In this session, Dr. Josh Brant, a clinical psychologist with extensive experience working with athletes, dives deep into the crucial mental skills required for success in sports, particularly for junior athletes. Dr. Brant brings both a professional background in psychology and practical coaching insights, focusing on emotional control, resilience, and mental toughness. He emphasizes how coaches can effectively guide their athletes through the mental challenges that often accompany athletic performance, teaching them not only to perform well physically, but to develop a strong and confident mindset.
Mental Game Training Needs More Focus: Coaches often lack formal training in sports psychology, which can hinder their ability to effectively integrate mental skills into coaching. Mental game training should be prioritized alongside technical instruction to improve overall performance.
- Mental Toughness is a Learnable Skill: Mental toughness isn’t just about toughing it out; it’s about recovering from setbacks, maintaining composure, and adapting to challenges. This ability is not innate but can be taught and developed, especially through practices like resilience and adaptability.
- Mental Toughness Defined: The ability to recover and bounce back from perceived setbacks, challenges, or adversity with a positive and productive mindset, adapting to changing circumstances while continuing to strive towards goals. The key is learning how to manage one’s own perceptions and reactions.
- Resistance to Change is a Key Obstacle: Whether it’s a golfer resisting mental training or a coach struggling with their own development, resistance to change is a major barrier. Coaches and athletes alike need to work on overcoming this resistance to grow and improve.
- Golf Development is Holistic: Performance in golf isn’t just about technique; it involves physical fitness, nutrition, and, crucially, mental skills. All these elements must be developed simultaneously to achieve sustained improvement. There are no shortcuts—true development takes time and personalized planning.
- Coaching Yourself First: To be an effective coach, you must first be able to coach yourself. Reflecting on your own approach, mental state, and how you influence others is crucial. Coaches should be aware of their own personal issues, as they can impact how they coach athletes.
- Avoid Identifying with Scores: Mentally tough junior golfers don’t define themselves by their scores. A strong sense of self-worth and confidence comes from within, not from external outcomes like scores or rankings.
For Junior Golfers: Embrace the mental game as much as the physical one. Develop resilience, learn from setbacks, and focus on progress, not perfection.
For Parents: Support your child’s mental development as much as their physical training. Help them learn to bounce back from disappointments and focus on the journey of improvement.
For Coaches: Invest in your own personal development and mental game knowledge. Create an environment that encourages mental toughness and helps junior golfers grow both on and off the course.
This second part focuses a lot on practical strategies for coaching mental toughness, especially for junior athletes. It emphasizes that while optimal learning conditions are ideal, they aren’t always feasible for every coach or program. However, the ideas shared in this section offer accessible, low-resource strategies that coaches can implement.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
1. Building Mental Toughness:
- The approach to coaching mental toughness involves assessment, setting goals, designing individual plans, and reassessing over time.
- The process is dynamic and should evolve as athletes grow and face new challenges.
2. Self-Awareness:
- Self-awareness is the cornerstone of any mental change. Without understanding their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, athletes won’t be able to grow mentally.
- Self-reflection (using journals or post-practice discussions) can help athletes become more aware of their emotions and actions.
- Coaching Tip: Use open-ended questions to encourage self-reflection: “What were you thinking during that shot?” or “How did you feel before your tee shot?”
3. Resilience:
- Resilience is central to mental toughness. Coaches should design drills that introduce failure to help athletes learn to recover from setbacks.
- Coaching Tip: Use growth mindset principles. Praise effort, not results, and encourage seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.
- Have athletes do resilience reviews after challenges to discuss how they bounced back and what they learned.
4. Process-Focused Mindset:
- Emphasize process over outcomes. Focusing on controllable factors (like their preparation and mindset) helps athletes stay present and mentally tough.
- Coaching Tip: Encourage athletes to focus on their preshot routines and process goals rather than just the result of their shots.
- Praise process-related behavior and use analogies (like learning directions) to help athletes understand that success is a continuous journey.
5. Emotional Control:
- Strong emotional regulation is vital for mental toughness. Techniques like mindful breathing help athletes manage their emotions before they affect performance.
- Coaching Tip: Introduce strategies for emotional control into their preshot routines. Using methods like side breathing can quickly regulate emotions and improve focus.
6. Drills & Practices to Build Mental Toughness:
- Failure-Oriented Drills: Create challenges where athletes are likely to fail. The goal isn’t failure itself but how they handle it afterward.
- Journaling: Use reflective journaling to encourage athletes to think about challenges they face, how they react to adversity, and what strategies worked for them.
- Preshot Routine: Focus on reinforcing routines that center athletes, both mentally and emotionally.
7. Practical Approaches for Busy Coaches:
- Even if you don’t have the resources for in-depth assessments or a comprehensive development program, simple tools like journals, open-ended questions, and consistent focus on process goals can make a big impact.
This section provides a lot of actionable advice for coaches to integrate mental toughness into their existing practices, without needing massive resources or overhaul of their current training methods. It’s about small, consistent changes that add up over time.
The next segment really emphasizes the importance of emotional control, confidence, and resilience in coaching, especially in junior athletes. The key takeaway is that emotional intelligence isn’t about suppressing emotions but rather learning to recover from them effectively. The coach’s role is to model emotional control, reinforce it positively, and build self-awareness in their athletes.
A few coaching strategies that stood out:
- Model Emotional Control: It’s essential for coaches to practice what they preach. If you’re telling athletes to stay composed, but you don’t demonstrate it yourself, it undermines the message.
- Reinforce Emotional Control Positively: When athletes stay composed in tough situations, acknowledging and praising that can reinforce their ability to control their emotions in the future.
- Self-Awareness and Confidence: A focus on building confidence through positive journaling, self-affirmations, and highlighting past successes can help athletes better manage setbacks. This approach also includes helping athletes recover from emotional situations rather than just express or repress their feelings.
- Process-Focused Mindset: It’s about helping athletes stay focused on the process, not just the outcomes. Mistakes are part of learning, and by focusing on the steps to improvement, they can build resilience.
Finally, Dr. Brant emphasizes that learning to coach mental toughness takes time, and it’s about helping athletes get out of their own way mentally, which is one of the hardest parts of coaching. Coaching the mental game effectively can take a lot of patience and awareness of your own limits as a coach.