Breaking Up Is Hard to Do! Letting Go of “Last Year”! How to Move on And Take Advantage of THIS YEAR!
- Julie Jones
- Feb 4
- 6 min read
I do realize there are other sports, but it’s softball season and any of you who follow these Tips know it’s my first love! 😊
Every new season, whether it begins next week or not, presents us with a new opportunity…to be different. To be better. To reach our goals.
UNLESS…we can’t let last season go.
This tip was inspired by a few coaches I talked to last week. One is in the throws of it, trying to figure out why her team isn’t reaching its potential. The other is just starting and fighting the “well, last season” thoughts. Both are trying to get their athletes to focus on what is to come and leave the past where it is! OVER!
It’s not just my teams that deal with this. I work with a high-performing swimmer who went into the high school season hoping to avoid a repeat of his freshman year. It consumed him…until it didn’t and he is KILLING IT right now!
We’ll talk about how he made the switch, but before that, let’s look at why we can’t let it go!
When we struggle to leave past experiences behind, we often deal with three invisible forces: our negativity bias, emotional residue and attentional residue. All impact focus, confidence, and performance—often without us realizing it.
As we know…we love to focus on things we don’t like. In fact, our brains are wired to remember negative experiences more than positive ones. It’s the 9 and 1 principle again. Get 9 compliments and one nasty comment and what sticks in your crawl? It’s a great mechanism for survival. Way back when... it saved us.
Remembering past dangers helped humans avoid threats. But it’s 2025 and remembering there is a lion in that cave isn’t as relevant, so instead, our negativity bias means that a tough loss, a failed project, or a season of underperformance sticks in our minds more than what went well.
Researchers call this emotional residue—the leftover feelings from past events. We are really bad at estimating how long a bad thing will affect us and that makes it harder to move on. “I lose…it will ruin me.” Researchers at Harvard found that we tend to overestimate how long negative emotions will last, and this overestimation sets us up for hanging on.
Emotional residue doesn’t just affect those who experienced it. It, like everything else, is contagious. Your older team members hang on to what was and share it with those who have no idea what happened.
Then, as I learned after an especially tough season at Akron, we tend to self-identify with past experiences. To a coach, a bad season that included injury and other variables may be a “you can’t even make this up, it’s not normal” season, but for our athletes, it’s easy for them to internalize the belief that they are “just not good enough.”
Think about it. A coach who was criticized for a bad decision last season may hesitate to take bold risks this year, even when it’s the right move. A team that lost in the playoffs on a last-second mistake might struggle with confidence in late-game situations, even if they’ve improved. Leaders with past failures may start to fear failure more than they pursue success, leading to conservative decision-making.
But these are just the stories we tell ourselves, not reality. In fact, it was a fluke that two pitchers, the catcher, shortstop and centerfielder were all out with season-ending injuries. The record remained, but the circumstances were sure to change!
Here’s more great news. The emotional residue and identifying with the past don’t just affect those who experienced it. It, like everything else, is contagious. Your older team members hang on to what was and share it with those who have no idea what happened. AWESOME! That’s why JP Nerbun, author of The Culture System says it can take three years to change a culture. Keep reading to try to speed this process up!!
From emotional to attentional residue, anything that distracts us dissipates our energy.
Attentional residue is the leftover mental focus on a past task or event, which makes it harder to be fully engaged in the present. When we switch from one task to another, our brain doesn’t immediately let go of the previous task.
You’ve heard the fact that each time you switch tasks it takes 20 minutes to get back to full focus on the task at hand. Who has time for that? Residue reduces focus and effectiveness. If we are still mentally processing a past mistake, loss, or event, part of our cognitive resources remain stuck back there. And if they are ‘back there’, we aren’t where we need to be! Remember, we don’t have a time machine for a reason!
It’s clear hanging on can disrupt our focus, affect our culture and stifle performance, but how do get our teams to be where their cleats are?
This may seem too ‘woo woo’ for you, but Dr. James Pennebaker has a solution that has been proven to help us move out of the past and on to the future.
WRITE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED! I didn't say talk...over and over...WRITE ABOUT IT!
Pennebaker’s work focuses on helping people move forward from things that didn’t go well – what he would call deeply emotional experiences. He found that when people wrote about their experiences for 15–20 minutes per day over four consecutive days, major shifts happened.
It seems like we should leave sleeping dogs lying, but research suggests that writing helps us process emotions, reframe experiences, and reduce psychological distress. All necessary for letting things go!
If you read these Tips often, you know I am all about WRITING THINGS DOWN…by hand. This is more proof that writing shifts activity from the amygdala (emotional center of the brain) to the prefrontal cortex so we can think and make better decisions. And it helps us detach from emotions, allowing us to process negative experiences more objectively.
Writing forces the brain to organize and make sense of emotional experiences, rather than suppress them. It puts our thoughts into words which allows us to gain a sense of control over our emotions. It even lowers our cortisol. It also chills out our Default Mode Network… which likes to replay the past and overanalyze which helps our brains transition from an emotional, reactive state to a more logical and problem-solving state.
When we write about past emotional events, our brain treats them as things that happened…not things that are still happening! They are over…not ongoing! GOOD!
Not into having your whole team sit down and put pen to paper? Then choose those who can benefit the most and try the trick that helped a few of my athletes break through and set new PRs this year.
The questions you ask are simple. How are you different this year? What else is different this year? What are you doing that is different this year? Keep asking until you have a comprehensive list of ALL THE VARIABLES that have changed. This not only points out growth, experience and maturity differences, but it also allows the athlete to see where he or she can make adjustments to continue the separation from the past “you” and the “new you”!
I have seen a HUGE shift after using this tool. We vastly underestimate the impact of small changes. This presents a full picture of how “little things make big things happen”, as John Wooden would say.
Whichever exercise you choose, separation from the past has to start somewhere. Ignoring it or acting as if isn’t a big deal isn’t the way to go. You may not think last year has any connection to this one, but others may…and if they do…it is contagious.
This isn’t rehashing. It’s releasing. It’s acknowledging what was and what is and that one thing isn’t like the other.
Leave last year where it is. Learn from it and let’s go!
Manage the moments!
Julie
P.S. It’s not too late to start improving your mental game. Let’s build a plan and help your team design their Mental Performance Operating Systems and improve their performance! Contact me to find out how!
Send me a text at 234-206-0946 or an email at juliej@ssbperformance.com and schedule a call to see how we can enhance your program’s mental approach!
Julie Jones
Mental Performance Coach
SSB Performance
juliej@ssbperformance.com • 234-206-0946
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