Three More Behaviors of Confident Athletes

1. Confident athletes focus on the process. If you focus on the process, the rest will take care of itself. Too often athletes focus on the outcome, like winning the tournament or the gold medal. That’s all fine and good to want to achieve these outcomes, but confident athletes know they must let go of expectations and focus on the process. The process allows you to stay in the moment and attend to all the important cues necessary for successful execution. Confident athletes know their best performances are when they are focused on the moment. It starts with paying attention to what is in front of you, being where your feet are, and responding to the demands of the moment. Process, process, process!
2. Confident athletes control the controllables. Everyone has a finite amount of mental energy. You must decide how best to use and direct that energy. Focusing on things beyond your control (e.g., the weather, your competitors, the judges, the referee, and what other people will say) wastes precious energy. There is nothing you can do about any of those situations. But you can control your preparation, attitude, effort, confidence, and focus. Direct your energy toward things you can control.  Dominate the controllables.
3. Confident athletes have patience. Impatience may rear its ugly head when you are not playing or performing up to your expectations, when skills are taking too long to develop, or when you don’t reach the outcome you desire. Peyton Manning took almost a decade to make it to the Super Bowl. In his rookie season, his team went 3-13, but that didn’t deter him; he stayed in the fight. Confident athletes commit to the long-haul, knowing if they stick with it and push forward they will find ways to work through the adversity. Patience is a valued virtue for confident athletes.

In our third and final part of this series, we’ll talk about a few more ways confident athletes rise above the pack.

The post How Confident Athletes Set Themselves Apart: Part II first appeared on Inner Edge Performance.

Ninety percent of the game is half mental.

I love the truth of Berra’s “yogi-ism” even if his math is off.  Many elite athletes and coaches agree that the percentage of their performance that is mental is well over 50% and in some sports like golf, tennis and figure skating it can be as much as 80 to 90%. The mental game oftentimes becomes the distinguishing factor with elite athletes or teams when physical skills are fairly evenly matched.

Given this popular belief, you would think mental skills training would be a priority within the athletic community.  But here in lies the paradox. If we agree the mind is important for peak performance then why aren’t we more committed, as a sports community, to developing these skills with our young athletes along with the physical skills?

More often than not athletes are introduced to mental skills when there is already a problem. The timing is unfortunate. Imagine trying to teach someone to swim when they are drowning.

Some reasons for this oversight are:

• perceived lack of time
• knowledge gap, and
• distrust of the unknown.

Coaches are keenly aware of the constraints of time.  Finding time to introduce another facet of training is challenging. The knowledge gap speaks to the degree coaches feel comfortable teaching the mental skills and if they’re unfamiliar with the benefits of this training, they are less likely to trust the process. Finally, coaches may feel uncomfortable inviting an outsider to work with their athletes, unsure of the message or process and what effect it will have on their athletes.

What is Mental Skills Training?

Mental skills training, most agree is important but many may not understand what mental skills training is all about. 

When I discuss mental skills training, I am talking about developing skills that address the mental obstacles athletes face whether in practice, competition or performance that keep them from reaching their potential. For some their obstacles may be lack of confidence, distractions, or difficulty dealing with adversity.  Still others may struggle with fear of failure, perfectionism, or rebounding after mistakes. Mental skills also encompass learning how to focus on the process, set goals, how to practice or design pre-performance routines and more.  

As coaches we want to make sure we have prepared our athletes completely.  Leaving mental skills to chance is risky business.  Their success is our success, and their failure is our failure, we win and lose together.  Let’s face it, the mind is already impacting their performance so it becomes a question of “how”.  Is it serving the athlete well or hindering the athlete?  Some athletes have found ways to navigate their mental obstacles on their own and may not even realize they are using certain skills.  But for those who don’t figure it out, we need to be systematic just like we would be with our physical skills.

What can we do to help increase the odds of optimal performance beyond physical, technical and tactical training?  How can we help our athletes become mentally strong?

