Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Yesterday I was moved to write about former professional football player Marcus Smith and the story of his attempted suicide. The point parents must take away from stories like Smith’s is how critical it is to teach athletes mental skills. Today the mental skill I want to focus on deals with teaching athletes how to cope with pressure.

Pressure in sports can come from anywhere and for any reason. It’s a feeling one can trigger as the result of something minor and avoid when something major happens. There is no rhyme or reason to it, as each individual athlete is different. However, the way you deal with pressure is basically the same.

The mental skill I suggest you start with to teach athletes how to cope with pressure regardless of the situation is reframing. Reframing is a mental skill that helps athletes change their perception of a situation. When an athlete changes their perception of a situation, they can change their emotions. Correspondingly, the ultimate goal of reframing is to eliminate emotions that have a negative impact.

How to use Reframing to Cope with Pressure

One famous example of using reframing to cope with pressure comes from Billie Jean King.  King is one of the best tennis players in history, and she is in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her primary competitive years were in the 1960s and 70s where she won 12 Grand Slam titles. Needless to say, King was very good at coping with pressure. In her 2008 book King explains to readers exactly how she did it using reframing. She states:

Pressure is a privilege—it only comes to those who earn it.

So, instead of viewing pressure through the lens of negativity, King views pressure using a more neutral point of view. Pressure is something that one earns, and therefore it is something to wear like a badge of honor. An athlete with this view of pressure will have far more helpful emotions than emotions that will hurt.

5 Ways to Help Athletes Use Reframing to Cope with Pressure

This simple process of reframing pressure from a negative into something one can be proud of as King does did wonders for her but won’t necessarily work for other athletes. Reframing must be put in context with an athlete’s current state of thinking. An athlete can view pressure as a privilege and still be in a state of panic because they think they are in a must win situation for example. Moreover, reframing is not something most athletes can do alone using one simple quote.

Athletes often trap themselves in thought loops and keep replaying the same thoughts over and over. Consequently, it’s important for parents and coaches to teach athletes to communicate with someone they trust when having negative thoughts. This outside person typically provides the catalyst to break a negative thought loop and reframe it with something more neutral. If you happen to be this person an athlete trust, I suggest you consider these five ways to reframe:

1. Goals from an outcome focus to a process focus.
2. Urgency from a short term mindset into a long term mindset.
3. Comparisons from an ego focus to a tasks focus.
4. Progress from focusing on the end state to focusing on a progression.
5. Growth from fixing weaknesses to building strengths.