Three Limiting Beliefs That Stop Athletes from Having the Right Mindset
The right mindset for an athlete is not something you can sum up in one simple maxim. While there are a handful of research studies that show how thinking one way over another leads to better academic, social, or athletic outcomes, there are currently none that show the impact of the intersection of these different mindsets.
As a result, when it comes to defining what’s the right mindset for an athlete, I must rely on the combination of research and anecdotal evidence. Through my experience as a youth, high school, and college athlete as well as a parent and coach of athletes, I define the right mindset as an intersection of the following mindset orientations:
- Tasks and not an ego mindset.
- Growth and not a fixed mindset.
- Building strengths and not a fixing weaknesses mindset.
- Challenge and not a threat mindset.
- Strategic and not an impulsive mindset.
Teaching athletes to adopt each of these mindsets is not something that takes one day, one week, or even one month. For some athletes it may take their entire athletic career. Moreover, changing an athlete’s mindset can be even harder when they hold limiting beliefs.
Changing Limiting Beliefs to Get Athlete’s to the Right Mindset
There are three limiting beliefs in particular that I see as the culprit for stopping many athletes from having the right mindset.
- Great athletes have innate or natural abilities they are born with.
- Luck is what leads to elite success.
- To have the same success as another athlete you must reverse engineer what they did and follow the same exact steps.
These three limiting beliefs are an indictment on hard work. They devalue strategically focused effort and make a farce out of the daily grind required for sustained success. In addition, they orient an athlete’s mind to focus on things they don’t control.
Limiting beliefs like these are largely unconscious. They are opinions people adopt over time as facts. However, the fact is that these opinions are just mental barriers preventing them from seeing the facts. Sometimes limiting beliefs are so deeply held that an athlete may need therapy to break them. Other times, all an athlete needs is consistent mental skills training to change their locus of control to be more internal.
Either way, limiting beliefs such as these can’t go unchecked. Once a parent or coach recognizes them in an athlete’s thought pattern, they must nip it in the bud as soon as possible.
Contact me here to discuss this more and develop a plan to work with an athlete in your life.