01/09/2026
This is so transferable to sport and life!
When things get tight. when the pressure, stress, worry, tension or pain increases, as it does for all of us, there can be a tendency to tighten up ourselves.
We become rigid in our thinking.
We hold on and hope it passes.
We grip tightly to what we have in case we lose it.
We try harder to control what’s happening around us and within us.
It’s often instinctive, the survival part of our brain doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
But rarely does going tense when the situation is tense work…
More often it keeps us to stuck!
When we eventually lift our heads up, sometimes we realise we’ve already lost something.
The game.
The match.
The moment.
The opportunity.
Our peace.
The alternative is almost counterintuitive:
When life goes tight, we go loose.
We lighten our grip.
We become more flexible. More adaptable. We move.
And in doing so, we start to see things we couldn’t see before. We access thinking that tension had locked us out of. We create enough space between what’s happening and what we do next.
We stop simply reacting and give ourselves the opportunity to respond.
Going loose doesn’t mean we don’t care.
It doesn’t mean the pressure disappears.
And it certainly doesn’t mean we give up.
It means that when the moment demands more from us, rather than allowing the pressure to make our world smaller, we give ourselves enough freedom to meet it.
