Athlete Tip: How to Give Yourself a Competitive Advantage In Your Sport

Welcome back to the raising elite competitors podcast. I'm coach Bri, a mental performance coach for girl athletes and athletes. This is a special athlete tip episode just for you. We are talking about how to give yourself a competitive advantage or a competitive edge, whatever you are looking for. This is how you're going to do it now, before I get into exactly how you can give yourself that competitive advantage, I want to quickly give a shout out to an athlete that was inside our program called the elite mental game. She said this the other day, she goes, Hey, I have had a mindset shift and it unlocked some potential. I didn't know. I had, instead of focusing on how good I am compared to others and constantly trying to get better and better, I have focused on enjoying myself and everything. I do. This mindset shift has not only allowed me to have more fun and make my time worthwhile, but I've also noticed I'm doing better. Amazing. Okay. So can you see this mindset shift that just happened with this athlete instead of focusing on other people and how good she is compared to other people? So it was just kind of looking around and then probably feeling. Kind of terrible about yourself most of the time, because if you're constantly comparing it, just not a great feeling and it kind of up and down and all over the place and said, I'm going to focus on myself. I'm gonna focus on enjoying what I'm doing. I'm going to focus on my own improvement. I guess what? I'm having more fun. My time feels better and I'm improving what uh, awesome shifts. So nice job. Keep going. Okay. Let's talk about how to give yourself a competitive advantage. First, I have a question for you. If I were to ask you. How much of your sport do you think is mental. So when I say. What comes to mind? Like what percentage out of a hundred, what percentage of your sport that you play? Is mental. What would you come up with? Now there's no wrong answer here, but. Most athletes want to ask him that question say anywhere from about 75 to 99% of their sport is mental. And we look at research in this area. It confirms that. Your sport is mental. Meaning that what you think about. What you do under pressure. How you respond to mistakes and if you come back from them or not, how you prepare what you're thinking about when you're up there in pressure situations, all of that is on the mental side of the sport. And if you are beating yourself up, if you can't come back from mistakes, if every time you're in a pressure situation, You crumble a little bit. And if a coach pulled you out, you get super negative and down on yourself. All of those things are not going to help you play your best. So if you are not good, On the mental side of the sport. And if you don't believe in yourself, if you really struggle with confidence, which most athletes do from time to time, it's very normal, but you don't know how to get out of that. Then you, aren't actually going to allow your physical skills to pay off. You can practice as much as you want. And honestly, That's the easy part. If you want to give yourself a competitive advantage, you have to train more than you, just your body. I'm going to be honest with you right now. Every athlete, trains the physical side of the game it's easiest thing to do. You're not special. If you train the physical side of the game, every athlete goes to practice. Every athlete likely puts in the good ones are putting in some extra reps to. The good ones are focusing and working hard and practice. Like you're probably doing that already. So are all the other athletes who are trying to be great, the best athletes though, don't just stop there. They give themselves an advantage by training things like how fast they come back from mistakes. They train how they deal with pressure. They train their confidence. They train how they respond to negative teammates. They train how they respond to crowds that are taunting them or coaches that they think are making bad decisions And honestly, as a coach myself, if I have two athletes who are of similar skill putting in similar work ethic, Right. And they're of similar talent. And one can get over mistake in three seconds. And the other one takes like a minute. Or a longer to get back from a mistake. Guess, which athlete I'm choosing guess which athlete I'm banking on. The athlete that can get over mistakes, no matter how much physical training you've done, no matter how much potential you have, if you can't get our mistakes fast. And if every time the pressure is on. He can't make your surf or you can't make that shot. It doesn't matter. All of that work you just did before all those hours that you put in practicing all of those reps that you did, that you thought like, oh, I'm getting ahead because I'm putting in all these extra reps. Guess what if you can't turn it on when the pressure is on when it's game time. And you're crumbling and those moments. It's actually not. Worth anything. So to give yourself a competitive advantage, you've got to deal with the best athletes do, and that is they train their mind. They don't just train their body. And training your mind is actually simpler than you might think it is, but you do just need to follow a plan, follow a process. So some easy ways that you can just get started in this area is learn how to come back from mistakes. Have a routine. Inside the elite mental game, we teach something called a snapback routine, and this is a combination of a deep breath. Reset word at the top of that breath and then a reset gesture on the exhale. This has a variety of things that breath helps kind of regulate your nervous system. The reset word is a word that you want to feel when you're playing out there. We find this for athletes. Through an activity where they identify their best playing moment, their most fun playing moment so far. And they pick a word that describes that. So things like joy present focused. Whatever it is, every athlete's word is individual. And that just helps them kind of get back into the present moment and remind them how they want to play. The reset signal is something that they do to help ground them. So it's anything from like, You know, snapping their fingers, something very simple, adjusting a hair tie. Maybe there's something physical on the court that never moves and they can look at that. So something that is a gesture that really helps remind them. Of Hey, I'm in the here and now. And the only thing that's important is this next play. So learn how to get back from mistakes. The faster you can. The better the athlete you are. Number two, start finding the reasons that you are capable, not the reasons you're not your brain is actually predis positioned. It's like what it likes to do. So find the negative. So there's no shortage of negative things. I'm sure you can find about yourself. I'm not good enough. I'm not short enough. I'm not pulling off and not whatever it, half. Okay. The more you focus on those things, the worst player you're going to be. Start finding the reason that you are capable, that you do deserve to be out there and stop listening to the noise that doesn't matter. And so this is training your mind to find what's going right. Finding one thing that you're grateful for today from practice finding one thing that went well. I practiced today focusing on one thing that you're going to improve on for practice the next day and find the things that are going right. Find the evidence that, Hey, I am a good player. That doesn't mean that you stopped working. That doesn't mean that you are finished. That doesn't mean that you're as good as you are ever going to be. Okay. It means that you are working towards the player you want to be while also appreciating where you are right now. So start finding the reasons that you are capable rather than not. And finally another simple thing to get started with start learning how to visualize and use your breath. Okay. What does this mean? Start visualizing the player you want to be, even if it's visualizing for a couple of minutes before you go out to practice before you would go out to a competition, start seeing yourself doing good things. Seeing yourself doing those skills that you practice, performing, seeing good outcomes in your mind. Because the more that you can create that image in your head, the more likely you are to repeat it, because you have put in the practice, you put in the skill. And so now when you combine that with that vision that you have, that's where the magic starts to happen. Using your breath. This is one of the most simple things you could do. I talked about it with snapback routine. Taking that nice, deep inhale. A lot of athletes don't realize that that actually can impact their game and bring it to a whole nother level, especially when you're feeling nervous, especially when you're kind of thrown out of the zone. So. This is how you can get yourself a competitive advantage to make sure you're training more than just the fiscal game. Everyone trains the physical part of the game. You've got to separate yourself in a different way. And if mental training is something you're like, okay. Yeah. Like this makes sense. I want to be one of the best athletes. I'm telling you right now, you will never regret that choice. And also our signature program, the lead mental game is currently open for enrollment. So if you want to check that out, it's at elite competitor.com forward slash athlete, and that will give you all the information. You can share it with your parents. On what we do to train the mental game through a proven process that is rooted in sports psychology. All right. Athletes. I'm coach brief mental performance coach for athletes. And I will see you in the next athlete tip episode of the racing elite competitors podcast.