What is Mental Skills Training for Athletes?
Mental skills training for athletes is the process of improving the skills that help athletes control the aspects of performance that are within their control and minimize the influence of what’s not within their control. This primarily includes the skills to increase emotional intelligence, resilience, focus, confidence, and mental toughness.
To teach the various mental skills to support each of these areas, athletes must commit to an iterative process of assessment, measurement, goal setting, progression planning, and follow-through. This iterative process of mental skills training is uncomfortable by design. Unquestionably, it’s the uncomfortable parts of the training that makes it effective. Therefore, the most important factor in whether mental skills training will be successful is the athlete’s motivation.
Motivation is the energy to act. Sometimes that energy comes from pushing and sometimes that energy comes from pulling. Pushing comes from external sources like parents, coaches, and employers. On the other hand, pulling comes from internal sources like innate passions, purpose, values, and personality.
With respect to overcoming the uncomfortable process of mental skills training, a pulling motivation is far better that a pushing motivation. Pushing motivations often are what convince athletes to start, but it’s the pulling motivations that keep athletes going.
As a result, if an athlete is to complete the mental skills training process, they must learn how to tap into the motivations that pull during that process. Moreover, this type of self-motivation is a product of emotional intelligence, which is one of the primary mental skills they will learn from a proper mental skills coach.
Assessing if an Athlete is Struggling Due to Mental or Physical Skills
If a sports coach does not spend a lot of time working with athletes on their mental skills, it’s difficult for that coach to assess that part of their game. When coaches only focus on the physical side of sports, every problem is a technical or tactical problem. As the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat every problem like it’s a nail. The truth is, however, most athletic struggles aren’t nails.
Just because an athlete makes a technical or tactical mistake repeatedly, doesn’t mean that they are having a technical or tactical problem. The problem could be mental while all the focus is on the physical. As a result, coaches with less experience working with the mental side of sports need an objective way to assess the true source of an athlete’s struggles.
To address this, I recommend assessing four categories of performance that sport psychologist Robert M. Nideffer, PhD suggest in his book Psyched to Win. Nideffer has served as the sports psychologist for several Olympic teams and is renowned for his ability to teach practical mental skills that improve physical performance. Below is a summary of how he does his assessment.
1) Assess Satisfaction
Are you satisfied with your skill level when you are playing well? If not, then you probably don’t have the skill level…You need to develop greater strength, speed, and coordination and maybe alter your technique. The best way to do this is through physical practice.
2) Assess the Pattern of Mistakes
Do mistakes occur randomly, or do they increase in pressure situations? A purely technical problem will occur in a wide variety of situations…You will not be able to see a pattern to the problem. When the problem is psychological, the mistakes will tend to occur more frequently under pressure, and they will have a predictable pattern.
3) Assess Emotional State When Problems Occur
When you are having a problem, how do you feel? If you feel confident and in control of your thoughts and feelings, then the problem may involve nothing more than a simple technical issue. If you feel a sense of panic, if you feel pressured and rushed…or if you feel confused and overloaded…chances are the problem is primarily psychological.
4) Assess if the Problem is Narrow or Broad Reaching
Is the problem affecting only one aspect of your performance or are several things going wrong at the same time? When stress is a factor, the increase in muscle tension interferes with your vision and concentration. Under stressful conditions, you are not likely to be dealing with a single problem. Instead, you will find that everything is going wrong.
The Mental Side of Sports Summed up in 10 Mental Skills
Unquestionably, the mental side of sports is as important, if not more important than the physical side of sports. If you ask any coach what percentage of sports is mental, you almost always get an answer that’s somewhere between 50% and 90% mental. Rarely will you ever hear a coach with a significant amount of experience downplay the importance of an athlete’s mindset.
However, if you ask a coach what mental elements make up this 50% to 90%, you won’t get any agreement. You will get an answer that will focus on anything from motivation and confidence to mental toughness and faith. Often, a coach’s answer to this question will leave you with no more information than you had before and may leave you even more confused.
Well, let this list below clear up any confusion on what makes up the mental side of sports. Mental preparation that focuses on improving these skills make up 99% of what one needs to win the mental battle in sports.
10 Skills to Win the Mental Battle in Sports
- Improving mental toughness by reframing emotions that have a negative impact.
- Conditioning an athlete’s thoughts to instinctively have positive/neutral thoughts and emotions instead of negative thoughts and emotions.
- Building confidence by eliminating worries about unrealistic expectations as well as things out of an athlete’s control and focusing instead on those things within the athlete’s control.
- Managing intensity and anxiety.
- Having a meaningful “why” for everything the athlete does.
- Strategically using feedback to improve how the athlete responds to failure.
- Training the athlete to exhibit self-awareness of their strengths and weaknesses and then teaching them how to use their strengths to overcome weaknesses.
- Establishing a source of self-worth and self-esteem that is task oriented and not ego oriented.
- Consistent use of routines and healthy habits.
- Clarifying goals to direct the athlete’s focus to the most important things and avoid distractions.
The First Skill an Athlete Must Master to Conquer the Mental Side of Sports
Out of the 10 skills above, there is one in particular athletes must excel at before all others. It happens to be #10 on the list, but it’s actually #1 in terms of process. It’s the ability to clarify goals to direct one’s focus.
This ability to consistently focus on a specific mission/vision/goal over a specific period of time is a prerequisite for excellence. To become excellent in the other 9 mental skills, athletes must work on each skill separately and deliberately. It may take a week, a month, or a year. Either way, improving mental skills is an intentional act that starts with a mission/vision/goal.
What’s more, one must have discipline to wake up each day with a deliberate focus on their mission/vision/goal. It’s one thing to write it down. It’s another separate and far more difficult thing to live it, breathe it, and progress towards it.
Without doubt, athletes get a lot of practice setting goals. Yet, they don’t get much practice with the process of clarifying the specific steps they must take to keep focus on their goals and avoid distractions. This process is a mental skill that parents and coaches would be remiss to ignore.
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. College coaches typically have more resources, and therefore can hire a mental skills coach on staff. High school coaches don’t have this option.
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 those 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 emotional intelligence, resilience, focus, confidence, and mental toughness. Round and round they go thinking that progress is being made as they continue to go in circles.
As a mental skills coach, my job is to help these athletes build their mental skills with laser like focus. The mental skills process I use helps athletes 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.
Contact me here to learn more about how I can help a high school athlete you know win with mental skills.