Success Is No Accident
“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do” – Pele
The ‘healthy mind, healthy body’ philosophy dates back to ancient Greek and Chinese civilisations. Socrates believed that the ‘good life’ was one devoted to the pursuit of excellence in all things – physical, intellectual, and ethical – and that an individual’s emotional state could affect their physical state.
The study of sports psychology and how the mind affects a sportsperson’s body has developed in much more recent times but, even without such deep historical roots, it has grown quickly into a recognised and significant part of the science of sports performance coaching. Sports psychology 2 uses cutting-edge technology to demonstrate how developing mental training skills can lead also lead to developing the ’winning edge.’
“Olympism…exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, mind, and will” – Pierre de Coubertin (Olympic Games revivalist)
In its widest sense, sports psychology encompasses all areas of exercise, fitness and leisure, not just competitive sport, but in terms of competition results, what are the factors that lead us to the conclusion that the best man, woman, or team won on the day?
The person holding the trophy is undoubtedly the winner but there’s much more to getting your hands on the prize than simply turning up on the day and hoping you play better than the other competitors. Without appropriate levels of fitness and physical preparation, the chances of playing well are instantly limited but equal emphasis must also be placed upon mental fitness and preparation if a top performance is to be realised.
Here are some frequently heard comments made by sports commentators:
- “He seems to be struggling to find his form today.”
- The winner, “…just wanted it more.”
- “They’re all over the place; there doesn’t seem to be any spirit in the team.”
- “There’s no sparkle; she seems to be just going through the motions.”
- “His focus would appear to be on picking fights with officials rather than on his game.”
- “That missed shot seems to have shaken his confidence; he’s struggled to regain concentration since then.”
Now, here’s a list of proven sport psychology, or mental skill, techniques used by sports psychology 2 to ensure those comments are never true of your own or your team’s performance:
Goal Setting
Setting a course towards the ‘big event’ and progressively working through a series of lesser events, or smaller goals strategically placed in a training schedule, will ensure you achieve your peak performance when it really counts. Sports psychology 2 encourages athletes to set specific, measurable, achievable, recorded, and appropriately time phased goals to keep motivation high in training and in competition.
“The most important key to achieving great success is to decide upon your goal and launch, get started, take action, move” – John Wooden (basketball coach)
Understanding Motivation
By learning what motivates you, you can prepare a training schedule that will keep you going even when the going gets tougher! Understanding motivation is an important part of the goal setting process. Sports psychology 2 promotes the need for each athlete to understand what motivates them as an individual, even if playing as part of a team.
“Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there” – Will Rogers (actor/humorist)
Positive Mental Attitude
Things can, and do, go wrong! An athlete’s ability to remain positive when the pressure is on is key to allowing them to realise their full potential. Sports psychology 2 techniques can’t prevent things from going wrong but they can develop powerful mental skills that make it much easier to remain positive when they do. A positive attitude is a winning attitude.
“It’s not the disability that defines you, it’s how you deal with the challenges the disability presents you with. We have an obligation to the abilities we DO have, not the disability” – Jim Abbott (baseball pitcher)
Understanding ‘Mindset’
In a nutshell, the term ‘Mindset’ describes an individual’s view of who and what they are. A person with a ‘fixed mindset’ holds the belief that they are what they are and nothing will change that. A person with a ‘growth mindset’ holds the belief that change is always possible and that nothing is set in stone. In a sports environment, a fixed mindset leaves no room for learning new skills or improving performance through making changes.
It could also lead to a successful athlete resting on their laurels in the mistaken belief that they don’t need to work at their skills – as they’re a given! Promoting a growth mindset is therefore of vital importance if athletes are to thrive through continued learning and the mastering of new skills. Sports psychology 2 helps athletes to identify their current mindset and paves the way to making positive changes.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” – Aristotle
Developing Team Spirit
‘There’s no I in team,’ or so the saying goes. There’s also a great comedy come-back to that line that goes, ‘But there are four in platitude quoting idiot.’ It goes without saying that an effective team must devote a large proportion of training time to the actual physical practice of perfecting their skills as a unit. However, an effective coach will also recognise the need to utilise the learned skills of goal setting and understanding motivation for each individual player if a winning team is to be formed. True team spirit can only be achieved through open communication and trust. Sports psychology 2 provides practical, effective methods of analysing – and improving – the available lines of communication between players and coaches as well as between players themselves.
