Below I have provided some guidelines on developing a clear and simple plan to succeed which may provide you with some ideas to compliment your current planning process.

Point #1: Identify your job in as much detail as you can, so you know clearly what it is.

A good starting point is to ask yourself the question ‘What does my team need me to do in this situation’. When you have worked out what you need to do you then need to work out how you will do it, which is where you plan comes in.

Ponit #2: Develop a simple, realistic plan that will allow you to do your job.

Keep it simple, my personal plan, simply stated is defend on the stumps, score or leave width. My key technical points are to be as stable as possible and hit as straight as I can for each shot.

Ponit #3: Knowing your job will help you to make better decisions in the middle.

If an openers plan was to open the batting and bat through the innings to score a big hundred for his team, he may identify that in order to do this he will leave all the balls he faces on a good length outside off-stump and that all balls on this line that are full he will drive and all the balls short on this line will be cut. Weather you have the same plan yourself doesn’t matter, the point is that in order to achieve a larger goal the player has identified a plan that will guide his action. It will be up to the player to execute his plan but at least he will have a sense of purpose to guide him through the decisions he must make in his innings.

Ponit #4: Thinking is hard but the effort to plan is worth it. Use your mind to get the best out of your skills.

Being in control of your thoughts, in my view is the critical factor in being successful as it determines how well you will apply your mind to the job you need to do (your plan). Having a plan will guide you in the process of understanding your game and getting the most from your skills.

Point #5: Take responsibility for yourself; work out your job on your own.

I don’t think it is up to the captain to work out your job for you, if the job is against the team interests your captain will soon tell you and if your job is to help the team to win by scoring lots of runs and taking lots of wickets the captain will love it. It doesn’t make sense to ask someone else for help until you have had a go at fixing your problem yourself, it’s your Saturday, it’s your time, work how you want to play and do it, anyway your know your game better than anyone else. Your captain and other senior players can help you but it should not be up to someone else to work out your job for you. The best way to learn is to work it out for yourself; they are your runs, your wickets, your figures and your average, take responsibility for them.

Point #6: Work out what your job in the team is and go out and enjoy the challenge of putting your plan into place.

We all get nervous and worried about failing at times, enjoying the great challenge that playing cricket provides will increase your chances of success, if you enjoy something you do it well!

Good luck

Mark

‘In all things, success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure’ – Confucius

An expression you often hear around cricket is ‘back yourself’.

What does it mean to back yourself?

Some of the things it means to me are:

• Trust yourself to perform
• Be confident in your own ability

In order to trust yourself and be confident about your performance you need to be prepared, for example if you lived in France and studied French for ten years you would probably face a basic exam on how to speak French very confidently – in fact you might even enjoy the opportunity to apply your skills!

However, if you know nothing about the language, have never studied it, but still need to pass the exam you wouldn’t enjoy or face the exam with any confidence, in fact you’d probably expect to fail…and you’d be right!

Confidence comes from knowing that you have done everything you can to be the best you can be in terms of your planning, physical preparation and mental and technical skills.

Backing yourself to succeed goes hand-in-hand with confidence and as we see with the French exam example above, your confidence is related to the quality of your preparation. The trick is to know what to do in the situation before you get there, this is where your planning and practice comes in and is where you pay the price for your success with hard work and as Justin Langer says he’s never met a successful person who hasn’t worked hard!

Playing against a high quality opponent is as much about knowing what to do as doing it! Excellent players will test your technique and temperament. If you have done the work in preparation you will have a solution (that works) for the challenges you are facing and will have practiced your skills to the point where you can execute them in a match. You can confidently face the competitive challenges and enjoy them, however if you don’t have the answer and haven’t done the work, you will be unlikely to play with confidence and more likely to fail!

If you plan and prepare to the best of your ability and commit to the discipline of the hard work required to achieve excellence in your game, then you will earn the confidence you will need to succeed and can back yourself when the going gets tough.

Good Luck.

Mark

What does it mean to be mentally tough? It means making the effort to think of and develop a game plan that gives you your best chance of success and then having the commitment and discipline to carry out your plan under any circumstances.

To develop a plan for success, you must have a very clear understanding of how your game works and this includes knowing your strengths, weaknesses and how you play best. The odds are that if you have ever performed well in the past you carried out a process to help you achieve success. In general, consistently repeating your individual process for success you will give yourself your best chance of success.

Great players understand their game very well, right down to tiny details, which allows them to know exactly what they are doing at every step of their performance and also to self-correct rapidly if required.

Once you have established your plan for success, you need to carry it out and this takes discipline and commitment. There are many distractions that will take your mind off doing your job successfully (executing your plan for success) if you focus on them. Remember that any time you are not focused on implementing the steps you need to take to be successful, is a waste of effort if you truly wish to succeed in achieving your goals.

It takes genuine toughness to commit to focusing on your success process in the face of challenging and uncertain conditions but remember, giving up or not thinking are easy and don’t work. The hard road of being mentally tough is difficult but the effort is worth the reward, if you have the desire to succeed.

A helpful way to self-manage the execution of your plan, is to firstly know your plan and your job (your job is to implement your plan) and secondly, some simple self-questioning in the middle while you are playing can help focus your mind on the job at hand. A good question to ask yourself is, ‘What is my job’, this will not only bring your mind back to the present, it will help you to focus on what you need to do now to succeed. We often get distracted thinking about past or future events, for example what happened the previous delivery or how you will perform at the end of the day.

If your can leave the past in the past and understand that the future is only influenced by the next ball, it will help you to know that the most important thing you ever do in cricket is deal with the next ball the very best you can.

Good luck

Mark