Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the Mindset Coach Academy podcast. My name is Lindsey Wilson. And today, we're going to talk about the number one thing that will improve your coaching. Now, it is, I don't know what day it is.
I never really know. I just got done lifting weights. And I'm doing this podcast in between another meeting. And I'm doing it actually for the second time. And I'm really excited to do it.
And my thought about doing it a second time is that this time is going to be even better. And I want to share that with you because basically what happened is I recorded it, sent it to my team, shout out to Chantel and Johnny, who do the producing and the editing of this podcast. And there was no audio. And it was totally on my side. My microphone wasn't working. And I've had this happen.
And you probably have to. Like, you finish something and your computer ate it. Or your kids ruined something.
Or your computer didn't record, like this time. And I have had, because of mindset training, I am able to watch myself spiral or almost spiral into getting really upset and the unfairness of it and the worry that it's not going to be very good the next time. And I've been able to watch myself almost like a parallel universe. And this is something we teach in the certification called the tear process, where you're watching your thoughts and the ripple effect of that one thought. And my thought right now is that I'm going to knock this out of the park, and it's going to be better than the recording that we lost. And I just wanted to offer that to you because, again, this happens in life.
And you can actually spend a lot of time being really pissed off about losing something and believing that it's gone forever and that you will never recover what you created. And in fact, the thought that this is going to be better really motivates me to do this podcast. So thanks for letting me share that. I want to talk about our process, our system, called the Mental Game Plan.
And I'm going to tell you all about it today. And even if you don't do it, how you can improve your coaching. And I'm going to tell you that in the beginning, though, because by the time you listen to this, we will be just about to start our Mental Game Plan six week system. So if you're at all interested, I would definitely encourage you to go check it out. It's on our website, positiveperformancetraining.com. It'll be in the show notes. I think we start mid-August.
So if you're listening to this anytime around that and you want in, just go check it out real quick. OK, so what I want to talk about is really deep in my heart. So I just sat down with a friend who she's kind of a badass. Well, I'm not kind of a badass. She's like absolutely a badass in the women's sports world. And she was high level in the WNBA.
She's done all kinds of things. But I'm going to tell you about our conversation because most of it was talking about the impact that coaches have. And this is something that will absolutely give me goosebumps to talk about. But if you're a coach or you've had a coach in your life, think about how much impact you have or your favorite coach had on your life. My favorite coach, my best coach that I ever had is Katie Abrahamson Henderson.
Shout out to Coach Abe. And she changed my life. She impacted my life.
I would run through a frickin' brick wall for her anytime, anywhere, love her to death. And as a coach, I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you are that type of coach. You are the type that is doing it because you believe in the power of sports to impact lives. And I would go so far as to, you might think like I do, that sports is actually the best vehicle for young people to learn these crucial life skills.
Like I know there's other ways to do it. Drama and music and performance and debate team and all this stuff. But my heart is in how this stuff affects young people through athletics. The success, the failure, the pushing yourself, the teamwork, all the things that, again, if you're in this community, I know you're not in your head because that's probably what you learn in sports. That's probably why you're a coach.
Like, sure, there is the ego of all of us that wants to win and wants to compete and wants to be our best self. But in our heart, we are coaching because we were at one point that little boy or that little girl on the court or on the playing field that had a coach that taught them how to go for a goal that we never would have believed on our own. And I just want to say that because that was in my conversation with this woman about, like, this is what coaches are doing. This is, like, the ripple effect that a coach can have because those little boys and little girls are then taking those skills and they're applying it to their relationships. They're applying it to their jobs. They're applying it to their lives, to their parenting, to coaching themselves. And it's like, I literally get choked up talking about it because it is so crucial.
And here's the part that takes it to the next level for me, is I see so many of you doing this. You are in it for the right reasons. You are heart-centered. You are like, let me impact some young people. That is, like, your mission in life.
And how many skills and tools are we actually giving you? And that's what, like, oh, that, like, gets me. You know what I mean? Because it's like, we expect so much of our coaches, much like we expect from our teachers. Like, the impact on young people is, like, so huge. And yet we're teaching you the X's and O's. We teach you about concussion safety and, like, you know, you have the safe sport and all that stuff.
And, like, of course, that stuff is vitally important. But how many times have you really gotten support, help, like any kind of structure or system to help you with the one part of the game that in my guess and my experience is taking a lot of your time? And it's also a source of a lot of frustration and overwhelm, and that's the mental game, right? And here's the, like, I think sort of, like, catch 22.
Is that so many coaches get into coaching because that's what they care the most about, right? But it's also the place that I think is causing you the most time, inefficiency, feelings of helplessness, not having confidence, because you're trying to solve this massive problem. And I'm not talking about, like, mental health issues, right? Like, you have an athlete with anxiety or depression or suicide ideation or, like, any of those big things like that. Absolutely. Those need to be with a professional.
