This is not your typical reading list of sport psychology books. At Headstrong Mindset, I want to start by acknowledging that there are a ton of fantastic books out there on mental toughness, navigating pressure, and overcoming mental obstacles for athletes in sports. The problem is that most of them are written by men about male professional athletes. As a former professional and collegiate athlete who has spent a lifetime competing and working in women’s sports, I don’t find most sport psychology books relatable to my athletic career.
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Summer Mental Training for Athletes: 5 Goals to Set Right Now
You’ve probably heard the advice a hundred times: set goals for your season. Write them down. Make them S.M.A.R.T. Post them somewhere you’ll see them every day.
And yet, most athletes go into the summer with a list that looks something like this: Make the starting lineup. Shave 3 seconds off my 400m. Win conference championship.
Those are all great goals, but they are all outcome goals. And when it comes to summer mental training for athletes, outcome goals alone aren’t enough. Here’s the problem: outcome goals are largely outside your control. Here’s the problem: outcome goals are largely outside your control. You can train every day, give it your all, and still fall short of an outcome because of factors that have nothing to do with you — a competitor having the best game of their life, a bad weather day, a coach’s decision, an injury.
When outcome goals are the only goals you’re focused on, your confidence becomes dependent on things you can’t control. And that’s a vulnerable place to compete from.
The athletes who make the biggest mental leaps understand that summer mental training for athletes isn’t just about reps in the weight room — it’s about building the mental foundation that carries you through next season. Specifically, mental performance goals: goals that target how you think, focus, respond, behave, and show up when it matters most.
Here’s how to do it.
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Fix-It Mentality: Recover from Performance Errors Faster
“Volleyball is a game of mistakes” is a common phrase in volleyball. In fact, Karch Kiraly, the former U.S. women’s national team volleyball coach, has been quoted many times saying that he loves watching his athletes struggle and make mistakes because it is the path to learning and improving.
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How to Bounce Back from Adversity in Sports
To learn how to overcome defeat and bounce back from adversity in sports, it can be helpful to look back through history at the greatest athletes of all time.
History is full of stories about athletes that have been cut from teams, experienced heartbreaking losses, and devastating injuries. However because the focus is usually on the career highlights of the winners, the heroic stories of their persevering journeys are often missed.
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Deconstructing Perfectionism in Athletes (and Coaches)
Perfectionism is characterized by unrealistically high expectations of self and a tendency to be over critical of one’s performance (Madigan et al., 2016). Within the last decade, the number of research studies conducted on perfectionism in sports has increased significantly (Vicent, Sanmartín, Vásconez-Rubio, and García-Fernández, 2020). In 2005, Flett and Hewitt coined the term “perfectionism paradox” to describe how the environment of competitive sports encourages perfectionism in athletes (Flett & Hewitt, 2005). Since the emergence of Covid-19, researchers Flett and Hewitt are now referring to the phenomenon of widespread rates of perfectionism among athletes as a “perfectionism pandemic”.
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Why You Cannot Afford to Ignore Positive Psychology
When it comes to the field of positive psychology, there’s a ton of information and misunderstanding. Many coaches feel resistant to the idea of shifting their coaching philosophy from a deficit mentality to a strength-based one. The most common question that comes up is how will players improve their weaknesses if we only focus on their strengths? In this post, I’ll answer that question, along with the other most common questions about what positive psychology is and why it’s so important to understand.
What exactly is positive psychology?
Positive psychology is a framework based in scientific research that contains formal strength assessments to help athletes reach their optimal potential. Martin Seligman is considered the father of positive psychology because his research on resilience, happiness, wellbeing, and strengths laid the foundation for a shift from focusing on mental illness, trauma, suffering, and pain to focusing on happiness, wellbeing, flourishing, flow, and strengths. Positive psychology ultimately asks what’s right with athletes, instead of what’s wrong with them. Using positive psychology, a mental performance coach or consultant can help athletes understand their greatest strengths and use them to elevate their performance and even navigate their athletic careers.
[Read more…] about Why You Cannot Afford to Ignore Positive PsychologyPositive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living.” (Peterson, 2008).