“If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, then we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games” – Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant (American college football coach)
Visualisation
Learning how to visualise a positive outcome under any set of circumstances is key to preparing any sportsperson in any sport for the pressures of competition. A vision of exactly what it takes to create a winning performance must be clear in the athlete’s mind’s-eye and there should be no surprises on the day! Negative external factors such as poor weather or noisy crowds will no longer have the power to break concentration or focus when visualisation techniques, along with the ability to use positive self-talk, have been mastered. Sports psychology 2 trains athletes to go beyond ‘seeing’ a winning performance and to also, hear, feel, smell, or even taste it too.
“To give yourself the best possible chance of playing to your potential, you must prepare for every eventuality. That means practice” – Seve Ballesteros (golfer)
Building Confidence
Everyone experiences moments of self-doubt but it’s important that athletes should not experience those moments just as they are about to compete in the most important event of their career so far. Building confidence also builds greater self-belief. Sports psychology 2 not only provides effective methods of developing confidence but also powerful coping mechanisms for those high pressure moments of doubt.
“Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it” – Stan Smith (tennis player)
Improving Focus
Developing an understanding of and practicing the techniques used in the above – goal setting, motivation, positive mental attitude, mindset, team spirit, visualisation, and confidence – will have the added bonus of improving an athlete’s ability to remain focussed and to maintain concentration when it matters most – in competition. We are all creatures of habit, we like our comfortable, familiar training environment. The competition environment often takes an athlete out of their comfort zone and the result can be a loss of focus leading to a poor performance. The mental training skills developed through sports psychology 2 techniques provide athletes with the ability to focus and concentrate only on what’s important and to disregard the rest – the noisy crowds; the 747’s flying over; the loose dog after the police display; the call for the lost child on the loud-haler just as they are about to perform…
“When I go out on the ice, I’m just thinking about my skating. I forget it is a competition” – Katarina Witt (figure skater)
Here’s the question, “Why are some athletes able to rise to the occasion and perform well under pressure when others seem to lose the plot?”
“Luck? Sure. But only after long practice and only with the ability to think under pressure” – Babe Didrikson Zaharias (golfer)
The answer? Explore Sports psychology 2!
Creating a Motivational Environment: What is a Positive Climate?
With sports psychology 2 techniques, coaches involved in any sport at any level can learn how to get the best from themselves and their athletes in every session.
Creating a positive coaching climate is key to allowing athletes to achieve their true potential and it’s also an essential element of ensuring the best version of you is always presented whenever you coach.
“In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently” – Tony Robbins
As people, we are generally creatures of habit so in terms of coaching this tends to mean we stick to what we know best. Unfortunately, a coaching style that motivates one athlete can actually be a style that de-motivates another.
In many cases, coaching a session becomes so routine that the coach is unaware of how his methods – or lack of them – are affecting those he coaches. Sports psychology 2 techniques allow coaches to identify strengths and potential weaknesses in their coaching style which can help change training sessions from one-size-fits-all experiences into much more motivational ones for all concerned.
What motivates an athlete can be complex but it’s essential that the coach learns to understand each athlete and, in the case of team sports, each player as an individual. For some, coaching is simply a case of yelling a lot and when things are not working out, yelling louder but without a positive climate in which to train, athletes or players are unlikely to perform well in the long run.
Positive coaching methods allow athletes to develop and grow. Negative coaching methods rarely achieve anything other than frustration and disappointment. For example, try the following simple sports psychology 2 exercise to understand a little more about coaching climates.
