When the Moment Gets Away From You

Whether you agree with the AFL tribunal decision or not, one thing is clear: Zak Butters' outburst in the heat of the moment was never going to have a positive outcome. Whatever the provocation, whatever the frustration, the moment those words left his mouth, the situation was already beyond his control.

And that's worth talking about. Not to pile on. But because every competitive person, at every level, will recognise that feeling.

Here's something that often gets lost in these conversations: high performance doesn't mean the absence of big emotions. It never has. The best competitors in the world feel things intensely. That investment is frequently part of what makes them exceptional. The frustration, the injustice, the desperate desire to influence an outcome that feels like it's slipping away, these aren't signs that something has gone wrong. They're signs that someone cares deeply about what they're doing.

The question was never whether Butters felt something in that moment. Of course he did. The question is what happens in the space between feeling it and acting on it.

Elite sport is designed to push people to their edges. The physical intensity, the stakes, the scrutiny, all of it creates conditions where the brain's threat-detection system is already running hot. Add a contentious decision, a cheap shot that wasn't called, or a match slipping away, and the emotional brain can move faster than the thinking brain can follow. This isn't a character flaw. It's biology. But biology, left unattended, can cost you.

What also tends to get missed is that visible frustration rarely arrives without a history. There's the immediate trigger, but underneath that is usually something older and more loaded, a fear of losing control, a deep investment in what's at stake, a sense that something unfair is happening and nobody is seeing it. These are profoundly human experiences, and they don't disappear because you're playing in front of 40,000 people. That environment tends to turn up the volume on all of it.

There's a framework I work with called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that asks a different question than most people expect. Rather than how do I stop feeling this way, it asks: what do I want to do with what I'm feeling, given what actually matters to me right now?

That shift is subtle but it changes everything. Trying to suppress or fight the emotion in a high-pressure moment rarely works and often makes outcomes worse. What does work, though, is creating just enough space between the emotion and the action to make a conscious choice. The ability to notice I am furious right now, rather than simply becoming the fury. That gap is where your values get to be put into action for the greater outcome of success.

In practice this is less dramatic than it sounds. Knowing your ‘stories’ prior is always useful to begin with, and in the moment? Well, a slow exhale and silently naming what you're experiencing, because labelling an emotion reduces its intensity neurologically, not just philosophically.

Coming back to one simple question: what's the next useful thing I can do here? Not the perfect thing. Not the thing that fixes everything. Just the next useful thing.

Sometimes moving your body helps, walking away from a contest for a moment, finding a teammate, shifting your physical environment. Escalation has a rhythm, and small interruptions can break it before it peaks.
High performance is not about becoming someone who doesn't feel the pressure. It's about feeling it fully and then asking what's useful next. That's the whole game, really, not the absence of big emotions, but learning to let them move through you without making your decisions for you.

That's not a talent. It's a skill. And like every skill worth having, it takes time and repetition to build.

Dane Barclay is a registered psychologist with 15+ years of experience in sport and performance psychology. This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute clinical advice.