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Big
If you’re anything like me, chances are you’ve experienced this feeling before.
You are passionate about your craft and work hard on it almost every day. You love what you do, and so you pour as much energy as you can manage into that one thing. It’s hard work, but you enjoy they craft so it does not matter to you.
Eventually, you get your big chance at a specific event. It’s months away, but it becomes your sole focus. Everything you’re working on in your craft is leading up to this moment. To you, it feels like there’s a you before the event, and one after it. You can just feel that this event is going to change everything, so long as you perform how you should.
In short, you begin to build up this image in your head of what the event should be, instead of focusing on performing at your best. You’ve moved from thinking about your performance to expecting a certain result. Therefore, you’ve just given yourself much less of a chance to actually accomplish your goal. After all, a process goal is much easier to be complete than a result-based goal (particularly if this is supposed to be a breakthrough performance).
Additionally, there’s the added pressure of “placing all your chips” on this big moment. Instead of recognizing that performances come and go, you’ve banked everything on one event. This is a recipe for failure, and one that will leave you stressed before the event and disappointed after it.
If you want to hit new levels of performance in your craft, avoid only doing one event a season. This will allow you to take off some of the pressure of performing, since you’ll have other opportunities throughout the year to do so.
Building up an event to be too big is setting yourself up for failure.