop waiting to feel ready before you take action. This isn't about becoming a perfect athlete, by the way. It's about becoming an athlete who could compete with confidence, bounce back faster, and enjoy your sport again. Actually, for anybody that's clicked on this podcast, that sounds right up your alley. That is exactly what we're talking about today. But this is in my description. It is such an easy sign up. It's actually sign up for it to get early access because it's not out right now, but you guys will be on the early access list and you will be getting it before it even comes out on my website. So please sign up for that. But now let's get into those tools. So I'm a huge visualization type of person. Like I love to go onto YouTube, and right before I go to bed or in the morning, I'll play like a 10-minute video and just sit there and visualize any goal that I have. Not that you have to do that, but that is going to honestly show you the best results, and it's the easiest freaking thing ever. And maybe it's gonna be hard to sit yourself down and close your eyes and take time for yourself, blah blah blah. But you are taking your time for yourself right now listening to this podcast. So that's amazing for you. But when you get through like that first minute and you're just sitting there breathing, because a lot of them will have you meditate like for literally a minute or like five breaths, you're really into it. But if you don't want to do that, you could just literally ask yourself this question and sit there for a minute and just define your best self. So ask yourself when I play my best, what do I look like? But also, what does it feel like? So examples of that could be that you are aggressive, you're energetic, you're trusting, you're vocal, and or you're competitive. When I was gaining my confidence back, I actually visualized all the time. This is like the biggest tool that I give. I just know that sometimes people aren't visual people or don't like to do this type of thing. So I obviously always give a lot of other tools to do, but this is what helped me above any other thing in my life. To feel like myself again and play like myself again. I visualized every single day. A lot of people don't want to do it because, well, one, they're impatient, which I totally get. I am a very impatient person, especially with our attention spans nowadays. Two, it is super hard to feel abundant when you are not abundant with that thing that you're visualizing. It was challenging. It was challenging for me to sit there and think about being confident when I have not felt that for two years. It will be hard, but there comes a point, and literally this point will either be after the second video or you know, whatever visualization you guys want to listen to, where all of a sudden you're like, oh wait, okay, I could feel it. Because the biggest thing with visualization is that you need to feel it in order for it to come about. But if you're consistent with this, then you are going to get rid of that second layer piece by piece. And we know this as athletes. That's why I love to work with athletes, is because we know that it takes work. It sometimes takes hard work to get where we are. Tool number two is also a little bit of a challenge, but it's going to have to happen, I think, in practice. And so tool number two is act first. Like I talked about in the third bullet point of what makes athletes stop feeling like themselves is that you're trying to earn your confidence and that's doing it backwards. If you did tool number one, this is going to be the most successful. If you do tool number one and you have visualized at some point what it feels like to be your best self, I want you to apply that to practice. I want you to just be it is, and it's hard, right? It's hard to get in that mindset where you're just like, I'm just gonna play the way that I have visualized. Um, you'd actually be really surprised that once you've visualized this stuff and you just let go and you play freely, that it actually will come out. But also, that's hard to just say, oh, I'm just not gonna care and practice today, and I'm just gonna compete freely. Like I understand that it's not there, but if we could try to practice to let go and to try to get to a point where we are not caring so much. And if that happens, if that takes a few weeks, then it takes a few weeks, but at least we're doing that one percent every single day. Tool number three is super important, and it is stop monitoring, what the hell? Monitoring yourself. I'm not even gonna repeat that word because I don't think I could do it again. But a lot of athletes spend the entire game or entire Match evaluating themselves. You know, you're asking yourself, oh my gosh, how am I doing? Am I playing well? What does Coach think? Am I gonna be taken out soon? That's obsessing. And we know that in any subject of our lives, obsessing is terrible for us. I used to a lot of times think about how I was playing in the first half compared to the second half because it was bad because I would like, for example, I would see if I was pacing myself. Usually in my head, I believe that if I scored over 10 points in the first half, that I was gonna have a good second half. And if I didn't have those 10 points or more than 10 points, then I was like, oh my God, my second half, I'm gonna have to work so much harder to get more points to make you know the team look better. I'm gonna have to get more assists up, more rebounds. Like I started to overcompensate for everything that I hadn't done yet. That's evaluation. That's me thinking about stats. It's me thinking about how I'm gonna perform and whether or not I get a stay in the game or I'm gonna get benched. Like that is obsession. And with evaluating, that means that you're not playing, you're thinking. You can't think. You literally, like when a situation comes up in a game because sports are so fast, you can't think. You just have to act. And of course, that comes with practice, right? I can't just go out and play another sport that I've never played before and be like, okay, well, just think off your instinct and just or don't think and just play off the instincts. Like, I'm not gonna be able to perform well. But this is what I'm saying. You have been playing your sport for years. You know how to play your sport. You just have to stop thinking so much. So I want you to compete first, just