The best way to build mental toughness in young athletes is to work on six critical mental game areas.
If parents and coaches put in just a few minutes a week, developing mental toughness in their student-athletes isn’t tricky.
Here are the six ways to build mental toughness with kids:
- Build self-awareness – without knowing your strengths and weaknesses, it’s hard to know what to improve. Developing self-awareness with kids starts with emotional intelligence. One of the most significant emotions that holds young athletes back is anxiety. Coach your athletes on recognizing anxiety so they can be aware it’s arrived at and have a strategy for reducing it. Teach them to acknowledge their elevated heart rate and a racing mind and be mindful of their overthinking. Once they recognize their emotional state, they can start to manage it.
- Manage their focus – teach young athletes that what they focus on expands. This is a critical lesson for developing mental toughness, as where your focus goes, your energy flows. If an athlete is overthinking or losing confidence or belief in themselves, it’s often the result of what they are focusing on. An athlete who focuses on the present feels energized and ready to compete. An athlete focused on a mistake made minutes ago becomes easily frustrated, loses focus, and falls apart quickly.
- Coach how to let go of mistakes – mistakes will happen, so youth athletes must have a strategy for managing how they bounce back. The key here is to help your athletes understand they are experiencing mistakes and failure, yet they themselves are not a mistake or failure. Many athletes tend to identify with their mistakes, and this carries a much heavier weight than simply experiencing them. Listen for “I am” statements, as this reveals when teen athletes identify with their mistakes.
- Build their self-belief – athletes who perform at their best believe in themselves. They feel confident in their abilities and compete in alignment with who they think they are as a player. Youth athletes who don’t believe in themselves will struggle to be mentally tough and perform under pressure. Self-belief is a culmination of tiny bits of evidence accumulated over time that become the proof they need to believe. Highlight small wins by verbally recognizing them and the skills or characteristics that helped to achieve them, and self-belief will grow.
- Recognize the “why,” not just the result – coaches and parents of student-athletes make a huge error that destroys a kid’s confidence. They praise the results a kid gets without recognizing the “why” behind the result they achieved. If you just praise the result kids solely focus on results and disregard the process it took to get to the result. This puts their mental toughness in jeopardy. It’s okay to recognize results, but make sure the praise comes on how they get to the result. For example, “Great three pointer Beth, you maintained composure and stayed focus when it mattered.”
- Keep sports fun for youth athletes – don’t ever forget that kids want to have fun. They will check out once you make sports feel like a job for a kid. A kid who falls out of love with their sport is destined to fail and likely give up on sports altogether. The reason your kid got into sports was a love for the game. Don’t put any more pressure on them to perform. They already put enough pressure on themselves.
If you aren’t quite sure how to implement these strategies I can help.
My name is Dr. Jay Cavanaugh, and I’ve been a mental Performance Coach for youth athletes since 2017.
I specialize in sports performance anxiety and have developed a system for turning strong athletes into pro athletes.
My work is with both pro athletes across the world as well as student-athletes.
Reach out to me using the contact form or call me at 951-999-8423.
