The Easiest Method for Coaches to Add Mental Skills Training into Practice
It’s a fact that most coaches spend less than 5% of any given youth or high school practice on developing mental skills. This means that during a typical 2 hour practice, a coach may spend about 6 minutes tops on mental skills. Even with that 6 minutes, it’s still likely only touching the surface with a motivational speech or a verbal lashing on focus and goals.
However, if you ask any coach what percentage of sports is mental, you almost always get an answer that it’s somewhere between 50% and 90%. So, what gives? Why is there such a disconnect?
Most coaches will tell you they just don’t have enough time to set aside for the mental side of the game. Their sense of urgency is 100% on the need to drill the basics, teach their system, and conditioning. This is understandable. Coaching is the ultimate “full-circle” profession in that how you were coached has a big impact on how you coach. As a result, if a coach’s coach didn’t coach them up on the mental side of sports, it’s unlikely that coach will coach mental skills.
Start with the Most Basic Mental Skill
With that said, my suggestion to coaches who recognize this deficiency and want to do something about it is to start with the most basic mental skill of them all, self-awareness. What’s more, the easiest way to help athletes with their self-awareness is by having small group discussions with like-minded and similarly skilled team members.
The idea is to spend 10 or so minutes either at the beginning or end of practice to have athletes talk about how they perform amongst a few of their teammates in which they share commonalities with. This should start as a positive experience to build trust. Therefore, I recommend starting this after a successful event. The focus should be on getting the athletes to talk about their thoughts and emotions before, during, and after the event. What were possible causes for those thoughts and emotions, and how those emotions impacted performance during preparation and while competing.
After a coach does this a few times informally, next the coach could ask athletes to bring journals to take notes of what they talk about during the small group discussions. As trust builds, incorporating these discussions after poor performances would then be the final step.
Ultimately, this is the simplest pathway for a coach to increase their team’s self-awareness. In addition, as self-awareness increases it gets easier to develop all other mental skills. This only takes roughly 10 minutes a few times a week. There is no excuse for coaches not to add this process or one that’s similar to their tool kit.