Personally I follow the mentality of Ayrton Senna, the Formula One driver and possibly the bravest athlete ever. He said "fear is exciting for me". I think that's how you have to deal with fear, you need to learn how to love it. I just learned how to simply love the feeling of fear before the fights. It's hard to explain but this feeling of knowing that it will go down and being scared but at the same time totally confident is just so exciting. There's nothing like it. I think a lot of people are ashamed of being scared and run away from such feelings but I think you need to just accept them. Every fighter has fear before his fights so it's not something shameful. It's not even so much about physical pain but also about the fear of being outclassed and humiliated. But once you learn how to love it and once you experienced it often enough to be comfortable with such feelings it's a lot easier. Another thing that works well for me is that I have always been quite arrogant and always wanted to be superior in everything, not just in boxing. I admit that it's a bad trait but it works fine in boxing and all kinds of confrontations. For example, when I used to do exams in my university I would always put extra pressure on myself because I wanted to not just only to pass them but to outshine everyone and be the best. When we had to do public presentations I would always come without any paper or any help but would just start speaking things from my memory to make it harder for me and hopefully to impress everyone. The feeling before those tests was basically the same as the feelings before fighting so when I started training boxing I just looked at it as another "exam". If you listened to a recent Q&A with David Haye he says that he loved that feeling of pressure as well, that's why he talked so much trash before his fights. The thing is that the society tells you to be humble and detests people with an arrogant character, but in boxing things don't work this way. If you look at the elite boxers they're all arrogant and slightly narcissistic like Ali, Klitschko, Ward, Haye... So you should encourage these traits in yourself. When I go to the ring I always have that feeling that I'm just a superior human being and too intelligent and that whatever the opponent brings to the table I'm going to be able to adapt and counter (obviously when I fight my level of opposition, I wouldn't feel this way against Usyk or Kovalev, I'm not delusional). I know that people absolutely hate this kind of character in people but I'm just honest about myself and also with this kind of mentality you're not going to fold mentally before the fight starts like a lot of people do. If you want to win you need to really believe that you're something special and unique, you need to really convince yourself. Obviously you're going to get humbled once in a while, but if you aim high you're going to get as high as possible. My advice would be to really try to convince yourself rationally why you're just a superior fighter and a superior man. Think about how much you've trained or how strong your character is or how good your technique is. If you have doubts then work harder and try to remove weaknesses until you have those doubts no more. Ask yourself if you really feel superior and if you really think that you're better than your opponent, ask yourself this several times a day. Once you'll have no doubt that the answer is yes that's when you will have a mental edge, at least going into the fight.
"Fear is part of people's life. Some of them don't know how to face it, others — where I include myself — learn coexisting with it or face it, not as a negative thing, but like a autoprotection sensation." - Ayrton Senna, the GOAT This content is protected