Mental Conditioning For Athletes

Ever experience your coaches loudest most accusatory voice? Maybe even some yelling?

Most athletes have and it usually isn’t any fun. Sport coaches are known for their loud, intimidating voices and immediate verbal corrections of a player’s most recent screw-ups. And, to make athletes feel embarrassed in hopes of changing their play, some coaches scream at their athletes inviting the whole world to see and hear their dissatisfaction with a particular player.

Does this effect their game? You bet it does. Athletes take coaching to heart. Depending on their personality type, some are able to shake off the negativity, correct their game and score, but other athletes hear the accusations and actually get worse.

Recently, I worked with a collegiate softball player here in Springfield, Missouri. Every time she got up to bat, her coach would scream at her if she hit out of bounds. She admitted she often hit way to the right but hated the way coach always pointed it out. The coach would scream at her in dismay, “You hit out to the right again! Stay focused.”

Often, when the girl approached the batter’s box, she would hear her coach scream, “Do it right!” She would try her best, but more often than not, the ball would go out of bounds to the right. Slump, rut, call it what you want - this player hit to the right and began to loose her confidence.

Finally, she came for Mental Conditioning sessions to retrain and regain her self-confidence. She knew she was a good, solid player and had been a peak performer in high school. This player spoke about how she used to frequently feel that she was in the zone when playing and how valuable she was to her varsity team. She had simply lost it in college.

So, what was going on with her?

Literally, she took her coach’s words to heart. Coach’s words went directly into her subconscious and played themselves out perfectly. You see, when a person is in a stressed condition (competitive play) and hear power statements from an authority figure (coach) the ideas/concepts can literally go deep into the subconscious uncensored. What the subconscious hears and acts upon is “You, hit to the right again.” “Stay focused.”  “Do it right.” And what did this player do? She stayed focused, played right, and hit to the right again and again and again. Did she do it consciously - no. She was simply acting unconsciously on the ideas accidentally implanted during practice and games.

We spent time working on mental toughness to rebuild self-confidence. Then, we focused on refocusing the negative programming of the coach’s reinforcement of her as being an out-of-bounds hitter to the right. This gal spent spent all of her time focusing on what she didn’t want - sending the ball out of bounds to the right - that she never thought of what she did want out of her game. We created power visualizations and affirmations that she used outside of practice and just before her games.

In a matter of days, by learning new mental skills, her game changed. She wasn’t hitting out of bounds to the right anymore - she actually started hitting home runs with the ball flying high across the field and out of the park!

By learning the 5 essential skills for achieving a Winner’s Mentality, she used her Mental Conditioning for Athletes training to achieve lasting success in her favorite sport. These skills will not only serve her well in sports, but they carry over into all other aspects of her life and career. It never hurts to be mentally tough.