Why High School Athletes Need a Mental Skills Coach
High school is a defining phase in an athlete’s life. While not all high school athletes are destined to play in college, all high school athletes can benefit from using sports as a classroom for building the mental skills they will need for success in life.
Like all classrooms, the classroom of sports is only as good as the teacher, and teachers are only as good as their knowledge base. While high school coaches do many things good, teaching mental skills is not one of them.
My anecdotal research finds that high school coaches spend less than 5% of any given 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.
When it comes to mental skills, high school coaches are at their best when they only need to provide a map. It’s up to the athletes to come to practice with a compass to get the most out of their coach’s map. For example, the coach can tell an athlete they need more confidence, but it’s up to the athlete to figure out how to get more confident.
A Mental Skills Coach Will Equip an Athlete with a Compass
This map and compass metaphor is why high school athletes need a separate mental skills coach to get the most of their performance and maximize their potential.
Imagine that you’re lost in a forest without a compass. Imagine a forest so vast and thick that you can’t even see above the branches to the sun or moon. How will you find your way? The fact is, research shows that no matter how hard you try you will end up walking in circles.
The results, published today in the journal Current Biology, showed that no matter how hard people tried to walk in a straight line, they often ended up going in circles without ever realizing that they were crossing their own paths.
This is what most high school athletes do as they try to improve their mental skills. Skills like confidence, mental toughness, self-awareness, and goal setting. Round and round they go thinking that progress is being made as they continue to go in circles.
My Approach to Teaching High School Athletes Mental Skills
As a mental skills coach, my job is to help athletes build their mental skills with laser like focus. The mental skills I teach help them achieve two primary objectives:
- See who they can become when they are at their absolute best.
- Support them in the process of becoming that version of themselves.
I support this process by helping high school athletes build mental skills in 1 or more of 10 mental focus areas, based on their needs:
- Improving mental toughness by reframing emotions that have a negative impact to emotions that have a positive impact.
- Conditioning them to instinctively have positive/neutral thoughts and emotions instead of negative thoughts and emotions.
- Building confidence by eliminating worries about unrealistic expectations and directing focus on high but attainable expectations.
- Identifying and having a process to get to their optimal level of intensity.
- Having a meaningful “why” for everything they do.
- Strategically using both real-time and post competition feedback to improve their training and practice habits.
- Exhibiting self-awareness of their strengths and weaknesses and then utilizing the strengths to overcome the weaknesses.
- Establishing a source of self-worth and self-esteem that is task oriented and not ego oriented.
- Consistent use of routines.
- Clarifying goals to direct focus on the most important things and avoid distractions.
Contact me here to learn more about how I can help a high school athlete you know win with mental skills.