Few emotions can compare to the thrill of game day for athletes. Everyone wants to win, including the coach, players, and teams. They all aspire to have a performance worthy of an MVP. The drive to emerge victorious is the foundation of the competitive spirit.

However, games and matches also include a plethora of factors and features that are entirely beyond of the player’s control, such as the weather and referee decisions. This is common to most scenarios. Athletes should, in my opinion, concentrate on the variables under their control, which include, among other things, pre-game rituals, diet, and mindset. Since most teams and athletes have access to the same facilities, coaching, and equipment, mental preparation is one of the most important strategies that gives players an advantage and enables them to perform at their best.

Tips for Mental Preparation

As a professionally trained peak performance coach, you can attest from experience that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for preparing yourself mentally for a game because every player and team requires a distinct approach. However, we can offer some good beginning ideas (in no specific sequence) that anyone may use to put their best effort and mental state into a more productive one.

Place your focus and energy on the controllables.

The lives of athletes and coaches can be stressful, with countless moving parts that lead to stress and distraction. We find that many athletes worry about the wrong things­–namely, the things that are out of their control. Focus instead on what you can regulate, including your physical fitness, technical and tactical skills, effort, attitude, thoughts, nutrition, emotions, behavior, equipment and preparation.

Focus on your strengths. Not what you think you need to work on.

Game day is not the time to critique yourself. When you’re playing, you should go all in on what you know you do well. Bring your best onto the field so you can have the biggest impact for your team. A good game day hack is to write out your strengths on a 3×5 notecard and keep it with you in your locker, training bag or the bench, so you can read it over and over heading into competition.

Embrace the pressure of game day

This is absolutely one of the biggest game changers for an athlete, but it can also be one of the most challenging to develop. Every single athlete can learn to reframe pressure. Remember, champions don’t run from big moments, they embrace and welcome them.

A simple way to begin improving your relationship with pressure is to remember why you play the sport. This seems simple, but it’s important. Sports are not life or death. You play because you love it and enjoy it. Embrace the opportunity to feel the privilege of playing, competing and putting yourself in a position to do something meaningful.

Adopt a trusting mindset

“You don’t rise to the occasion; you sink to the level of your training.” – Joshua Medcalf

There is a time and a place to think about technique, and that’s during practice. When game day arrives, you shouldn’t question, doubt, analyze or think about form. Whatever capabilities you bring to the game, trust yourself, and do the best you can with what you have on that day.

Commit yourself

Repeat after me: “In order to be the best version of myself, I must be 100% committed to performing the very best that I can!”

You will come across competitive situations and conditions that you think are over your head, where you’re uncertain about going all out. This will only create doubt and anxiety. If you try to perform with this mindset, you are going to perform tentatively and give up at the first sign of trouble.

Going into your game, make sure you are focused and totally committed to leaving it all on the field. If you lose your drive, refocus and recommit, then go for it! Develop the skill by getting into the same mindset before practices. You will perform better, increase your chances of getting the results you want and have a whole lot more fun in the process.

What is the Role of Mental Toughness in Sports Performance?

Even while heredity has been linked to physical prowess, psychological aspects also need to be considered. Resilience, grit, optimism, and perseverance are a few characteristics that set exceptional athletes apart from others. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of an exceptional athlete in sports is their mental toughness.

An athlete’s capacity to persevere in the face of difficulties, errors, and failure is referred to as mental toughness. To compete at the highest level in sports, one must possess mental toughness; variables affecting this include intrinsic motivation, external environmental influences, and other internal forces like perseverance and positive thinking.

To assist young athletes reach their maximum potential, coaches must instill in them the values that drive the mental toughness scale from an early age.

Athletes’ success has been favorably correlated with mental toughness (MT), which has also been linked to adaptive mental health functioning, wellbeing, and incidences of reduced stress, depression, and improved sleep quality (Cowden et al., 2019). When assessing athletes, the majority of non-professional players only engage in mental training when they’re depressed; yet, including mental training into daily activities might have positive effects. The focus of Cowden et al. (2019) was on the essential traits of MT, which included perfectionism and self-determined motivation.

According to the analysis, because of the challenges they confront in building mental fortitude, athletes with higher personal standards of perfectionism tend to maintain more independent kinds of motivation. The self determination theory addresses psychological requirements and human motivation without taking into account outside influences. It also addresses personality traits related to one’s innate growth tendencies.

The theory demonstrates that motivation is represented by the continuum of motivational subtypes and has been used to the study of perfectionism (Cowden et al., 2019). These subcategories show how much internalization of fundamental psychological demands takes place. According to the article, MT is made up of a variety of internal conflicts that can arise from interactions with the environment that happen spontaneously as well as deliberate interventions.

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Mahoney found that autonomy supportive environments had a positive connection with psychological needs satisfaction when focusing on the motivational antecedents and associations with performance and psychological health. Put differently, independent affirmative data made it possible for athletes to thrive in an atmosphere where they could strengthen their mental toughness.

