When is the best time to start sport psychology training?

Sport psychology is often misunderstood. It is seen exclusively as a remedy to fix problems. This includes things like a slump, "the yips," or performance anxiety. Fixing is only a small part of sport psychology training. It is  SO MUCH more! Mental skills training, through sport psychology, is about tuning the mental game to create consistent, high-level performance. Training mental skills keeps slumps, yips, and meltdowns at bay. This training covers the basics and benefits of sport psychology. 

This sport psychology clinic benefits athletes, parents, coaches, and organizations. Dr. J explores the similarities, benefits, and differences between sport psychology and mental skills training and therapy. He explains the differences between mental skills coaches, psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors and how to know which one to use for support. He also shows participants how to find local resources to support strong athlete mental health.

Mindfulness is the thousands of years-old art of maintaining mental control through controlling attention. Dr. J’s working definition is an awareness of the present experience without assessing it as bad. How does an ancient tradition apply to sport psychology and performance, you might ask? The answer is in EVERY way. Mindful awareness of the present experience keeps performers from mental “time travel,” in which they dwell on things that just happened or fear what is about to happen. This awareness is a key mental skill for athletes to understand. Through this training, Dr. J teaches athletes to stay present and focused on the task at hand and create consistent, repeatable, high-level performance.

Mental toughness is the ability to persevere when things become difficult. It is a fundamental element of sport psychology. It is about the next step, the next rep, and quieting the self-talk which is trying to convince the athlete it’s okay to quit.

Mental toughness isn’t a fixed point. We view it as an inherent trait and perceive athletes as either mentally tough or not. We label them mentally weak because they have a low failure point and write them off or have low expectations of them in the system. Even the most mentally developed players are often accused of a lack of mental toughness when they lose, fail, or make a mistake. 

Mental Toughness is a Trainable Skill

A lack of mental toughness is a lack of understanding of simple, repeatable techniques that create consistent performance. This informative training uses the art and science of sport and performance psychology to develop the 4 pillars of mental toughness.

Activation is the mind and body’s excitement level. Through this training, using sport psychology fundamentals, athletes will learn Dr. J’s “Peak of Peak Performance Model.” Through "finding their 5s," athletes learn to manage activation levels and create consistent performance at the upper edges of their ability. After this training, athletes will recognize when they are too low or too high (physically and mentally) and reach the optimal performance sweet spot. They will learn and recognize the right thoughts and physical sensations for peak performance and be able to draw them up at will. 

Goal setting is a powerful and necessary technique for enhancing and facilitating performance, but it is under-used in sport psychology terms, and the mechanics aren’t fully understood. Goals help an athlete stick to it, remain persistent and confident, focused, and create momentum in the right direction. Goal setting is important to every facet of performance.

Through training goal setting, athletes, teams, and coaches will learn to:

1. Direct attention to important skill elements to maximize results.

2. Direct and mobilize efforts

3. Increase the ability to persist

4. Use goal setting to foster the development of new learning strategies.

In this training, Dr. J presents his “Lily Pad Theory,” an easy-to-use system that harnesses the power of goal setting to create elite performance, teams, and organizations.

In athletic performance (and life), the mind and body react toward one’s dominant thoughts. Automatic negative self-talk guides one’s experience into the gravitational pull of one's negative beliefs and destroys peak performance. Self-talk is a mostly unconscious process in which a collection of statements, phrases, and cue words instructs actions and makes a commentary on experience. Through this training, athletes realize how they inform themselves and take control of their inner dialog.  Using sport psychology, performance-oriented self-talk is a trainable skill. The right self-talk blocks or deemphasizes distractions and fortifies the attention required for high performance. Self-talk is used to manage focus, funnel thoughts, actions, and behaviors to the task at hand, and manage mental and physical activation levels. 

Peak performance depends on the athlete’s ability to perform the task at hand when the situation requires it. While the ability to focus is a skill, the ability to focus and refocus on the right things over and over is an art. Through this training, athletes will learn Dr. J’s “Hourglass of Focus” technique, which uses sport psychology principles, to stay present in the moment, perform the task at hand, and use focus to perform consistently in any situation.

The most important narrative of excellence is “hard work in the right direction pays off,” and the most important performance mechanism is motivation. Motivation happens on a continuum from external to internal. The mental skills taught in this training benefit anyone in an athlete’s system, including the athletes themself, coaches, and parents. Motivation is the fuel that makes peak performance go. Internally motivated people approach an activity because they see value in it. Internal motivation creates good feelings about oneself and primes a solution-focused mindset versus a problem focus.

Athletes will learn to find value in their training and performance across various circumstances.  In sports and life, there are also requirements, rules, and expectations from external sources. This sport psychology training also teaches top performers how to operate under external control and coaches and parents to apply external control effectively. Finding value in the grind is a key to becoming elite. Mental skills training equips an athlete to be motivated in all aspects of development. Understanding how to promote internal motivation and manage external motivation greatly benefits the athlete and those in an athlete’s system who help guide development. 

Imagery is the ability to use visualization for mental rehearsal. It is used to learn new skills, plan performance strategies, improve technique, recover from injury, and develop mental toughness for optimal success in sport and fitness. It is a staple of sport psychology training and a valuable mental skill.  This training will help athletes learn internal and external imagery techniques. They will learn to use relevant senses, including what they see, hear, and feel emotionally and physically visualization, smell, and taste. Imagery is a mental blueprint that can be projected onto future practice and performance or to revisit past performance, making it useful across a wide range of situations.