Sports Psychology is about improving your attitude and mental game skills to help you perform your best by identifying limiting beliefs and embracing a healthier philosophy about your sport. Below is a list of top ten ways that you can benefit from sports psychology:

1. Improve focus and deal with distractions. Many athletes have ability to concentrate, but often their focus is displaced on wrong areas such as when a batter thinks “I need to get a hit” while in batter’s box, which is a result-oriented focus. Much of my instruction on focus deals with helping athlete to stay focused on present moment and let go of results.

2. Grow confidence in athletes who have doubts. Doubt is opposite of confidence. If you maintain many doubts prior to or during your performance, this indicates low self-confidence or at least you are sabotaging what confidence you had at start of competition. Confidence is what I call a core mental game skill because of its importance and relationship to other mental skills.

3. Develop coping skills to deal with setbacks and errors. Emotional control is a prerequisite to getting into zone. Athletes with very high and strict expectations, have trouble dealing with minor errors that are a natural part of sports. It’s important to address these expectations and also help athletes stay composed under pressure and when they commit errors or become frustrated.

4. Find right zone of intensity for your sport. I use intensity in a broad sense to identify level of arousal or mental activation that is necessary for each person to perform his or her best. This will vary from person to person and from sport to sport. Feeling “up” and positively charged is critical, but not getting overly excited is also important. You have to tread a fine line between being excited to complete, but not getting over-excited.

5. Help teams develop communication skills and cohesion. A major part of sports psychology and mental training is helping teams improve cohesion and communication. The more a team works as a unit, better results for all involved.

Youth sports are huge in today’s society. Coaches and parents have a tremendous impact on how children will engage in sports. I get several emails a month from concerned sports parents asking me how they should help their child superstar win at and enjoy sports. When working with young athletes, I often work with parents themselves so parents can reinforce concepts I teach to athletes in our mental game coaching sessions. Below are eight simple guidelines for sports parents to adopt with youth athletes.

8 Simple Guidelines for Sports Parents:

1.Sports should be fun for kids. Treat sport as a game—It’s not a business for kids. With all money in professional sports today, it is hard for parents to understand that it’s just good fun to young athletes. The primary goal should be to have fun and enjoy healthy competition.

2.Your own agenda is not your child’s. Young athletes compete in sports for many reasons. They enjoy competition, like social aspect, engage with being part of a team, and enjoy challenge of setting goals. You might have a different agenda than your child and you need to recognize that racing is your child’s sport, not yours.