Derek Carr Quotes

Increasingly, it becomes evident that managing a ball club is a psychiatrist's job. In a short series, the mental attitude of the combatants is everything.

I put out one album one week, and I'm already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

Pressure is the biggest single factor in Test cricket.

You go through mental preparation the night before the game and prepare for moments of trauma in a game when it happens.

I'm a successful professional athlete, and whatever I'm going through in my private life would never impact my performance on court.

I think when you're stressing, or worried about your performance, worrying about this and worrying about that, that's when things start to get tough and you're not enjoying it anymore and it becomes a job. Although it is our job to play, still you have to understand that it's a game and you have to enjoy it.

When I was a player, all the pressures I felt created a lot of anxiety in me. I didn't know how to manage that on my own. I think I was missing someone - a manager, no doubt - who could teach me to control my emotions.

Trying your best not to get stressed out, the hardest part is not to get down, not to let the business get to you. I think the business is more mental than it is talent. I think you can have the talent, but if you don't have it up here, I think you can easily just break down.

If I'm mad or showing my frustration, the whole team's gonna be like that, techs, and people are going to go down. So I just try to keep the even keel. That's why I don't get too high or too low. I've been playing like that my whole life. It's just natural for me.

For some reason, the busier I am at the track, the better I tend to race. I think it's because I don't have to deal with all the distractions outside the car that can get me in trouble at times.

Luckily, I'm not one of these players who get nervous.

Being a wrestler, it can get rough in terms of your mindset, just having that mentality embedded in you where you just wanna go, go, go, 100 miles per hour, always redlining your body and never actually taking the time out to let your body recover the right way. As I got older, I started to realized that less sometimes is more.

After I joined the Indian cricket team, MS Dhoni advised me that I need to avoid reading the newspapers and should try to stay away from social media as much as possible.

I've always believed that I performed better under pressure.

All the players are human beings and need more support to bring their confidence up.

I'm not worried about the Masters. I never worry about this tournament or that tournament.

The psychology of sport is so important. When you are standing at the crease, in front of a stadium full of people, it's a pretty intense experience. So you need to have the psychological tools to control your mind and deliver your best performance.

We're not robots, we're not factory built. We have feelings, we have families and we go through tough times that people don't know about. Sometimes your form isn't good and there's a reason for that. Sometimes the team isn't playing well and you can't quite work out why.

Some players like to practise right up to the start of play. But for me, whatever warming up I did was only going to be followed by cooling down again.

When I get down, I can sense my teammates looking at me, and they can get down as well. That was something I had to learn over the years.

I did address my anxiety issues through therapy.

I've seen young guys break down in those situations. They're cruising along, playing great, then their minutes get funky and they fall apart. Some of them never recover.

I think there are always phases in life when things get intense or difficult, whether it's the sheer volume of work or personal circumstances. And I've definitely had tough moments. The way I approach them is just to tell myself that this, too, will pass, and take it one day at a time.

There are times when new players replace injured players in the national squad. Since the new players don't have enough experience and match practice at the international level, they seldom play under a lot of pressure.

Specifically, my time in therapy has changed my life. It was such a relief to have a trained professional listen to my thoughts and help me positively restructure my thinking.