High School Coaches Must Prioritize Teaching Two Mental Skills
The average coach spends less than 5% of any given high school practice on developing mental skills. This means that during a typical 2-hour practice, a coach may spend about 6 minutes on mental skills. Even with those 6 minutes, coaches only touch the surface of the mental side of sports. Typically, the most that a coach does is give a motivational speech or lecture 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%. Therefore, coaches must be open to change if they want to close the gap between what they do and what they say about mental skills.
My suggestion is that coaches start by by prioritizing two specific mental skills.
1. Purpose
Purpose is the motivation to achieve a goal with an impact bigger than just you. When an athlete applies purpose as a mental skill it prevents burnout and helps drive the will to maximize their potential. In addition, athletes who use purpose to fuel their motivation also learn how to increase their will to grind as challenges increase.
While setting goals is the first step to having purpose, it’s far from the only step. Good coaches always help their athletes set goals. But using purpose as a mental skill goes beyond setting goals just about winning and getting better. Coaches must also teach athletes that the process to win and get better “is bigger than you and me.” Moreover, coaches must integrate purpose into the fabric of their process by continuously being creative in how they reiterate why an athlete’s family, team, school, community, etc. is sharing in their progress.
2. Progression
A progression is the process of starting where you are currently, and then gradually layering on new abilities to progress towards where you want to be. Progression as a mental skill starts with visualization. Athletes must be able to visualize where they could be if they stick with the process and reverse engineer the steps it will take to get there.
Coaches use progressions all the time. However, they often don’t communicate the why behind the smaller steps, how those smaller steps were identified, and how they fit together in the end. Subsequently, this is a big opportunity that coaches can easily take advantage of without making that much of a change in how they currently do things.
Coaches just need to be more mindful in how they identify the progressions in their coaching approach. Instead of just going through the motions, take more time to show athletes the connections between the steps in the progression. When done consistently over time, using this more methodical coaching method will help athletes develop the ability to visualize progressions on their own.
This will not only lead to an increase in motivation but will also increase the speed in which athletes progress through the steps to learn and improve skills.