About Success Starts Within
Success Starts Within provides sport psychology resources to athletes and performers looking to improve their mental game. Success Starts Within offers 1-1 mental performance coaching and mental training courses to help you build confidence, mental toughness, and all the mental skills you need to elevate your performance. We also provide many free resources, including weekly articles, podcasts, and videos that cover sport psychology topics to help you master the mental game. No matter your sport, skill level, or financial ability, you will find the mental training resources you need here at Success Starts Within.
Mission Statement
Make mental training and sport psychology accessible, affordable, and achieveable to all athletes.
Eli Straw, M.S. - Mental Game Coach
Eli is a mental game coach and the founder of Success Starts Within. He holds a Master’s Degree in psychology with a sport psychology specialization. He has worked one-on-one with athletes from 6 different continents and over ten different countries on building a stronger mental game.
Eli has extensive experience coaching, teaching, and consulting with professional, elite, college, high school, middle school, and youth athletes. Eli also has experience playing baseball at the collegiate and professional levels.
Eli works with athletes of all sports and all levels and is a current member of the AASP.
Founder of Success Starts Within, LLC
Sports Psychology Articles
Three Elements of a Strong Mental Game
Quick Summary:
- The three key elements of a strong mindset: knowing your ideal mindset, creating it, and managing what can pull you out of it.
- Reflect on past great performances to identify the mindset that helps you play your best.
- Use preparation techniques like visualization, mindfulness, and self-talk to build that mindset before competition.
- Anticipate challenges such as mistakes or distractions and plan reset strategies to stay focused.
- Apply these three steps consistently to compete with confidence, calm, and mental toughness.
Anticipating and Managing Challenges During Competition
Quick Summary:
- Strong mental performance comes from anticipating and preparing for challenges before they happen.
- Identify both mental (negative thoughts, frustration, loss of confidence) and physical (off days, bad conditions) challenges you’re likely to face.
- Create resetting strategies — like deep breaths, self-talk, or reframing — to refocus when distractions or setbacks occur.
- This type of preparation builds confidence and consistency, helping you perform freely even when things go wrong.
- Don’t hope for perfection — plan for imperfection so you can stay composed, focused, and mentally tough in competition.
Why You Play Well One Day but Not the Next
Quick Summary:
- Inconsistency often stems from changes in your mental state, not physical skill.
- Good performances come from staying focused, positive, and process-oriented.
- Bad days usually involve self-criticism, outcome thinking, and distraction by others.
- Identify key differences between your good and bad days to find controllable factors.
- Create 2–3 simple mental objectives to build consistent confidence and focus.
How to Use Self-Talk During Games
Quick Summary:
- Self-talk is the internal dialogue that shapes your mindset and performance as an athlete.
- During competition, use self-talk strategically—not constantly—to stay present and confident.
- Replace negative thoughts with positive, productive ones to improve focus and emotional control.
- Use self-talk to: Refocus on your process when you drift toward outcome thinking. Push through pain and fatigue in endurance sports. Recover quickly after mistakes by learning and moving forward.
- The goal isn’t to think more—it’s to make your thoughts helpful when they appear.
Develop a Better Attitude in Sports
Why is attitude so important to you as an athlete? Why is it that when your attitude gets bad, you underperform—but when you keep a
What to Do If You’re Not Doing Well in Practice
If you’re not doing well in practice right now, there are a few questions that you can ask yourself. Now, I talk a lot about
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