The notion that mental toughness is a multifaceted term is the main emphasis of the review. The ability to be mentally tough is made up of a number of individual traits, including buoyancy, optimism, and self-assurance. A review based on track athlete race times revealed a positive correlation between psychological needs satisfaction and mental toughness.

Coaches can create end goals and maintain athletes’ commitment by helping them build positive behaviors. Additionally, coaches want to create independent spaces where their players can maintain motivation. All ages can acquire mental toughness, and it is important to practice often. The distinction between an elite athlete and a non-elite athlete may depend on the value of mental training. Youth sports programs that incorporate mental training will equip athletes to persevere through hardship.

Why Athletes May Struggle With Mental Health

Even though there is little doubt that mental toughness and athletic success go hand in hand, many athletes find it difficult to put their mental health first.

According to Bradley Donohue, PhD, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), athletes are trained to perfect extremely particular skills in order to compete at a high level. His research focuses on performance optimization through mental health training.

He claims that “athletes are so tuned in to criticism,” which is advantageous when it comes to accepting criticism from teammates and coaches in order to get better. Regretfully, this implies that individuals can be just as vulnerable to criticism in other spheres of their lives, which can result in low self-worth.

There’s also the pressure. Every day throughout training, athletes are under intense pressure to push themselves to the limit so that when the game, match, or race begins, they can give it their all.

The public’s access to events occurring worldwide, frequently in real time, is made possible by technology and social media, which increases pressure, according to Lani Lawrence, PsyD, the director of wellness and clinical services and the New York Giants’ supervisor of player engagement and development.

“Every athlete, from high school teams to professional teams, lives in a fishbowl all the time,” the author claims. She claims that compared to past generations of athletes, today’s athletes’ triumphs and mistakes are more widely shared because of social media. Errors were once only visible to people present, unless a competition was shown on television.

“Mistakes can now be quickly tweeted, uploaded, and posted on Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat, where the person or team can be made fun of—all before they go home,” the author claims. “It can be extremely stressful to perform in this fishbowl, especially for athletes who haven’t learned healthy coping mechanisms.”

As an athlete, it’s simple to concentrate on your flaws and failures rather than your strengths and accomplishments, according to Kastor. Real victories or first-place finishes are uncommon for the great majority of athletes; on the other hand, defeats and finishes in second or thirteenth place are far more typical. Finding flaws when staring in the mirror is a simple task, according to Kastor.

Feelings of “not measuring up” can be especially high in individual sports, adds Todd Wells, a cycling coach and former professional mountain bike racer based in Durango, Colorado (who retired from the sport in 2017 at age 41). “One person wins and everyone else loses,” he says.

Although mental health is a challenge for so many athletes, harmful and damaging stigmas surrounding mental health can be especially strong. The culture around the athlete might view therapy as a sign of weakness, and student athletes may not be able to seek on-campus counseling anonymously, adds Dr. Donohue, who competed in National Association of Police Athletic and Activities League boxing competitions during his college years.

One review found that stigma is the number one reason athletes don’t seek the mental health help they need, according to 52 studies that collectively looked at more than 13,000 professional, Olympic, and collegiate- or university-level athletes across 71 different sports.

How to Work on Mental Toughness to Boost Your Personal Fitness

According to cycling coach Wells, “I see more and more athletes going to see sports psychologists as a way to gain an edge.”

Here are some ideas for athletes of all skill levels who wish to improve their mental toughness.

• Set goals that are specific. While long-term goals, like running a marathon, are great, Konzer suggests having “bite-size” goals, too. “Focus on what you want to accomplish on today’s run or workout. Write them out, tell a friend or coach, measure them, and celebrate,” Konzer says.
• Build awareness. Start paying attention to your thoughts during your workouts and performances, says Konzer. What’s your inner dialogue? For example, how do your thoughts and feelings change when you work out alone versus with a friend or when you’re in a different environment?
• Determine the narrative. Once you’ve begun to recognize and track your thoughts and emotions, the next step is to take control of the narrative, says Konzer. “Thoughts aren’t facts. Begin to separate out what the indisputable facts are and what is just the story you’re telling yourself about that fact; you have the control and the power to effect change,” Konzer says.
• Find your “why.” Remember when you fell in love with your sport and take yourself back to that time, suggests Konzer. “Your ‘why’ isn’t just for the love of the sport, it’s also for what you want to accomplish,” she says. If your “why” isn’t big enough, you won’t move out of your comfort zone to reach it, but if it’s so big it requires perfection, that won’t work either, she says. “Embrace your challenges and make them your own, but be kind to yourself,” she says.
• Put yourself to the test as often as you can. In order to build resilience to difficult situations, you need to actually put yourself in those situations, Dr. Galasso says. Go up against tough opponents as much as you can, and don’t shy away from a workout that seems like it might be too difficult, or a race that’s longer than anything you’ve done before.
• Learn from people who are mentally tough. Whether it’s a teammate, an opponent, or someone you know outside of sports, think of someone in your life who exhibits mental toughness. “Be inquisitive and observant of them,” Galasso says. “These people exist in our lives and we watch as they perform on the field, in the boardroom, or in the classroom.” Pay special attention to how they respond when something gets difficult, and try to model those responses yourself.