Self-awareness is the first step towards growth. Both in soccer and in life. On the soccer field, you can make improvements technically, tactically and physically without much self-awareness, but you won’t ever be able to truly accelerate your growth and start knocking things out of the park until you have solid awareness – meaning you are able to objectively look at what you are doing without judging and just see it as what IS. Self-awareness is not only the first step to mental skills expansion, it is also the first step towards emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is your ability to clearly see, evaluate and self-regulate your emotions, thoughts and actions in a way that has you now fully in control and CHOOSING your response to things instead of just automatically reacting to situations in the environment. 

Gaining self-awareness is super important, but also understanding WHY our brain defaults to self-doubt and automatic negative thoughts is the crucial piece to have clarity on if we want to start to make change. When we can to separate ourselves from this unhelpful voice, and learn to see it as something that is not US but instead just the default system that runs in all brains, we can start to turn down the volume on those thoughts and turn UP the volume on a different voice – our inner coach. And when we start talking to ourselves with this new voice, and coaching ourselves through things with intentional self-talk, we start to understand why mental skills are a superpower and we feel empowered and in control.