I’ve been working with coaches for years helping to best understand mindset and the mental side of sport. While I think it’s always good to educate, I think it’s hard to tackle coaching the mental side of sport when your job is to coach the physical side. And, lets face it, there’s only so much in a practice to do everything that needs to get done.

My goal is to develop simple, effective tools that coaches can use and incorporate into teaching physical skills. I have a growth mindset and that includes always being conscious about how I can continue to grow and develop my presentations and workshops in a way that is simple and applicable for coaches.

This is fast becoming the most important part of my work and it is what I did during my second presentation for PTR at Wimbledon this summer.

Scope of practice

As a coach, your scope of practice is to coach; the physical skills. It’s not to dole out nutrition or physical therapy advice because this isn’t your specific area expertise just as is the case with mental skills. But sometimes that is what might be expected, right?

I get that training athletes on mental skills is not your expertise nor should it be. However, since mental skills are so critical to your athlete’s success, it is critical to have some tools for helping athletes with their mental skills. There are ways to do it that aren’t outside of your scope of practice and that are different than actually coaching mindset and mental skills.

Role modeling

In my second presentation in the UK, I started by talking about being a good role model.  When you only have a small amount of time and effort to devote to the mental side of sport, you can model the thoughts and behaviors that elicit optimal athletic performance.

What does that look like? It starts the moment you walk onto the court and ends when practice ends.

• #1: get to know your athletes as people. This carries a lot of trust and respect and goes a long way.
• Show confidence in your positive body language – head up, shoulders back, and walk tall. A slight upturn of the corners of your mouth helps too. 😊
• Model resilience by bouncing back when things don’t go your way.
• Nurture internal motivation is important and encourage your athletes to think about their way. This helps them develop their own small, realistic practice goals.
• Help athletes develop more positive language around their abilities – “I can’t do this” thinking to “if I keep working, I will get better” thinking.
• Promote effort, intent, and growth instead of it being all about winning, zero mistakes, and perfectionism.
• Have fun at practice and allow athletes to have fun too.
• Allow your athletes to be part of the decision-making process, and get out of the habit of telling and in the habit of asking and discussing.

This helps athletes feel empowered and take responsibility for their growth and learning. Athletes also flourish and want to be in environments where this kind of coaching exists.

The #1 reason people play sports is fun.
#2 is to be social.
#3 learn a new skill.

In this process, they don’t want to be bystanders, they want to be participants. If you encourage this with role modeling, you make a huge impact on their mindset and their game. People mostly look to their coach for ‘the right thing to do’.

Overall, this allows the athletes to buy in more and take a more active role in their success. I understand that there are days when other things in life happen and impact us in a negative way, and make it harder to be the role model you know you should be, so it is critical to learn to compartmentalize which is good for you and for your athletes.

Taking it to the court

The second part of my presentation in the UK took mental skills to the court. I taught a couple of easy drills that help to specifically train mental skills. One was specific to focus and one for negativity. I used volunteers to teach a couple of variations so coaches could see the drills and see the development and change in mentality.

Beating the Tennis Demon System was a big part of the on-court session – pre-performance routine, pre-serve routine, and a between point routine. We talked about how it’s important to train the brain to be a competitive athlete, how the demons pop up to sabotage in these areas for tennis players and ways to begin to train them on what to do in these moments. I took the coaches through some ideas and ways to help them help their athletes develop the necessary routines.

As I was talking through this in my first presentation, a coach asked me, aren’t routines specific to each individual? Good question and the short answer is YES so the routines can be very different for each athlete. However, tennis coaches can start to help tennis players understand these moments and understand what to do with these moments.

Every practice should include mindset

Every practice should include fun, socialness, and learning. Some coaches seem to think that fun and being social can’t exist in a learning environment but in fact they are a necessary component of learning. People learn much better when these exist and on a consistent basis.

I frequently hear, “my child doesn’t play like she practices.” So, it is very important to understand the differences between practice and playing a match. Start to understand how practice and a match are different and incorporate more deliberate practice into what you are doing.

For example, thinking about technique is important in practice but it’s not an important part of playing a match. In a match, there should be very little thinking. In practice, a tennis player can make mistakes and correct them and practice the growing serve technique over and over but that can’t happen in a match. Unfortunately, coaches don’t talk enough about that difference, so overthinking happens in a match because a tennis hasn’t been properly ‘trained’ to “not think” in a match.

Mindset is critical

Bottom line, mindset and the mental side of sport is SO critical to your success as a coach and your athletes success. And more importantly, it can be a hard thing to grasp if you don’t understand what is happening. So many begin to think that it is all physical and sometimes it is a small tweak to a technique but most times, it is a small tweak to how you think and work. There are some small things you should do to create a positive, confident, resilient environment.

Last note, observation is a critical skill for a coach. Observe and when you see something, stop practice and ask questions about what is happening? What the athlete is thinking? How they are feeling? Be confident and flexible enough to think critically about how to train your athlete through that moment.

Start small. Try one thing and build from there. Try two things and keep it moving.