It’s no secret that some cheerleaders experience injuries during cheerleading practices or performances.  

One such cheerleader recently wrote to me after she fell on her head, asking me to help her cope with the stress of doing the stunt that led to her injury.  This cheerleader fell on her head doing a 360 elevator/extension. 

What follows is my response to this cheerleader: 

How awful that you fell on your head!  No wonder you are afraid! 

First – I assume you got immediate medical attention, right?  Any injury is serious business but a head injury in particular requires immediate and thorough evaluation.  There is no way you should resume physical activity until you are cleared by a physician.

Second – has your coach been certified by an organization such as the American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators (AACCA)? All cheer coaches and cheerleading squads should go through a safety course. Safety is fundamental and the most important thing.

Third – ask your coach and squad to review what happened in detail in order to determine what went wrong.  Someone wasn’t doing what he or she should have been doing, right?  A careful analysis sets the stage for a plan to remedy the problem to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  This process will contribute to your feeling a bit more secure about future attempts at doing a 360 elevator/extension.

Fourth – once all of these steps are taken, you can begin the psychological recuperation. 

You have experienced a physical and a psychological trauma and the reality of that needs to be acknowledged and honored.  Of course you are frightened…that is natural. You will need to rebuild your trust in yourself and in your team-mates and perhaps in your coach, too.  This is a process and will take some time.  Ultimately, only you can decide if you wish to return to cheerleading or not.  Do not allow anyone to force you into doing something that you do not want to do. It is your decision. 

If you want to stay in the game, here are some things to consider: After a serious injury, we tend to get stuck on replaying the incident.  This prolongs the fear and it also engraves the incident in our brains. The body does what the brain thinks so you will definitely want to stop this process. To do this, you can try some visualization. (Many pro athletes use this to help them recover from injuries.) 

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Find a nice quiet place and while sitting up, close your eyes.
2. Exhale as slowly as you can 3 – 4 times.
3. Say to yourself, “With each out-breath, I am relaxing more and more.”
4. Once relaxed, see yourself, with your mind’s eye, in a safe place, a place you feel ultra comfortable, secure and happy.
5. Really enjoy being in your special safe place as you continue to focus on your out-breath.
6. Now, shift your focus and see yourself in your cheerleading practice spot, beginning an easy cheerleading stunt, something you learned a long time ago that is simple for you to do.
7. See yourself executing the move with grace and ease and “feel” yourself enjoying it; enjoy your success.
8. If you feel any anxiety during this phase, stop visualizing the stunt and return to your favorite safe place.
9. Stay in your safe place until you feel relaxed.
10. Once relaxed, return again to seeing yourself executing a simple cheer stunt.
11. Repeat until you have seen yourself successfully execute the simple stunt.
12. Now, see yourself begin a slightly more difficult stunt, something that requires more skill and competence.
13. Again, if you feel anxious, return to your safe place and focus on your out-breath.
14. Once relaxed, return to doing your stunt until you can do so with ease and confidence.
15. Keep building up the level of difficulty of the stunt until you are able to “see” yourself and “feel” yourself executing the stunt that resulted in your injury.
16. Remember, if you feel anxious, return to your safe place.
17. Once you can, in your mind’s eye, execute the 360 elevator/extension with success, repeat over and over. 

This visualization accomplishes several things.  It helps you ease back into the idea of cheerleading while minimizing your anxiety and it also engraves successful execution of stunts in your brain.  You will be training your brain to feel and think in the way you want.  You will also be learning how to control your thoughts and feelings rather than have them control you! 

Good luck with this.  I’m so glad you wrote to me about this.  Please keep me posted.

Readers!  Are you on Facebook?  If so, please be my friend and join my Facebook group – Confident Cheerleading!

While exploring the forum on the site – All About Cheerleading, I came across a question written by a cheerleader who has a “mental block” throwing her full. She wrote that she found her fulls easy to do when her team is warming up in the corners but then “blocks” when they do their whole routine. She has to do a pass through 3 other girls which is “scary” for her. 

This cheerleader said that this is “taking a lot of mental energy” as it is “all I think about”   and it’s frustrating for her. She gets mad at herself because she is a “perfectionist.”

Well, as a psychologist and peak performance coach, this caught my interest and I thought I would use her concern as the basis of a blog post – maybe a few!

Where to begin?  I think I’ll focus on the perfectionist problem today.

Perfectionism in itself is not necessarily a problem.  On a positive note, perfectionism can drive a cheerleader (or anyone) to work hard and persevere in the face of discouragement. So, perfectionism can be the fuel that motivates a cheerleader to succeed especially when it is accompanied by commitment, persistence, and attention to detail.  

 A healthy perfectionist can take pleasure in the effort taken to achieve success.

But sometimes, perfectionism isn’t so good for you!  This is true if you are unable to feel satisfaction because you can never believe what you do is good enough or if you are striving towards unrealistic goals. 

 There is an important distinction between striving towards excellence versus perfection. The former is realistic and possible; the latter is rarely possible and more likely to lead to frustration and heartache and in some instances – depression.

