Athletes Who Ignore Mental Skills Will Never Know Their True Potential
Athletes who ignore developing mental skills will always have a ceiling lower than their true potential. You just can’t develop elite level muscle memory, clutch abilities, and purpose without training your brain. The stereotype that an elite athlete can be a “dumb jock” is a thing of the past.
Once an athlete goes beyond competing just in their local community, almost every athlete is about equal physically. All the athletes have private coaches. All the athletes do extra strength and explosiveness training in the offseason. At this point, elite physical skills are the norm, not the exception.
Yet, there are always a few athletes who find an edge and earn elite results beyond all the others doing the same things. When you only use a naked eye comparison, it’s hard to figure out what separates these few outliers from everyone else. The reality is that you will never see what separates the best from the rest by comparing physical traits.
Indeed, elite athletes earn their edge by developing their mental skills as much, if not more than their physical skills.
- They find a mental edge in training by using visualization and video review to develop their strategic muscle memory.
- They use their mental edge in coping with pressure to help them perform in the clutch.
- In addition, they orient their mind around purpose instead of ego, which creates an innate form of self-motivation that always out-wills external forms of motivation head to head.
The bottom line is that mental skills are the only true differentiator among competitive athletes. Therefore, if an athlete wants to know their true potential, they must be diligent in finding ways to grow their mental skills as much or more than physical skills.