How to Practice and Apply Your Mental Game

By Patrick J. Cohn, Ph.D.

Unfortunately, many athletes view sports psychology as a quick fix for helping them overcome a short-term slump or get back on track with their performance. If you look at mental training as a "quick fix" for your game, you stick with mental training and thus won’t realize your potential with a strong mental game. Your mental game must be cultivated and tweaked every day just like you do with your physical game.

I recently gave an online sports psychology webinar to Peaksports Network members about a very important topic in my work: How to practice the mental game and apply to your performance. You can watch the first 10 minutes of the webinar minutes on my YouTube Channel.

Today I’d like to cover the basics of my sports psychology webinar and discuss how you can better learn and apply the mental game…

Helping my athletes apply what they learn in our mental coaching sessions is an everyday challenge. Most athletes understand the strategies I teach to stay focused, be proactive with confidence, and stay calm after mistakes, but how can they practice theses strategies so they can apply them easily to competition? I find a huge gap between the conceptual knowledge and an athlete’s ability to use it in practice and competition.

So in this month’s Sports Psychology Insights Magazine, I’ll discuss two areas to help you get the most out of mental training:

1. How to practice mental game strategies you learn from me
2. How to apply mental game strategies to competition

First, I prefer to keep sports psychology simple for athletes to understand and use. I am not implying that athletes are a dumb group. Many of the athletes I coach are very intelligent. But I avoid confusing my students with a lot of psychobabble or theories from sports psychology. Thus, I don’t want you to get bogged down in over analysis or big terms with the mental game.

How to Practice the Mental Game

You can easily learn how to refocus when you are distracted during practice or competition, but do you know how to practice this skill? My philosophy is that learning mental strategies includes four critical steps:

1. Awareness of mental game – first, you have to understand what’s missing or what needs to be improved in your mental game.

2. Education of mental skills – you have to learn the strategies that will help you improve your performance, such as the ability to refocus when distracted.

3. Practice of mental skills – you must learn how to practice the mental skills so you can easily take them to competition.

4. Application of mental skills – finally, you have to use what you learn in competition, which can often be the most difficult part for athletes as they go to “what they know” when under pressure.
 

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Thus, if we use the example of how to refocus after distracted, the first step is to identify your top or typical distractions during competition. The second step is to think through a positive reaction and how to get back on track, also called a refocus statement. The third step would be to rehearse this new reaction or refocus statement in your mind using mental rehearsal. And the fourth step would be to integrate this into an activity while at practice (or while at home, work, or school)

The more you practice your new refocusing strategy, the easier and more natural it becomes for your to refocus your mind when distracted. This sounds simple, right? Not exactly… The problem is that distractions, doubts, anger, frustration, and other mental game challenges become hard-to-break habits for many athletes. When doubt and fear is your natural reaction in competition, the reaction you instinctively go to, it’s hard to change old habits. This is the reason why I have no quick fixes in sports psychology.

How to Apply the Mental Game to Competition

Once you have integrated and practiced your new strategy in training, and it becomes more of a dominant habit for you, it’s time to put it into action in competition. You can over think the mental game, just like the physical game. For this reason, you want to keep it simple.

Here are three ways to apply the mental game to competition:

1. Set small goals to improve your mental game during competition. Make your mental game important by setting small goals in competition, such as to let go of mistakes quickly. When you set a small goal or objective, you’ll focus on improving this one area when competing.

2. Use your pre-competition routine to help you get your game face on. In other words, your pregame routine is a perfect time to check in with yourself to make sure you are focused, confidence, and ready to trust your skills. This time is much more than a physical warm up, it’s a mental tune up as well. See The Relaxed Athlete for more information about the important of a warm up routine.

3. Use self-monitoring and tracking tools to assess your progress. I often ask my students to monitor their progress with the mental game by giving them specific post-performance feedback sheets. This holds you accountable for a few key areas of your mental game. When you have to track or monitor how well you are doing with the mental game, you are more likely to adhere to the plan. My students simply know that I will ask them how well they were able to refocus during competition, for example.

To get the most out of your mental training, you have to learn how to bridge the gap between learning and application to competition. You must become aware of the areas to improve in your mental game. Then learn the strategies that will help you improve. Finally, you have to practice and apply what you learn to competition. However, don’t abandon what you’ve learned and practice if you do not see immediate improvements with your performance. We have no quick fixes in sports psychology.

Get my effortless system for learning mental game strategies and how to put these strategies into practice with The Confident Athlete CD series.

Sports Specific Mental Training Tip

Too many athletes worry about missing a shot or making mistakes. If you do this, you can't fully focus on the process and execution of each play. Don't allow your mind to focus on the negative result. Stay focused on what you need to do to hit a good shot.

"I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot... When you think about the consequences, you always think of a negative result."

~ Michael Jordan, NBA Basketball Champion