It starts with recognizing the value of the mental game and finding ways to help our athletes develop these skills. That’s what we’ll discuss in Part 2.    

Related Articles:

3 Things All Confident Athletes Do

The post Mental Skills Paradox: Part 1 first appeared on Inner Edge Performance.

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”

Arthur Ashe

Many athletes I work with cite lack of confidence as a common mental challenge. As a coach, I believe confidence is a cornerstone for mental toughness. While wishing for a magic potion to deliver mega-doses of confidence is tempting, I respect the lessons earned through struggle and adversity too much to circumvent their gifts. Confidence is something to be nurtured and developed over time.

The question is, “How can we help our athletes develop confidence?”

As coaches/teachers, we are continuously given opportunities to plant seeds for confidence to grow. I want to be proactive with confidence and take steps to develop it as opposed to waiting for it to come.

To start, let’s define confidence. Confidence is how strongly you believe in your ability to execute a particular skill or perform a task.

The Confidence Resume

One of the first steps you can take is to help your athlete identify all their sources of confidence. In a sports journal, have them list all the strengths they have that go into building their confidence. Consider their strengths in the following areas:

1. Sport-specific skills
2. Choreography, musicality, expression, if applicable in your sport
3. Past and current accomplishments in sports
4. Work Ethic
5. Practice and training plans
6. Coaching staff and support team
7. Mental game strengths

Some strengths you might find on the list are:

• being hardworking
• having a positive attitude
• being technically and physically prepared
• knowing how to work through adversity
• being physically fit
• having a healthy diet
• having a supportive team
• knowing how to bounce back after mistakes.

Encourage your athlete to be as comprehensive and as detailed as possible in listing their strengths.

After they are finished, their list of strengths will become their confidence resume or deposits in their confidence bank, as I like to call it.

Make It Tangible

When your athlete accomplishes something through their hard work, they can make a deposit or add it to their list. Adding to the list or bank regularly is important.

A tangible and interactive idea for young athletes is to award paper coins, or stickers that look like coins, when a confidence-building action occurs. You can identify the accomplishment by writing it on the coin, or even better, give the athlete the coin and have them write their accomplishment, thus fostering ownership and awareness of their success.

Reviewing their confidence resume or all the coins they have earned is an important part of being proactive with their confidence.

“Ca-ching” Moments

As coaches, we can help our athletes identify those “ca-ching” moments and help them build their confidence. We have all heard, “Oh I’m too tired to work out.” But if they find a way to have a productive workout, then that’s a coin for their bank.

• Getting up after a fall early in a program and then skating cleanly is an awesome recovery but also a confidence-building moment. “Ca-ching!”
• Passing a test after having failed in a previous attempt, shows your athlete that the present will not be derailed by the past. “Ca-ching!”

Look and you shall find. Help make the connections for your athletes and you will be teaching them how to view their sport experiences, both positive and negative, as building blocks for future success. As coaches, we have to find what works best for our students, and making learning fun and creative is part of our skill set.

A final note about the sources of confidence:

Coaches: it’s important to focus and list those factors the athletes’ have within their control.

For example, basing their confidence on approval from others, or a certain panel of judges is outside of their control. To help elucidate sources of control you can have them draw a circle:

1. Write everything within their control inside the circle, and
2. Write things outside their control outside the circle.

Find fun and meaningful ways to make the confidence connection.

In closing I will leave you with something to ponder:
What do you do to develop your own confidence as a coach?

Coach Gianine
Inner Edge Performance Coach

The post The Importance of a Confidence Resume and How to Build One first appeared on Inner Edge Performance.

In Cindra Kamphoff’s book, Beyond Grit, she asks for the “why” powering the goal.  This “why” is the engine that will move you forward and close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

“Why” we want to achieve our goals is a really important part of the equation.  As a coach it is important for me to know my athlete’s motivation.  As a coach I am here to serve and unless I know what is important and my athletes’  ” why” I may miss the opportunity to help them reach their goals.