Here are two ways a coach might approach an athlete struggling to perfect a javelin throw:
- “You’re not getting the distance because you’re doing it wrong. How many times have I told you, if you keep throwing like that you’re not going to qualify. Go and do it again but get it right this time…”
- “That run up was much better so now let’s think about where you’re looking as you prepare to throw. Keep that run up and let’s try…”
Which method is likely to achieve the best results? The above are examples of verbal feedback a coach might give during a training session but even without spoken words, a positive or negative climate can be created by the coach’s body language or general attitude. Imagine the de-motivating effect of seeing your coach shake his head in disgust at your performance or of noticing that there’s no real point in actually trying to ask a question right after he’s said, “any questions?” because he always turns his back and walks off!
An effective coach will take time over creating a positive climate in which to nurture the potential of each individual athlete under his guidance. A positive coaching attitude will help to develop athletes with equally positive mental attitudes and positive attitudes lead to positive actions.
Sports psychology 2 techniques allow coaches to build on existing strengths and develop mind training methods that will keep them and their athletes on track to being the best they can be.
To learn more about sports psychology 2 techniques, check out the *NEW* updated Coaching Edge Mental Skills for sport course coming soon! To register interest e-mail support@zonedinperformance.com
The Coaching Edge: Building Your Pillars of Performance
There are four recognised pillars on which all great sporting performances rest. Those pillars, just like structural pillars supporting a building, must share the weight of their load evenly if the whole structure is to stay standing.
Sports psychology 2 encourages everyone, whether a coach or a player, to think of the pillars of performance as columns of ability. If your ability in one area has grown more than in another, you will have an uneven load and your overall performance may begin to show signs of structural stress and start to crumble!
The four pillars of performance are:
Technical
What technical skills are needed in your sport? As an athlete or player, an understanding of the technical requirements of your sport is essential if you are to achieve a top class performance.
The same level of understanding is a must for any coach aiming to guide an athlete towards a winning performance, making it important to ensure your technical ability always matches the requirements of your athletes or players. As their skills and abilities increase, so must yours.
Tactical
Some sports are considered more tactical than others. Team sports such as soccer and rugby are good examples but all sports, even solo events, have tactical elements that can make the difference between a mediocre performance or a winning one.
Players need game tactics in place long before the start of the match and athletes need race tactics in place long before they hear the starter’s gun so as the coach, an ability to discuss and plan the ‘best’ tactics for each new situation is vital.
Sports psychology 2 techniques help coaches to remain flexible and able to get the best out of changing conditions, different competitors, and changing abilities in athletes that can all mean changes of tactics are required.
Physical
It’s fair to say that a professional soccer player is generally fitter than a professional darts player and it’s also fair to say that a professional soccer coach doesn’t need to be as fit as his players to be a good coach but, whatever your sport and whatever role you play, you must be ‘fit for purpose.’
Being fit enough to run a marathon doesn’t mean you’re physically prepared to compete in the triple-jump. Without an understanding of how the human body adapts to physical training and how to apply a progressive programme of fitness training, optimum fitness for each sport is unlikely to be achieved.
Sport psychology 2 highlights the need to develop personalised fitness training plans for every player or athlete based on their own individual abilities.
Psychological
When all other elements are equal – technical, tactical, and physical abilities – what is it that makes one player win over another? The answer is often mental skill; the ability to remain focussed when it really counts or, as many successful players refer to it, the winning ‘edge.’ Mental skills training is therefore as important as physical skills training and all winning coach-athlete partnerships recognise the need to spend time learning and practicing mind training techniques.
As an athlete or player, identifying where your weaknesses are is the first step towards allowing yourself to grow as a performer and this is also the case in terms of developing your abilities as a coach. Sport psychology 2 can help you take that first step. Players get results by playing out of their strengths so coaches too can get results by coaching out of their strengths.
The key to greater success is then to develop your weaker skills, rather than hiding from them, so they match your existing strengths. This will not only correct an imbalance in your supporting pillars but will allow you to build onwards and upwards – the sky becomes the limit!
To learn more about building your mental pillar of performance, check out the *NEW* updated Coaching Edge Mental Skills for sport course coming soon! To register interest e-mail support@zonedinperformance.com
