Priming Your Athletes for the Performance Mindset.

Dweck conducted a study of college soccer players and found the more a player believed athletic ability was a result of effort and practice rather than just a natural ability the better that player performed. What they believed about their coaches’ values was even more important. The athletes who believed that their coaches prized effort and practice over natural ability were even more likely to have a superior season.

Are your athletes more concerned with LOOKING good, than learning? I see WAAAAY too many skilled athletes not giving maximum effort in practice and rarely doing anything outside of an organized practice. Are you aware that a Performance Mindset can be taught? You can teach your athletes how to take charge of their learning process, practice deeper, manage their time better, accept accountability for their role in success, embrace mistakes, and understand they control their motivation.

I was watching the movie focus the other day and it made me think of how powerful priming words are. They’re all around us. Not just in parenting and coaching but every single piece of advertisement, the product placement within movies and tv. As coaches and parents we have a tremendous responsibility to be our best. Every single word has the power to effect change in an athlete’s life. This can often occur with unintended circumstances, with phrases we believed to have little to no effect carrying great weight. I’ve seen these “insignificant” words lift individuals to never before achieved heights and also punch the athlete in the gut with the power of an elephant. 

Have you ever been frustrated by that athlete that had all the talent in the world yet never achieved success? Carol Dweck out of Stanford studied this and there are scores of books written about it, a few of my favorites are Talent is Never Enough - Maxwell, and Talent is Overrated- Colvin, The Talent Code – Coyle, and The Genius in All of Us - Schenk.

None of the greats rested on just their “talent”, they constantly stretched themselves, analyzed their performance, and constantly looked for ways to improve. Does Messi fit the perfect mold for a soccer player? No. How about Larry Bird with basketball? Tom Brady was relegated in both college and the pros and many of the players on his teams are not what the so called NFL experts considered “can’t miss” prospects. Heck, we all know even Michael Jordan was cut right? So what do they all have in common?? Well many things. Effort, Deliberate Practice, Performance Mindset, etc. Right now though I want to follow the concept of how powerful our words are as coaches and even the internal dialogue we have as individuals, can prime us for success.

I personally have seen many athletes fail because they never truly understood that talent is something that needs to be built on and developed, not something to coast with. While a majority of the responsibility for this understanding is on the athlete, it is also our responsibility as coaches and as parents to do everything in our power to teach young people how to embrace this way of thinking. Thus, setting them up for success. 

First, we must be aware of what our mindset it. What words do you use on a daily basis? Are you truly leading by example of just preaching to our players? You can learn how to develop and become more receptive to feedback from others, maybe bring in an expert on behavior or sport psychology to help get you out of your routines. The best coaches in the world are continually turning over every rock to see what they can use to make their players better. 

Do you know what you stand for? What your values are? 

Imagine if you could run your practices and your culture was set up to promote a true performance mindset with messages the players see but don’t “see” everywhere.

Successful people, They have belief systems, which we discussed yesterday in the Day 10 lesson, that support their success and they actively work to manage their thought patterns. ACTIVELY WORK! Every athlete who has conditioned themselves mentally will have readily practiced methods or strategies that support P3 thinking also referred to as effective thinking. Since we can’t control others (Day 9 – Controllables) it only makes sense that our focus should be on your thinking, our self-talk. Confident performers tend to think in a deliberate manner, TAP into the Growth Mindset, direct their attention with Deliberate Practice which can lead to the optimal Performance Mindset. Self-talk can be combined with Day 1 - Attention for motivation to improve gross and fie motor movements, meaning technical skills. A coach can also use persuasion to increase the confidence of players with priming words, enhancing an athletes self- efficacy (belief) and self-talk. It’s quite the circle isn’t it?

Today we will draw on many of the activities you’ve completed in this program, the Day 8 exercise you completed for your strengths to develop ideal motivational self-talk for developing certainty or confidence. However, we cannot have perfect self-talk all the time so today you will create a strategy for how to handle ineffective self-talk. Performances have consequences, high performers proactively prepare self-talk for higher pressure situations BEFORE they need it. Day 4 helped you create your own refocus routines and the AIR technique can also be utilized for effective thinking.

We can help you with this.