How do you treat your mental game?

Having had the opportunity to work with many athletes over the past 12 years I have found that there are 4 primary ways that athletes think about and engage with their mental game development.

Here goes…

There are those who do nothing. Chances are you are better off.  In fact… most do this. Nothing ventured… nothing gained.

The next is to be reactive… when you are in trouble you seek help. I wonder how your technical coach will feel if you only went to them when you were in trouble.) So many do this and think they are working on their mental game.

Then there are those who think about the mental game as skills-based…  ie You look at the mental game like you do your skills or muscles… train them and you get better.  Few do this.

Then you could approach it as an active investigation into the inner workings of your mind and its effect on performance… you actively peel back the layers and find the hidden drivers inside you that hold your performances back… and then you change them. Yep, it’s tough… hard, and oftentimes super scary, to face yourself… and be real. Very few do this.

With the first one… you get no benefit and you don’t care about it that much either.

For the second you might feel temporary relief and possibly after the temporary relief, you say that the mental game development stuff is not working for you… because you are not really working on it, yet you expect it to be a miracle cure.

With the 3rd, growing your mental skill takes work… often the strategies are easy to understand and easy to do… like journaling, reflecting, breathing under pressure, and yet the mundaneness of doing them or the forgetfulness to remind yourself to do them limits their value and so you lose out on the benefit they might bring.

With the last you become different and so you naturally show up and do differently… you approach situations and pressure differently. The work is in the inner change… your behaviour adjusts naturally. No need for reminders or conscious routines. Simply being the different version of you.

So… which of these resemble the way you work with or on your mental game?

I know which one interests me.

PS… if you want to journal to grow your mental game - click here