compete, just play without thinking. I know that's so much easier said than done. You guys could give all of my other podcasts a listen to. I have so many tools and I get into depth about everything about how to get better at this and how to compete without thinking. And I even have a podcast that's called Let's Play with Our Instincts. But we could compete and then after practice, after a game or match, like we could evaluate afterwards and we could grow from that afterwards. Tool number four might be my favorite tool on this one. Honestly, I really like these tools that I'm giving you guys, but I made this one play one possession like yourself. Don't try to get all of your confidence back and your whole confidence back. Don't try to fix your entire season. Don't think about the future, like just think about one possession and one play and ask yourself, can I play this next rep just like myself, the way that I wanna play? And then you complete that one and you do another and you do another. And it's just step by step. But let's say that you do, you know, you do have this question in mind. You're like, okay, this next rep, I'm just gonna play like myself. Like, let's go. I'm gonna trust myself, I'm gonna believe in myself. And let's say it doesn't go the way that you want it to. You don't feel like yourself again, or still, that's okay. Why would you, why do you expect to be perfect? Why do you expect that a good thing's gonna happen? That's not always gonna happen, and especially if we're in the process of trying to gain our confidence back, you're gonna have hiccups like that. So forget about it and do the next rep. Do the next one. The next one you could play like yourself. And if it doesn't work out again, you could learn from it. And you're just growing. Like even all of the mistakes that you're making, you are growing. It's literally like I was saying at the beginning of the podcast, it's giving you experience and it's giving you knowledge. Please listen to me when I say you don't need to become a whole different athlete. You don't need more talent, you don't need a whole new personality. The athlete that you are striving for and you are trying to become is usually the athlete you already are when fear, pressure, and overthinking aren't running the entire show. You have that first brain, you have that first experience for when you learned your sport and the confidence that you gain from that. Like you have that within you. You've just put that layer on top. And so just know you are within you. Literally, you are within you. And you need to piece by piece, day by day, step by step, get rid of that layer. And it's okay because you know it's experience and it's amazing. And that's why I never have any regrets. I really don't. It's hard to say that to somebody because I actually often say that. I'm always like, I don't have any regrets. And it honestly kind of sounds like an ego thing. But what I mean by that is that I'm just thankful. I'm so thankful that I made a mistake the other day and, you know, I messed up whatever I did because now I'm gonna learn from it and I'm going to strive to learn from it, and I'm not gonna make that mistake again. And if I do make the mistake again, well, now it's really in my head. Oh my gosh, the amount of times my mom yells at me and you know, I tell her, I go, hey, it's gonna take three times of you telling me, but I'll get there. Okay, I'll get there. And maybe it's gonna take you 10 times of making a mistake. That's okay because you're going to eventually learn. You have so much time. There's a ticking clock in a way where it's like, well, I'm only gonna play, you know, my college sport up until my senior year, up until I'm 21 or 22, and that's a ticking time bomb. Yeah, yeah, okay, but it's also not. Do you know how much you could learn in one day? Do you know how much you could learn in one week if you really are being conscious about it and actually working hard and really trying to learn so much. And if you actually sit down with yourself and you think about all the things that you learn that week, and I just love the saying, you learn something new every day because you do. And I talk a lot about being grateful and sitting down before you go to bed and writing down three things that you're grateful for, just three. And you actually realize that within those three things, you learn something, even if it's the smallest thing. Playing a sport, whether you are in middle school, you're in high school, you're in college, you're beyond college, is honestly, I'm biased maybe, but also at the same time, I know I'm right. It is the best thing a human could go through. Everything that you're doing, the way that you're working hard, the way that you're figuring yourself out in every single way possible, the way that you are having the lowest of lows and the highest of highs is how you're setting your future up and how you know you're gonna be happy in the future because you have gone through so much in your sport. You're figuring out your passions, you're figuring out, like for me, I figured out that I'm a super competitive person and I apply that to my life every day and I have fun every single day. I am now um an entrepreneur. I wouldn't have been where I'm at today if I didn't make mistakes and figure myself out and literally play a sport at such a high level and to the point where I had anxiety attacks. But thank God I hadn't those anxiety attacks. I literally tell everybody, I'm like, I will not have a midlife crisis because I played a sport in college. And I hope that you guys realize that and you know that. But that's all that I have for you guys today. Thank you so much for joining me and thank yourselves for being here. It does take a lot to listen to a podcast and to even just put time into yourself. Everybody is so busy nowadays, especially being a student athlete. Oh my goodness. Don't forget to sign up for that confidence playbook that I am making. There's I didn't mention, but I am literally talking to you in the course. Like I give you, like, I think it's like 30 videos. I have modules in there, and they're short videos, and you know, just over time you can develop confidence, and I know how to develop it. Also, it is like a really good tool for you guys, so that is in my description. But until then, that's all that I have, and I will see you guys in the next podcast next week. Love you guys. Bye.