What’s The Real Mental Game Challenge?
Do parents, coaches or athletes contact you about their lack of focus or confidence in competition?
Often, the presenting problem may not be the underlying problem…
Athletes and parents often don’t know the REAL mental game challenge. They just understand a lack of focus, tentative performances, and less than par performances.
But as a mental coach, you know better not to accept their presenting problem as what’s actually going on….
For example, an athlete might be afraid to disappoint a parent. He might be afraid to make mistakes. This looks like the athlete is not trying as hard as he can.
That’s why doing an AMAP assessment and discovery session with your athletes is so important…
You have to uncover the real issue underlying what’s happening on the surface. Athletes and parents are often not aware and need your help for this.
What do you look for?
You might consider:
- Fear of failure
- Fear of embarrassment
- Worrying about disappointing others
- Perfectionism
- Trying too hard
- Post-injury lack of trust in skills
- Recent changes in technique
Quick story… I remember when a top high school baseball player I worked with on his hitting. His presenting problem was inconsistent hitting.
As we talked more about his mental approach to hitting, it was clear he was overthinking his mechanics.
I find out via discovery that his team hired a new hitting coach who wanted to “improve” his mechanics early in the season–even though he was already the top hitter on the team!
This mental game challenge was easy for me to identify, but my athlete didn’t see it at first.
In the MGCP program, you’ll learn how to do assessments, drill down, and do discovery sessions to help you identify the real underlying issues with your athletes.
And you learn what to look for and how to ask the right questions.
One mental coach recently asked about how to identify the underlying challenges with athletes…
He asks:
“How do you identify major causes of an athlete’s discord and where to start in peeling back the layers? How do you know when you’ve “drilled down” and got to the real issues?”
Part of the fun of doing mental coaching with athletes is when you become an investigator—what we call the discovery phase of mental coaching.
But every athlete is different when you examine the underlying issues that prevent peak performance.
I teach a process called “drilling down” in the MGCP course, which helps you get more details from your athletes that an assessment might not reveal.
Here, you ask relevant questions to help you athlete identify the real challenges they face.
I call this the underlying issue.
For example, lack of focus might be due to frustration, but frustration might come from not meeting high expectations. And the athlete might be afraid to not reach a coach’s or team’s expectations.
In my work, I find that most underlying issues revolve around fear of failure.
And I see two categories of fear of failure:
- Fear of failure based on social approval issues.
- Fear of failure based on wanting badly for hard work and sacrifice to pay off.
When Bob Rotella was my mentor at UVA in the late 80s, he didn’t care what the real issue was when working with athletes. His philosophy was: “just do this” to improve mental toughness.
But I think it’s important for athletes to understand why they choke, get tight, get frustrated, or tank in competition.
You can learn my entire system for working with athletes on the mental game based on my 25 plus years of experience in this area…
Related Mental Coaching Articles:
- 5 Challenges for Sports Psychology Experts
- Challenges As A Mental Game Coach
- Become a Mental Coach or Sports Psychologist
Apply To Be In The MGCP Program!
Upon acceptance into the Mental Game Coaching Professional (MGCP) program, you’ll be given assess to the MGCP documents and to the peaksportsnetwork.com membership web site, start dates and times of each video conference, and how to access the video conference.
The MGCP video conference certification program is taught by video conference over a period of 10 weeks, meeting for two hours each week, but the course can take up to 12 weeks to complete (due to holidays and such).
By the end of the certification program (provided you have completed all requirements for graduation), you will receive a certification from Peak Performance Sports, LLC as a certified Mental Game Coaching Professional!
Have questions about the MGCP program? Read our FAQ. Find out what is included in the MGCP program. Call 888-742-7225 or email us at Peak Performance Sports