I'm talking about an athlete that's nervous for competition, an athlete that doesn't have confidence after they don't play well, a confidence that's struggling with being on the bench, that kind of stuff, right? And I know that that is, like, a huge part of your job. And it's sort of like you're running around trying to put out these little fires instead of, like, getting a sprinkler system, right? Like, you are in it for the right reasons. You're trying to solve this problem. But my guess is you're doing it really inefficiently.
And that kind of makes you feel bad, because this is the thing that you want to solve more than anything else. Like, yes, of course, we want to teach athletes how to win. We also want to teach them how to lose and still keep going.
But all that is the mental game, right? And here's the other thing that I see a lot, is if you're here, if you're in sports, you are probably a really driven person. You are probably the kind of person that is like a can-do attitude. And like, if there's a problem, I'm going to fix it. And like, I'm going to be there for my kids.
Like, I'm going to do it the right way, quote unquote, right? But here's what also contributes to this feeling of overwhelm and helplessness and like trying to do too much. Is that mentality that you have to do it all? So the way that we're going to teach it to you is like, you're going to teach these tools to your athletes so that they have like a foundation of mental skills that then when you're coming in and you're coaching the mental game, you're coaching at just a higher level.
You're not putting out like the little tiny fires. They can do that themselves. You're going to empower your athletes to have a skill set and a foundation that helps them solve some of these problems themselves. And I just want to offer that to you because I think a lot of coaches don't think that way.
I think because we're like can-do people, we're like, if there's a problem, I'm going to solve it. But what that ends up doing is creating a little bit of a co-dependent relationship where your athletes are coming to you for confidence. They're coming to you when they fail. They're coming to you to decide how they feel about themselves that day. They're coming to you to pick them up after mistakes. And it's like, sure, you can do that, but I bet you've already tried that.
And it's actually a lot of fricking work, right? You have multiple athletes, you have multiple challenges, you have maybe multiple jobs, you probably have a life outside of sports. And if it feels like you're drowning, it's not because you're not doing enough. It's not because you're not good enough.
It's because you don't have a fricking system, okay? That is like, it's not your fault. And back to my original point that I talked about with my friend is like, we don't train you. It's not your fault. It's not your fault that you're doing it this way by just trying to, what I call coach more. You're trying to coach more, give them confidence. You're trying to like believe in them more.
That's never going to work. So you're trying it that way because that's like, that's our athlete minded way of like, I'm just going to do more. I'm going to do more training, more practice, more tools.
I'm just going to throw stuff out and see what sticks. It's super inefficient. It's frustrating. It's not your fault. That's how we think. That's just how we think. And it's not your fault that we never like gave you a system.
We never taught you about any of this. Like raise your hand if when you started coaching someone was like, okay, listen, 90% of your job is going to be dealing with your athletes game between the ears, so to speak, right? And here's how you're going to handle it. Here's a toolbox. Here's a skill set. This is what you're going to do to make your coaching better, more efficient, more effective.
Here you go. No one ever did that for you. Am I right? That's what we do. Okay? So our system is called the mental game plan. I'm going to break down the six steps. And again, if you want to join the mental game plan we teach these to you over six weeks live in community. And I'm telling you that because I think that's really important. I love teaching it this way because there's going to be implementation challenges. There's going to be like little details that you want to work out.
You're going to feel so prepared by the end of this. You're going to be like, yeah, why didn't someone teach this to me when I was learning concussion training or whatever, like all the things or I went to a coaching clinic for my CEUs and I learned about basketball player. I learned about a full court press or I learned about a two, three zone. Like I learned all that stuff.
Most of my time is spent on the mental game. Why didn't anybody teach me this? This is the thing. So anyway, the mental game plan, it's $1,000. It's a six week program. You can learn more in the show notes.
We get started mid August. There you go. Okay. But even if you don't want to do that for whatever reason, I'm going to teach you, I'm going to go through the six steps today. And I'm doing this because one, I believe in the power of coaching. I believe a lot of your time and energy is spent dealing with these mental game challenges. And I also think that if you're here listening to this, spending your time, you are trying to solve this problem on your own and it's overwhelming. You're Googling it, you're reading the books, you're listening to the podcast and that's all great. But you probably don't need like more information.
You probably just need a system, like a curated system. And again, that is like what we do because I know how much you have to do from a coaching standpoint alone, much less the rest of your life. And what I want you to walk away with in this, This episode of this podcast is an understanding of do this, don't do this.
This is everything you need to coach from a mental game perspective. And here's the key, nothing that you don't. You do not need one million tools. You do not need to take one million courses.
