Sport Psychology is for athletes who understand the importance of a positive attitude and mental toughness. These athletes want every possible advantage they can get including the mental thrill out of a competition.
Mind Coaching is the base of sports psychology that concentrates specifically on helping athletes break through the mental barriers that are keeping them from performing up to their peak potential. By focusing on the mental skills needed to be successful in any sporting competition, mind coaching seeks to achieve the overall goal of performance improvement.
Sports Psychology is about improving your attitude and mental competitive skills and to help you identifying limiting beliefs. You will be embracing a healthier philosophy about your sport.
Below is a list of the top 9 ways that you can benefit from sports psychology:
- Improve focus and deal with distractions. Learning to breathe and to concentrate in the here and now.
- Grow confidence in athletes who have doubts. Doubt is the opposite of confidence. If you maintain many doubts prior to or during your performance, this indicates low self-confidence or at least you are sabotaging what confidence you had at the start of the competition.
- Develop coping skills to deal with setbacks and errors. Athletes with very high and strict expectations, have trouble dealing with minor errors that are a natural part of sports. They are easily frustrated and feel under pressure. Emotional control is the base needed to getting into the zone.
- Find the right base of intensity for your sport. To use intensity in a broad sense to identify the level of arousal or mental activation that is necessary for each person to perform at his or her best. Feeling “up” and positively charged is critical, but not getting overly excited is also important. You have to tread a fine line between being excited to complete, but not getting over-excited.
- To build a healthy belief system and identify irrational self sabotaging thoughts. Unhealthy or irrational beliefs will keep you stuck no matter how much you practice or hard you try.
- Identifying personal key points to be able to rely on one self. Building bridges between the emotions and the rational mind.
- Improve or balance motivation for optimal performance. It’s important to look at your level of motivation and just why you are motivated to play your sport. The work with athletes to help them adopt a healthy level of motivation and be motivated for the right reasons.
- Develop confidence post-injury. Some athletes find themselves fully prepared physically to get back into competition and practice, but mentally some scars remain. Injury can hurt confidence, generate doubt during competition, and cause a lack of focus. It is to help athletes mentally heal from injuries and deal with the fear of re-injury.
- To develop competition specific strategies. All great coaches employ preparation plans, competition strategies to help athletes mentally prepare for competition. This is an area beyond developing basic mental skills in which a mental coach helps athletes.
I need to emphasize that Sport psychology works only for those who are really open to it and want to understand themselves better.
Nothing will work if an athlete’s motivation is to prove him/herself for anything or anybody.