A Winding Road

 We know the road to success is not a straight line.  There will be days, weeks or even months when the road is hard and the rewards seems distant. You might take two steps backwards before you move forward.  An injury may set you back.

Who knew in January of 2020 our best laid plans would be victim to a pandemic.  Athletes had to learn to pivot and find new ways to train and remain focused despite a total life disruption.  Coaches had to find new ways to train their athletes and stay connected. Our life as we knew it was changed. It is times like these when it is important to remember your “why”.

If you are committed to your “why” you will find a way to persist.  This will be the guiding light, the lighthouse in the storm, providing you with direction and purpose. 

How many of us pose the question to our athletes or ourselves; “Why” are these goals meaningful; why do they matter? What will the picture of success look like when those goals are achieved?  We can’t assume we know our athletes’ “why.”    

Is Winning Their ‘Why’?

I was a coach of a competitive Theater on Ice team for 13 years.  I routinely did a survey at the end of the season to assess how I did as a coach and what the team valued. I assumed winning was the most important to my athletes. Wrong.

 Winning was not at the top of the list of priorities.  Yes, they wanted to win but it wasn’t as important as having fun, being with their team mates and skating a performance they could be proud of.  They also loved the team dinners, the thrill of staying overnight in a hotel and their annual roasting of the coaches.  This was an invaluable lesson for me.  The journey had to be fun and relationships had to be built. Skating was important but at the end of the day the relationships and experiences we had as a team were valued as much or more than the medals.

So, ask your athletes what is important to them.  Find out what is driving them. It could be as simple as, loving the challenge of learning a new skill, or testing themselves to see how far they can go in the sport.  Maybe they have something to prove to themselves or someone else, or want to feel a sense of personal expression.   We need to know as coaches what is driving our athletes. 

 I know identifying the “why” may seem like a tall order for some of our younger athletes but I like to plant seeds.  It’s not too early to get them thinking of their “why”.  You might be surprised with what they have to share. We need to challenge them a bit, give them ownership in their sport and develop a relationship with them that starts with understanding what they want for themselves.

4 tips for identifying the “Why”

1. To help our athletes identify their “why”, ask them to think back to when they first started their sport and write what they loved about it and how it made them feel?
2. Write about the good that comes from the pursuit of the “why”. How does it make you better or impact others?
3. An exercise in Beyond Grit by Kamphoff, is to answer this question 6 times:  I do what I do, so that __________________ . Each time you answer you are digging a little deeper and finding what is important to you.  Why you do what you do.
4. Once you have crystallized your “why” write it down and put it in places you see daily. Perhaps on the refrigerator door, bathroom mirror or in your sport bag.   Let it be a reminder especially through the topsy turvy parts of the journey to your big goal.

Asking ourselves why we do what we do is important for coaches as well as athletes. Answering this question brings us to understand our purpose as coaches.  John Ehrmann, former NFL football player, high school coach, and author of InSide Out Coaching explains, “I coach to help boys become men of empathy, integrity who will lead, be responsible and change the world for good.”

What is your “Why?”

The post What’s the “Why” Behind your Goals? first appeared on Inner Edge Performance.

“We believe what we tell ourselves.”
–Zig Ziglar

Helping our athletes develop confidence is a work in progress.  I like for athletes to be proactive with their confidence as opposed to waiting for confidence to arrive. I wrote previously about developing a confidence resume and helping our athletes identify personal victories and strengths to create their confidence resumes. In addition, I want my athletes to talk to themselves powerfully and positively.  I want to encourage positive self-talk.

We are constantly talking to ourselves. Recent research has postulated you have on average 6,200 thoughts a day.  Thoughts impact our feelings and feelings impact our behavior. So, getting in touch with what our athletes are thinking can help us help them.

So how can we influence our athletes’ positive self-talk? Well, we can start by listening to the words they use and asking questions.

