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Mental Skills Toolkit:
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Mental Skills Glossary
key terms and concepts to expand your game
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is your ability to see yourself clearly and objectively through self-reflection and introspection. It means starting to become aware of our thoughts, feelings & actions as you are doing them. It is only when you have self-awareness that you can begin to EFFECTIVELY make changes to the mental side of your game.
Inner coach
Your inner coach is YOU. It is you talking to yourself, helping yourself and COACHING yourself through hard moments. It’s you giving yourself positive encouragement and advice. Your inner coach doesn’t just magically happen though, you have to CHOOSE to activate it. If you don’t activate it, your default mode (inner criticism and self-doubt) can easily take over and remain in control.
Default Mode
Your brain has a negative bias – it’s naturally going to give you the negative stuff. This is what is called the brain’s DEFAULT mode. Overthinking, inner criticism, etc., it automatically does this stuff on its own. Your mental skills job as a player, is to SEE default mode happening (have self-awareness of it) and then DISRUPT it. Through mental skills work you can actually train your brain to do something different. You can train it to do what YOU want it to do.
Optimal performance zone
Your optimal performance zone is where you play your best soccer. And it is the ONLY place you can play your best soccer. When you are in this zone you are focused on the present moment, not hung up on a mistake or worried about something in the future. The ultimate goal of mental skills training is to be able to get ourselves into this zone on demand.
Controllable objectives
Controllable objectives are manageable, SPECIFIC, small actions that you have the power to do, no matter what everyone else is doing. They are conscious choices that you can always make, and whether or not they happen is completely up to you. They are focused on the PROCESS of self-improvement, not on the outcome of the game and not on eliminating mistakes.
Instructional self-talk
Instructional self-talk is when you give yourself a set of ‘instructions’ about what you should be doing right now in the game. It is the MOST HELPFUL thing you can do ON THE FIELD to keep you focused on the present moment. It is a trigger to remind you to do an action. It is a way to avoid overthinking and eliminate hesitation. Instructional self-talk is short: 1-4 words only, a question or a command.
High expectations
High expectations are measurable, realistic and aspirational, and are a necessary piece of performing at a high level of the game. High expectations are part of a healthy striving mentality. High expectations keep us focused on the right things to keep us moving forward toward growth and self-improvement. High expectations are based around elements of our game that we can fully control.
Unrealistic Expectations
of Perfection
An unrealistic expectation is chasing a result that isn’t 100% fully within your control. Typically an unrealistic expectation is an expectation of perfection and centered around completely eliminating mistakes. (It’s unrealistic to demand from yourself a result that isn’t fully within your control. Why? Since the result isn’t fully within your control, you can never do anything that will guaranteed that you’ll meet it, which results in feeling inadequate after most performances, even when you played well).
Mastery Experience
A mastery experience is remembering a time when you DID something really well, and reminding yourself you can do it again. It’s a ‘been there done that!’ memory. A mastery experience is proof that you can do something, because you’ve already done it! It’s a tool you can use to build confidence.
Mental Skills
Mental skills are the actual skills that you gain during mental skills training. They are the tools you use on and off the field (examples: controllable objectives, useful self-talk, meditation, etc.)
Mental Fitness
Mental fitness is continual work to set good habits and work on this piece of your game; just like physical fitness, you have to keep doing mental skills work in order to stay on top of it and have a good mindset.
Mental Wellness
Mental wellness is overall how you are feeling about yourself, about life, soccer, etc.; mental wellness is not defining yourself based on performance, but instead separating your self-worth from results and impossibly high, unrealistic standards of perfection.
Mental Toughness
Mental toughness your ability to recover and stay focused and keep going when things are hard; mental toughness is all about resiliency, grit, patience, perseverance, etc.