We have all heard that success is 20% physical and 80 % mental. This should give you an idea how of important sports psychology is. An athlete’s mental health is paramount in succeeding in athletic performance. Just think about it, anything you do is always easier when you are calm and have mental and emotional control.
So, incorporating the mental preparation before, during and after your physical training will take you further and faster in your athletic progression. For this article I will use the term Mind Coach interchangeably with Sports Psychologist as I feel it’s a good description.
Finding A Mind Coach
Finding a sports psychologist (or mind coach) that suit you is what could take you from average to one of the more elite athletes.
Your sports psychologist will work with you, highlighting what is and isn’t working for you.
For example: - Positive Self talk – What you consider to be positive self-talk could be sabotaging your goals. If you are constantly telling yourself, you are perfect and up talking your skills, you are placing a barrier on pushing yourself further. Or using affirmations you don’t truly believe also very damaging.
If you are telling yourself you are the next Katie Taylor or Rory McIlroy but in your heart you don’t feel any truth in it. Saying it over and over is only going to have you feeling and performing poorly. What should be helping you can be causing you problems.
Positive self-talk is what achieves your mental health and pushes your sports performance. This is very personal to you. Your Mind Coach will identify how your mind process thought and how to activate and stimulate positive self-talk and self-motivation. It can be tough work, just like any training.
A Sports Psychologist’s Role
A sports psychologist’s role is to help you create a mindset that will lead you to achieve your optimal performance without falter. It's like having your personal mind coach, who teaches you how to use your thoughts to direct your actions to smash all the goals you have set. They will also help you set those goals in a way that feeds your motivation.
All elite athletes have their mindset and their psychological skills set at peak performance.
Your sports psychologist works is to find and teach you what psychological factors you can use to suman the mindset required. Your physical training programme you will require a variety of psychological skill sets. For example, if you need to rest and recover you need a different mindset than if you are about to compete or play and different again if you are planning or strategising.
This control will enhance your sports training, achieving your ultimate physical fitness and finetune the skills required for your sports field.
Goal Setting
This may seem difficult for some and obvious to others. However, it’s important to know having a poor goal setting strategy can lead to negative mindset, low energy and/or motivation, reduced performance and even injury.
As I mentioned earlier, your mind coach or sports psychologist will help you use your goals to incrementally push your capacity at the rate and level that works towards getting you to optimal athletic performance.
Top 5 tips.
1. Know where you are starting from. Don’t be over or under confident about your current ability.
2. Set time points. You need deadlines to work towards.
3. Make long term goal lists, The next 6months, 12 months and 2 or 5 years.
4. Set short term goals, keep them achievable and realistic.
5. Make sure your short-term goals are feeding towards your long-term goals.
Understanding your fundamental WHY will lead to your goal mapping strategy. Reading your mental thought process, congruencies and current expectations will all be the building blocks to setting out achievable goals leading to ultimate success.
This is done by hearing, seeing and understanding your body language, choice of words, your tone. All the ways you communicate to yourself and others.
How does your Psychology or Mindset Change Your Sports Performance?
When new psychological skills are stimulated a change in the neurology occurs. This creates a hormonal or chemical change in the brain and the body. A positive change like this can help create laser focus of the mind and a calm physical and emotional control.
For now, let’s say your psychology is your mindset. Coaching your mindset involves the studying and analysing how the mind processes the input or information it receives. Then the programme or system you use to decide on your action in response to this information.
Often the human behaviour is reaction instead of action. This is where the athlete’s mental health and mental preparation will develop a calm state and emotional control to choose your response/action, rather than an uncontrolled reaction.
When your body and mind are synchronised like this, game strategies, observation and power, flow effortlessly, creating the zone required for ultimate performance.
Examining How Psychology Effects Sports Performance
When an athlete’s mental health is challenged, they are usually not reaching their optimal performance. This can lead to a cycle, feeling low, effecting their ability, poor ability leads to feeling like a failure.
A Sports Mindset Coach will work with your neurology to help you achieve your optimal performance. Your mind coach will develop your current skills, rebuilding the synapsis (brain signals) to create better thinking or mindset to achieve your ultimate goal, leading to your success.
Let’s look at how your mindset or psychology has a neurological and physiological effect on your body. In other words, how the way you think, changes your capability, focus and empowerment.
Negative Changes
Without getting too technical or going into a lot of detail, here is a brief explanation. When your mood gets low, it’s like anxiety or stress. The body secretes hormones or chemicals to various organs.
This chemical change, influence the body’s organs and muscle to either over act or under act, depending on the organ.
For one, the change from normal function to altered activity is very depleting. It uses up valuable energy resources that could and should be used for training and sports performance.
These changes also, raise blood sugar levels, increase heart rate, put strain on liver and kidneys and generally over tax your organs which can result in higher levels of toxic waste substances flowing through and being stored in your body. All this results in you feeling agitated, having poor ability to sleep, not digesting your food properly, depleted immune system and unnecessary muscle tension.
Not what your want, this effects normal human behaviour, so of course its something to avoid. Especially for an athlete seeking to achieve optimal performance.
Positive Changes
Mental preparation can act like a sports medicine. A sports psychologist’s work is to help you understand, recognise, and choose the right tools for you to affect the state or mental focus or sports performance you require at that time.
Having the energy, (that isn’t wasted on anxiety or stress), to channel into fine tuning your relevant sports skill, human relationships and team building, is a resource that could help take you to the next level.
Also being able to bring your mind and body to a calm state gives you the control how your body reacts, both physically and physiologically.
Results
This means, you actually get to control how your nervous systems make changes in your body. Like reducing or raising your heart rate or firing up hormonal changes that increase muscle strength. Its very empowering.
All the while you can remain in a calm state of mind choosing your actions. Not reacting to external or environmental activities that your often trigger a reaction from you.