You do not need to read 100 books and podcasts because here's the thing, you can do all that and you can still have no idea what to teach on a Tuesday afternoon. Right? Am I right? I know I'm right because I know you've experienced that and I've talked to so many of you that that's the thing. It's like, OK, I've learned these tools in, you know, I've read Carol Dweck's book and I've done personal therapy and I believe in mindfulness and like I've read all these books and I listen to Lindsey's podcast or whatever.
Right? And what do I actually teach my athletes? What do I teach them?
And then you end up either teaching them something randomly and you have no idea if it works or you get overwhelmed and say, I'll do it next season. Right? So these are the six steps. This is called the mental game plan. These are the things that you need to know yourself that will take your coaching to a totally different level.
Because most of your job is the mental game. Right? So here we go. All right. So the first thing that you really need to understand is how much the subconscious brain impacts our actions, our behavior, our results.
OK. So we know that the brain is divided into the conscious and the subconscious. We can have all kinds of thoughts and ideas about what we want to do consciously. We can know that we've got some talent and we can set a goal that we want to play in college.
If our subconscious belief is one of, I'm not good enough. I can't do that. This is scary.
This is new. I don't know if that's going to work out. I might do all this work and not get to that level and that feels scary. Everything that's going on below the surface, you could think of it like an iceberg. You can't see it, but it is 100% impacting everything that you do and your athletes do. Here's one of the most crucial things that we know about the brain. The brain actually doesn't want you to be successful. It cares zero about being quote unquote successful.
All it wants to do is survive. That is the brain's primary goal. So what we do in week one is really help you understand how the brain works in a simple, simple way that everybody can understand.
This isn't like neuroscience. These are the basic way. I teach it that way because I like learning that way and I want you to be able to teach it to your athletes. I want you to be able to help them understand how important their limiting thoughts are and how much they impact their performance and how much our brain prioritizes safety and how really not great our brain is at determining what is safe and unsafe. So let me give you one example. So I see this a lot with female athletes. So one of the things, you can have big goals for your athletes. She can have big goals for herself as far as being the best on the team.
Let's say that just a sort of a blanket statement or I'm a bad player averaging 20 points or whatever, which means she would probably be the best on the team. Right. Now she may want that.
You may want that. That may be well within her potential. There also may be subconscious deep seated fears that she's not going to be liked, that she's going to get a lot of unwanted attention, that she might get to that level and then fail. And just kind of a general angst that that's new and uncomfortable and there's going to be a lot of pressure on her. And it's not that you're going to go in and you're going to like solve all those things for her. But from a coaching perspective to understand like on a deep level, what her brain is doing will impact how you relate to her will impact your empathy and your compassion and your ability to to connect with her on a level that she understands.
Okay. It's also going to help you understand your brain. Again, this is how every human brain works. And that's what we do in step one.
We teach you how the brain works. That's week one, step one. Okay. But again, whether you do the mental game plan or not, understanding how the brain works, the basics of psychology is like a crucial thing for coaching because that is so much of what you do.
Okay. Week two, step week two of the mental game plan, step two of our process is two of our main goals, main tool. One of our two of our main tools, which is we teach visualization. We teach that in many different ways, but we teach visualization.
We teach something called the tear process, which is thought management. Okay. So similar actually to what I said in the beginning about how I responded to losing my podcast.
Okay. Managing our thought, getting curious about our thoughts, being aware of our thoughts, helping your athletes do this and doing this yourself is crucial to your coaching. You will coach at a much higher level. If you are able to manage your thoughts, if you're able to teach your athletes to manage theirs. And here's again, where we get back to, you are not going to be the one that has to hold up everyone else's mental and emotional health.
You are going to teach them tools to learn about their brain, to manage their own thoughts. Okay. So that's step two. Step three is our braver. This is our pre-practice warmup. It, the braver, if you don't know the braver, you need to check out the braver.
The braver is our most popular tool of all time. It teaches you how to create and your athletes to create a pre-practice mental warmup. Y'all know we spend a lot of time on the physical warmup and that's a good thing, right? We don't want people getting injured or pulling muscles or whatever. But how often do we spend all this time on the physical warmup and zero time on a mental warmup?
And that's just to expect our athletes to be magically, mentally focused. This is one of the most efficient ways you can get in mental training. It takes about five minutes and it hits all of the big things that we want our athletes to learn. Positive self-talk, breathing, affirmations, visualizations. It has it all in one simple mental warmup.
Definitely the braver is really, really cool. That's three. Step four is sorry, I'm getting confused. Step three is our pre-practice. OK. Step four is our pre-game routine. OK.
