Mental Game Coaching is that
segment of sports psychology that concentrates specifically on helping athletes break through mental barriers that are keeping them from performing up to their peak potential. By focusing on mental skills needed to be successful in any sporting competition, mental game coaching seeks to achieve overall goal of performance improvement.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.
6. To instill a healthy belief system and identify irrational thoughts. One of areas I pride myself on is helping athlete identify ineffective beliefs and attitudes such as comfort zones and negative self-labels that hold them back from performing well. These core unhealthy beliefs must be identified and replaced with a new way of thinking. Unhealthy or irrational beliefs will keep you stuck no matter how much you practice or hard you try.
