In this article, I’m going to go over three mental toughness exercises you can use before your next game.
Hey there, I’m Eli Straw, a mental performance coach who works with athletes from around the world on building a stronger mental game.
To develop mental toughness before games, we need to make sure that we are getting ourselves into the correct mindset. And these exercises will help.
Exercise #1: Visualizing Past Successes
What you want to do is think back to your most recent good games or even moments during those games. Then, before the game, you want to imagine or visualize those past moments.
Mentally tough athletes have confidence in themselves that they can go out there and play well.
When you’re playing with fear or anxiety, the scenes that you’re going to be thinking about—or the thoughts in your mind—will be those of failing.
You don’t want to make mistakes. You’re anxious about what will happen if you fail. And all that does is create these thoughts and these scenes in our mind about failing.
However, when we visualize past success, we are imagining things going well.
This can help us develop that feeling of, “I can go out there and I can play well again today because I’ve played well recently.”
So you want to do this before the game starts.
Exercise #2: Reading Over a Self-Talk List
Mentally tough athletes have control over their thinking. Their thoughts don’t control them—they control their thoughts.
Now, this is something that is very difficult to do, especially if you have a lot of doubt or if you have a lot of negative thinking.
When you read over a self-talk list before the game, that will instill this positive mindset as the game begins.
What you can do to create your own self-talk list is just think of about five to ten statements that make you feel confident, make you feel aggressive, and make you feel like you can go out there and play well.
You always want to ask yourself the question: How do I want to be thinking as the game begins? And then use that to guide your self-talk list.
Something else that can be very helpful is to think about the most common negative thoughts you have going into games, and then create some alternatives to those that are more positive.
A very simple list of five would be:
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I know I can play well today.
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I am confident in my skills.
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I am a great player.
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I’m going to give full effort today.
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I’ve got this.
Something very simple like that. But you want to personalize it to yourself, to your sport, and to your position.
Exercise #3: Mindfulness Breathing
Mentally tough athletes are able to perform in the present moment.
Going back to the fear and anxiety I mentioned in relation to visualizing past successes—when we have a lot of fear and anxiety, our attention is not present.
We might be anxious about what will happen in the future, which means our thinking is in the future. We might be thinking about how we’ve played poorly recently, and that’s leading to more fear of that happening again. So then our thoughts are in the past, and then they go into the future—worrying about this upcoming game.
When we can keep our attention and our thinking in the present moment, we are allowing ourselves to play more freely and naturally, getting into the flow state and into the natural rhythm of the game.
What you can do to perform this mindfulness breathing exercise is to take about five to ten minutes before the game begins. Close your eyes and just focus on your natural breathing rhythm. Try to take nice, easy, deep breaths and focus your attention there.
This will help instill a present-focused mindset as the game begins.
Final Thoughts
To develop this mental toughness going into games, we cannot allow it to be an accident. We can’t just hope to feel confident. We can’t hope to be in a good mindset. We can’t hope to be present.
We need to take action to get ourselves into this mindset.
And these three exercises—visualizing past success, reading over a self-talk list, and performing mindfulness breathing before the game—will help.
Now, if you’re interested in a more in-depth approach to developing mental toughness, overcoming any mental block you’re experiencing, or anything else, click here to learn more about my one-on-one mental performance coaching program.
I’ve also created two online courses:
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Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