Here's the thing, you guys. Having your athletes understand at a basic level, the fight or flight response, how to manage their thoughts and emotions going into competition, what is a normal response when we're talking about the brain and safety? Pre-game is such a crucial piece. And here's the thing that I see so many coaches do is like they let their athletes figure it out and then they expect they put it on them. This is actually kind of like a crucial example of what I'm talking about. It's like it is not up to you to do a magical pre-game speech that magically makes people mentally prepared to compete and confident. That doesn't exist.
OK. They have to get there mentally. Sure, you can say good things before games. That's great. But the onus is not on you to have the best mental preparation in your pre-game speech. Like have them with a solid mental game plan for competition. Step four, so, so crucial. Step five, how many times have you watched your athletes crumble after a mistake? Raise your hand like one million. How much stress and frustration and worry and helplessness does that cause you so much? Right?
Because you're like, OK, there's one mistake. All right, is she going to turn that into three? Maybe I need to take her out. You know, and it's like it's this game in the middle of the game that sucks for everybody. What we know about the brain is if we can manage our thoughts and emotions in the moment to be able to have a routine when the mistakes happen, we know they're going to happen.
This is going to pay so many dividends. And it's also one of the low hanging fruits, I believe, in mental training because athletes love it. It's like this anchor. They know what the mistakes are going to happen. They hate it too.
They don't know what to do. And now they actually have this thing. And by the way, if you do it as a team, it's super cool, super fun. Everybody buys into it.
It's just a cool thing to do. That's step five. Step six is our post competition routine.
Nobody does this, you guys. And it's one of the simplest, most effective ways, if you actually want to improve, is having an evaluation after competition. We teach you how to do that in mental game plan. Really simple. Key is to keep it really, really simple.
Okay. So that is our six steps, you guys. We're talking about how the brain works. We're talking about simple tools of thought management and subconscious management as well in our two tools and step two. Then we go into pre practice, pre game, in game mistake ritual and post competition routines. Those are the six steps, you guys. Okay. We're going to put a link below.
You can learn about the steps in the mental game plan. But here's what I just want you guys to know. You are doing crucial work and I know that you're doing it for the right reasons.
I know that your heart centered. I know that you're also frustrated because all of this is a lot of work and no one prepared you. No one gave you a skill set or toolbox. And so you go out and you try to do it yourself and it's massively frustrating. Doing it ad hoc or I call it the throwing spaghetti approach is so inefficient. And I know you hate inefficiency. I know you feel helpless and overwhelmed. And my guess is that either you're trying to do it and it's really messy and it makes you feel like you can't do it. Or you're saying we're going to do it next year or we're going to wait till we have a budget and we're going to bring somebody in.
And what I want to do when I want to encourage you to do is make your life easier. You deserve to have a system in the one part of coaching that is probably causing you the most stress. How much let me just ask you this. How much stress and how much time do you spend worrying about how mentally prepared your athletes are going to be for the next game.
Probably a lot. Probably talk about with your spouse. You probably talk about with your assistant coaches. You probably worry about it. You probably have conversations with athletes. You probably try to get them. You try to get your pregame speech. As I mentioned, like it is a huge part of coaching.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a trusted proven system. You deserve it. And here's what I also want you to know. You can do it.
Maybe you're even the best person to do it because you have the rapport and the relationship with your athletes already. And here's what I also want you to know. You don't have to do it all at once. You can cherry pick a couple things and you could try them this season. And then you can implement a couple more the next season.
You can do it at a slow pace. And even if you implemented one of our steps, I can guarantee you'd find results. And I can also guarantee that it'll make you feel so much better knowing your athletes have the tools that the onus is not all on you to babysit them, to make them believe in themselves, to give them confidence, to have the great pregame speech, to high five them after mistakes and hope that it works. Like you can take all that off the table and just know that they have tools.
Wouldn't that be nice? You deserve that. You are already working so hard to impact lives.
I know that's why you're here. You can do it better. You can do it easier and simpler. And you can coach at that higher level and have more of an impact when you have a system.
All right, guys, you deserve it. This is the number one thing that I hear from coaches is the mental side of coaching is what they love, but it's also the hardest. You can do more with it when you have a system. And also, here's what I also want you to say. Thank that coach that you have in your life that impacted you.
Right? Like go thank them. And if you're a coach, thank you. Thank you. You are doing amazing work in the world, even when you feel like you're not even the even the times when you feel like you could you wish you could do more.
You are doing the work and you are having such an impact on the world. All right. Get do yourself a favor and make it easier for yourself. We would love to have you in the mental game plan.
Check out the show notes before. And again, even if you don't join, please know that this system are the things that you need to teach and nothing that you don't. All right. Thank you for all the great work you do in the world. And we'll see you next week for the mental game plan.
