Does your training have a built in mental and emotional dynamic that helps you learn mental toughness and perform your best when it counts? Are you or your team practicing for optimal transfer–mental and physical–to competition?
Today’s coaches tend to focus their efforts on technical drills and forget to build in decision making and coping mechanisms that help athletes develop emotional control, which allows athletes to perform their best in competition.
That’s the message from two-time National Championship Coach Jeff Moore who I recently interviewed for The Sports Psychology podcast.
Jeff coached women’s tennis for 23 years at the University of Texas. His Teams won Two NCAA Championships and 18 conference titles. He was named National Coach of the Year and was Conference Coach of the Year 10 times. Today Jeff is a leadership consultant for groups in business and sports at Moore leadership.
“The problem is that the conventional approach to coaching is to do drills and scrimmage a lot. What’s lacking is any game situation (or point scenarios in tennis) to create drills where you force athletes to make decisions,” said Moore.
Many–or should I say most–athletes seek out my services because they can’t transfer their practice game to competition. They simply don’t perform as well in competition as they do in practice. Several mental game blocks can get in the way such as fear of failure, lack of emotional control, thinking too much about results, and so on.
Another factor that most athletes and coaches don’t consider is how you can set up training to help athletes transfer their skills to competition.
“If you make someone think and make decisions in training, it’s frustrating and creates emotional stress, along with physical stress. In that way, you are creating a positive transfer from practice to competition. You can’t create positive, optimal transfer without designing the practice around the mental dynamics,” said Moore.
Coaches and athletes must learn mental toughness during practice so they can handle the ups and downs they face in competition. The only way to do this is to set up practice to stress athletes—mentally, emotionally, and physically….