Think about it, imagen what it would look like or feel like to have that level of control.
Why hire a Sports Psychologist or Sports Mind Coach?
Most professional athletes will have a mind coach or sports psychologist working with them. And for many, who may feel that they are not yet an elite athlete, this can feel like an extravagant step. They can’t justify investing in this aspect of their training.
The question you need to ask is where do you want to go in your athletic career? If you want to get to the top of your game, then its best to get the advice and coaching from the professional.
When your boiler breaks or your car breaks down, you call the professionals to fix it.
When your body gets injured, you see your doctor or your physiotherapist to help heal the injury and maintain muscle and joint function.
Now is the Time
Your mind is as important if not more so. It controls your motivation, your stamina, goal setting, your performance, your game plan etc.
Notice when you are in a better psychological mindset everything is easier. You have a sharper mind, planning is easier, you are in the flow. Your stamina is magnified immensely. You communicate with people much more effectively. Making it easier to relate to team members, collages, coaches, trainers and most importantly yourself.
As I mentioned earlier, your training is 80% mental 20% physical. So, do you think the 80% should get professional training to maximise your potential?
Improving your Psychological Skills.
When you coach/therapist works with you, an understanding of your mental processing is established. Once this is done, a picture of what is working for you and what is working against you is highlighted.
A good mental planning strategy is then put in place. The key to this is using the positive stimulus and reframing the negative sabotage. Working towards building your motivation, stamina and self-belief.
Without A Mind Coach
Let’s be honest, we all get bogged down sometimes. It’s difficult, if not impossible to always see the positive, nor is it realistic. Nobody is perfect, despite what some people want you to believe on social media.
Most of our negative thoughts are fear based, but it can be difficult to identify why they reside in our heads. Or how to get them out. What negative thoughts can you see floating around in your head?
Learning how to change the colour/filter on these thought images. Or store them in a different part of our mind, even put a new frame on that picture that replays over in our head, can change how we see or feel about them.
This can sound over simplified. But until you find a professional who can work with you on your level, you may never understand how invaluable it is. Someone who can show you a new psychological skill set that works with your thought process.
Building a foundation for personal empowerment which is congruent with your current capability and a forward planed programme to direct you to your optimal sports performance. This is the result of having the right mindset or psychological skills.
Mental Toughness
This is an expression often used to describe what is needed to get athletes through the tough training, knock backs and naysayers.
However, when your mindset is in the right place your mental ease and clarity will win every time.
When you understand where you are in your athletic career, then you know where you came from and where you are going. This means everything is in the right place. Each step is planned and executed with confidence and will lead directly to the next step. The noise outside stays outside, it doesn’t de-rail you.
If your mindset, physiology and physical body are congruent you are strong, calm and in control. This is a much better position to be in than firefighting all around you.
Overcoming Obstacles or Blocks
There are many perceived blocks or obstacles that can hold you back. Likewise, there are many tools to overcome them. Your sports psychologist or therapist/mind coach have, the tool kit to help you. They give you the one you need and show you how to use it, so you keep building you own mental health tool kit.
Having the ability to stimulate your stamina and motivation develops your mental flexibility. So, what once presented itself as an obstacle, is now an exciting challenge. Problem solving is part of your new skill set. Developing your mental health to be stronger and more flexible, just like your body.
Positive Self Talk
A quick way to start this is to change negative statements to questions. EG.
Everyone is against me, they are always criticising me. | 1. How can I use this criticism to my advantage? 2. Are there points in there that I could use as advice to make some changes? |
What if I make a mistake and let the team down | What changes can I make to contribute and fulfil my role as part of the team?
|
I’m not good enough | What 5 steps can I make to make small constant improvement? |
While this may seem simple, it doesn’t mean its easy. Like any skill you want to develop it requires training and practice. That’s where you therapist/mind coach comes in.
It’s important to have someone who is trained to see how you think, how you communicate to yourself and/or your teammates. Receiving direction in your language, the way you think, is a fast-track way to beginning your new psychological skills.
Likewise, when something you have planned or trained for takes another direction, you will need to bend, stretch, problem solve, be resilient and seek new strategies. You’re an athlete all these characteristics are naturally within you. Developing your mental flexibility and strength are as important as your physical development.
Team Building or Flying Solo
Coaching the mindset of an athlete plays a crucial role in their performance. Team building is important for all athletes, these who play on a pitch or court as part of a team need to ensure they have the correct communication skills both on and off the game.
Even if you are a lone athlete, you will also have a team supporting you. Your physio, coach, manager etc. And for both types of athletes, you will always have media telling you what you did wrong or right.
Team building starts with you, you can add to your team, encourage them and problem solve. Or you can complain, criticise and be part of the problem. Practising the encouragement and problem solving in your own head is a great place to start. And it really helps if you have professional help to guide you.
Once an understand of your mental thought process is established, we can offer you some answers. Techniques and tools are used to restructure the minds programme or playlist of dealing with perceived obstacles or problems. Leading to a better mental strategies and structures, which strengthens your performance and training all round.
Creating the right mindset, integrates the physical and phycological combination required to accomplish top achievement in your sport discipline.
Conclusion
A Sports Mindset Coach can mean the difference between success and failure. The skill of both knowing how your mind works and understanding how to teach you the tools to re-programme you’re thinking so you can overcome setbacks.
A mindset coach can help you get in the zone or the flow on demand. Allowing you channel your energy and strength on the specific action you need to take to achieve each task required to reach success.
Exploring and learning how your mind works leads to new techniques to overcome challenges, increase focus, and turn on that fine-tuned instinct to achieve each goal.
While obtaining optimal physical and mental health play a key role in achieving peak performance, having the right mindset to get you there is where you need to start.
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