I bet we have all heard statements from our athletes like:

• “I’ll never get this; it is too hard.”
• “Oh, I’m so nervous, I don’t think I can do this.”
• “I always skate poorly in this rink.”
• “I can’t jump in this corner.”

The verbal landscape is full of information.  We have to really listen and help them interrupt the story they are telling themselves. You can hear the doubt, resignation and fixed mindset in, “I’ll never get this, it’s too hard.”  Routing out the doubt and challenging it is important to maintain confidence. Remind them of the learning process and how they have succeeded in the past to master difficult skills.  Suggest they change their self talk to, “This is a hard skill but I’ve gotten hard skills before and I’ll do it again.” It recognizes the difficulty but draws on past success and ends with a positive affirmation.”

Saying “I always skate poorly in this rink” may reflect an overgeneralization based on one disappointing performance in a particular rink.  The story athletes tell themselves is very powerful so we need to challenge them to provide the evidence.

 Athletes thinking “I’m so nervous,” and then equating that to not being able to perform well gives us an insight into how they view “being nervous”.  It’s viewed as something to be avoided or negative. But we know nerves are a natural and essential part of performance. We can help them reframe the nerves as something to be embraced, as an indication that they are ready for the “fight”.  The nerves also say we care about what we are going to do; it means something to us. It’s accepting the butterflies and getting them to fly in formation.

Finally, “I can’t jump in this corner” offers us an opportunity to refute the limited self-belief that jumping well only occurs in certain corners. Again, ask for the evidence and refute the thinking by saying, “All corners are equal opportunity zones for great jumps”. 

By listening carefully, we can help them unpack the messages they may be telling themselves. We can help them to challenge or reframe the thoughts. We can also help them to see the impact those thoughts are having on their performance. You know your athletes best and you may see patterns in their thinking. Maybe they like to blame others, maybe there is always an excuse, maybe they are determined to only accept perfection, etc. You are in a position to help them evaluate whether those patterns of thinking are serving them well or if there is evidence to support their thinking.  

The Most Important Question

Ask your athletes point-blank: does thinking this way help you perform better? I want athletes to be in the driver’s seat and choosing how they will think is in their control. Getting them to stop and ask themselves: is this thinking helping me get to where I want to go? If no, then they can choose to think differently. A common refrain is to “control the controllables”. Helping our athletes achieve this thinking is important for building confidence.

I’d like to share an abbreviated version of a recent conversation with a young skater.    

• Skater: “I don’t want to work on the scratch spin, it’s like a terrifying monster!”
• Coach: “Wow! I didn’t know you felt that way, what makes it so scary?”
• Skater: “It doesn’t make sense; I used to do it before the virus but now I don’t understand it.”
• Coach: “Okay, we can work through it together, but I want to ask you what you would do if you were walking outside and saw a terrifying monster?”
• Skater: “I’d run!”
• Coach: “Yes, I would too! When we are scared we want to run and hide, our muscles get tense, we don’t think as clearly, our heart may race or we may feel a burst of energy. Let me ask you something. Do you like challenges? 
• Skater: “Yes, I do”.
• Coach: “What if you could see the scratch spin as a challenge. I love a challenge and you just said you do too. We can make a plan on how we can rise to the challenge and confront the “terrifying monster”.

The conversation continued and we took a break from the spin but I was intent on leaving her with these thoughts:

• It’s all hard until it’s easy and that’s okay
• It’s also okay to feel uncomfortable or scared  
• Choose to see it as a challenge rather than a threat
• Ask for help
• Stay in the game and keep working on it 
• Persistence and hard work will slay the “terrifying monster”

To wrap up the lesson, I gave her the choice to pick the final skill.  Much to my surprise, she chose “the scratch spin”. Wow! I didn’t expect that but was really proud of her choice. By choosing to face the scary stuff and see it as a challenge to be met, she changed the story in her mind.  She also earned some coin for her confidence bank.

What story do you tell yourself that you would like to change?

The post Helping our Athletes Develop Confidence Through Self Talk first appeared on Inner Edge Performance.