In cheerleading, the road to perfecting a stunt or routine is riddled with bumps and potholes. Mistakes are inevitable and, as I’ve mentioned in this forum many times, the best attitude to have towards mistakes is to view them as opportunities to learn and grow.

So here is how I would advise this cheerleader: You are missing out on an opportunity to learn something about yourself that can be valuable to you.  A true champion sees a mistake as information, as data that can be used to learn and to improve!

I would invite you to step back and practice saying this phrase over and over – “Isn’t it interesting that…” and fill in the blank.  So, for example, you could say, “Isn’t it interesting that I can successfully throw a full alone but not with my team mates during our routine.  I wonder why that is?”

If you do this, you will be creating some distance and objectivity to your situation which will help you see the situation more clearly and with less negative emotion.  You become a scientist, filled with curiosity about this problem.  Your goal becomes searching for a solution to the problem which is now more clearly defined which is – there is a difference in your ability to throw a full during a routine versus during a solo practice.

The next question becomes: what is the difference or what are the different variables between the 2 conditions? You are the same cheerleader in both situations, right? It isn’t that you are not physically capable of throwing a full since you are able to do so when practicing alone.

 So what is it about executing this move with your squad that interferes with your ability to nail it?

To help you figure it out, here are some possibilities: you are allowing yourself to get distracted by the movements of your team mates; you have “spooked yourself” into believing that you cannot do it in these circumstances; you are more focused on your negative internal conversation than on executing the move.  Do any of these ring true?

This is a beginning.  Tomorrow I will pick up here and continue.

By the way – are you on Facebook? If so, please be my friend and join my Facebook group – Confident Cheerleading!

A more extreme from of Magnifying and Minimizing is All-or-Nothing Thinking. 

Consider this cheerleading scenario.  Your cheerleading squad is at Nationals and you have come in 3^rd in your division.  You all know that your performance was excellent; you hit everything.  What’s your reaction? 

Do you smile with pleasure, knowing that your squad performed so well?  Are you angry that you didn’t place first? Are you complaining that the judging was unfair? 

Well, All-or-Nothing Thinking occurs when you wipe out everything positive and only look at the negative. This can have a snow ball effect such that EVERYTHING becomes negative.  So, in this case, the thinking would be look like this: “We lost.  We were terrible.  I should just get out of cheerleading.  I don’t think the coaching was good either. And the judges always pick that other squad. We’ll never come in first. This is the worst experience of my life.” 

See how easily misery can happen? Such cognitive distortions can discourage you from trying new things or deter you from taking good risks. 

Tip:  In a situation like this, the squad can benefit from a debriefing in which everyone is asked what  went well, what went very well, and what, if anything can be learned from the event.

Let’s say you’re a cheerleader and you just heard this feedback from your coach: “You’re getting better and better with your toe touch jump.  I’m happy to see the improvement.  It will be even better if you can keep your arms level in a T position and bring your feet closer to your hands.” 

Ok, now what did you hear?  Did you hear it all?  Would you rate it a favorable critique?

If yes, you’re on the right track and you have no need to read further.  If you saw it as a negative critique, please read on! 

As I mentioned in a previous post, cheerleaders and cheer coaches can benefit from knowing about cognitive distortions which can adversely affect the overall performances of cheerleaders. 

Overgeneralization is the most common cognitive distortion and Mental Filtering is one type of Overgeneralization.  Using the example from above, the cheerleader who saw this as a negative critique filtered out the positive and only focused on what was wrong with the toe touch jump.  Do you see how the filtering can work to the cheerleader’s disadvantage?  The cheerleader might spend the next several hours feeling bad because he or she is convinced that the coach disapproves of the toe touch jump! 

Lesson: If you filter out all the positive and focus only on the negative, your performance will suffer. 

Coaches!  Knowing that this scenario is possible, be on the lookout for your cheerleaders using Mental Filtering and engage them in a conversation that might sound like this” “It might be useful for me to hear what you think I just told you so we can be clear we’re on the same page.”  Then, if the cheerleader has seemed to focus on what was wrong with the stunt, you can gently help them see the whole picture.

Cheerleaders can benefit from the accumulated wisdom of other athletes. In the world of elite sports, the best athletes are those who are always open to learning and the worst are those who know it all already.  Knowers tend to feel less secure about their performance, by the way.

So, what cheerleader type are you?  How open are you to learning?  And learning encompasses more than just learning the physical moves of cheerleading; it also involves learning how to communicate, how to resolve conflict, how to create a coherent team, etc. 

The next time someone tries to teach you something – whether it’s a coach or a peer, notice your reaction.  Are you closed off and quick to say, “I know that?” Or are you welcoming the insight or information? Even if you think you know something already, the other person will appreciate your listening with an open attitude. 

The best athletes, the Learners,  approach each situation with a spirit of curiosity and an eagerness to see if there’s some new angle that can improve their performance. 

This goes beyond conversation.  There is so much to learn by observation.  Again, a Learner carefully observes other athletes to discern what can be learned by watching other athletes perform. 

So, give it a try…become a Learner and see how you improve