Mind of an athlete : Part 2

Part 1 : What does the inside of an untrained mind look like?

Part 2 : How do athletes train their minds to better perform under pressure?

Part 3 : How different would our days be if we prepared our mind for life the same way athletes prepare for performance?

When you think of untrained minds, what do you think about?
Probably high stress, little control over emotions, impulsivity, hyper-alertness, fear.
None of these are exactly optimal during sports performance, whether you’re in the middle of an important game or preparing for a high-stakes moment.

What separates high-level athletes isn’t the absence of pressure.
It’s their relationship to it. High level athletes don’t train their minds so they never feel nervous.
They train their minds so that nerves don’t control the outcome.

But how do you do this? How can you become mentally tough as an athlete? These are 6 mental skills that help achieve mental toughness: self-awareness, self-confidence, focus, resilience, calming nerves and self-management.

Self-awareness : Performance identity comes first, it’s your foundation. You can’t work on your mental game without knowing what to work on. What exactly is holding you back ? Everyone is different so you need to clarify your own priorities, so you need to be open and honest with yourself.

Self-confidence : Again part of your performance identity. Athletic confidence comes from repetition, mastering fundamentals. It is built.

Focus : Fear of failure, the scoreboard, the crowd, all part of shifting your focus. So when these things are distracting you, you need to learn how to drift back your focus where it needs to go.

Resilience : Embrace the challenges, accept the mistakes and shift forward. How quickly can you reset after making a mistake?

Calming nerves : Regulating your nerves is super important during a performance. How? Some people use controlled breathing, pre-performance routines or visualization.

Self-management : Why put this one at the end? Because it’s the most important skill. Self-management is not about what you do right before or during a performance, it’s about what you do outside of it. Your sleep, your nutrition, your recovery, how you respond to setbacks. This one is a long term mental discipline.

The brain learns through exposure. There is no magic number of repetitions that is required to become skillful and instinctive. This number varies with each athlete. So how to do build a confidence mindset, and how do you begin to trust your own skills? Repetition. Exposing yourself to good outcomes. Practicing your skills, over and over again. Familiarity reduces hesitation. Every successful repetition becomes data in your brain : “I’ve done this before.”
“I can do this again.”

Take pleasure in your good outcomes. Athletes are often taught to focus on their mistakes so they don’t repeat them, which is sometimes useful. But it’s important to remember what went well. We are taught everywhere to revisit and think about our mistakes. Our good outcomes are passed over and taken for granted. Imagine what you are teaching your brain to remember? You’re training it to remember failure. If you acknowledge good execution, effort, or improvement, you’re giving your brain evidence of success.

The more your mind remembers success, the easier it gets to show up in stressful and high pressure situations.