People believe that you are either mentally confident, or you are not. That’s not exactly true, you have to train your mind, just like you have to train your body. The good news is if you take the time in training your mind to be confident, then it makes practice and drilling easier and more effective and you are ready for anything at your big event or game.

Tips to Make Your Mind Strong

In this video, Craig talks to a team of wrestlers’ right before their match. They won the tournament by one point as a team.

 

Mental Confidence

Well, there is no standard definition, but I have come up with one and it comes down to this: Focus, Confident, Determined, and Resilient. Resilient basically means being able to bounce back. Now, is being mentally confident useful for wrestling and the rest of your life? Yes, That’s what I am all about.

Importance of Mental Game

Every single screw up, every singlechoke, every single mistake you’ve ever made in wrestling or outside life, you can trace back to the mental game. Coaches, and rightly so, will always tell you, “Man, you got to work hard!”. Absolutely! I am not alone with that.

Questions that revolve in an athlete’s mind are:28711112_lWhat if your mental game is not there?
What if you don’t have determination?
Are you going to work hard?
What if you are not motivated?
Are you going to work hard?
What if you really just have underlying beliefs that say, “You know I can’t do this! This is guy is better than me.”
Are you going to work hard? No! Due to the lack mental confidence, your muscles will be weakened by your mind. You will not be able to perform at your potential.

Optimum Performance Formula

If we sum it up, we get the formula for optimum performance. Performance equals your potential minus your interference. That’s what we are going to discuss in this article; you already have potential, what we need is to reduce the interference. Your potential increases every time you learn a new skill, even from what you are learning from me today. That explodes and expands your potential.

What defines whether you are going to play your potential or not and what kind of performance will result in today is interference!

training for mental toughnessTo be at the top of your mental game, you need to start tackling your mental interferences. Let’s start with Belief! Now a lot of coaches will go out there and say you’ve got to believe in yourself. How many of you guys ever heard that? Right, right! What does that mean? Who wants to volunteer and answer what is belief?

Well, the answer is, Confidence. More specifically is believing in yourself!

”Knowing that you are going to win!” That’s fabulous. How do you get there? Have you ever been there? You ever get that feeling that you just know you are going to win this one? Sometimes!! What’s that?
“When you have won it before.” That’s a great one. That’s fabulous. We’re going to confidence.

Absolutely, so I actually did an interview with one of the top sports psychologists in the country, Allen Fox. He works with tennis players, and he said, “I don’t know any other way to get confidence other than to have past success.”

And I said, “What? What if you have never had past success?” We don’t come out of the womb with success. We create it from somewhere – right? So this is what I really want you guys to believe. You can create your own success from scratch out of nowhere! Now how do you do that? Well, that’s simple, start with what you do best!

training for mental toughnessHere is what we do as human beings and especially as athletes. We talk to ourselves. We tell ourselves what we don’t do well. And we hear these voices all the time in our head.
Well, I am not good at this move.
Well, I am not good away on visiting.
I am not as good as that guy.
That guy pinned me last time. He owns me.
Those are the kind of things we tell ourselves.

What you need to do is tell yourself what you are good at far more often. It needs to be 10 to 1. As I work with a lot of parents while I work with athletes and maybe you can recognize this in parents or parents that you know, they are all real good at telling their kids what they don’t do right and what we want them to do correct? Yeah, some of you have got parents that are like that.

To be mentally confident, we as parents and you as your own parent, it needs to be 10 to 1. “You’re great!” versus the one you know you need improvement on; needs to be 10 to 1.

We all want the best for our kids and we’ve got more free training for mental toughness for you. Check out our special ebook called training for mental toughnessThe 10 Commandments to Being A Great Sports Parent and learn how to talk to your kids so they will listen.

training for mental toughnessWelcome to the Winner’s Circle

Craig, the Mental Toughness Trainer