Mental Training Isn't a Bonus Anymore. It's Part of the Job.

I had a conversation with a coach recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

He was incredibly experienced. Great technical coach. His athletes respected him, his teams competed well, and from the outside looking in, he was doing everything "right."
But he looked at me and said, "I know mindset matters... I want to do it…I just don't know where it fits in with everything else."

Honestly, I think that's where a lot of coaches are right now.

Nobody is arguing that the mental game matters anymore. Ten years ago, maybe. But today? Every coach has watched an athlete completely unravel after one mistake. Every coach has seen a talented player suddenly lose confidence halfway through a season. Every coach has had an athlete who looked incredible in practice but couldn't perform under pressure when it mattered most.

The conversation has shifted from whether mindset matters to what do I actually do about it (with limited practice time and limited bandwidth)?

And I don't blame coaches for feeling stuck.

Most of us were never taught how to coach confidence. We were taught how to teach mechanics. We learned drills. We learned strategy. We learned how to break down film and make adjustments. Maybe. MAYBE we were taught about how to pick captains or how to create culture.

But nobody ever handed us a framework for teaching an athlete how to recover after failure or quiet the voice in their head after a bad performance. And just think of how much of coaching is just those two things I just mentioned?

So what happens?

We fall back on the phrases we grew up hearing ourselves.

"Be confident."

"Shake it off."

"Next play."

"Believe in yourself."

"We need to be mentally tough."

I know because I've said all of those things.

The problem isn't that they're wrong.

The problem is that they are just words.

Imagine walking into the weight room for the first time and having your strength coach simply say, "Be stronger."

You'd expect a program. Repetitions. Progression. Coaching. Feedback. A plan.

Yet somehow, when it comes to confidence, we expect athletes to figure it out on their own. And to be fair some of them do. Which gives us the message that people either have ‘it’ or don’t.

So we hope they do or that they somehow figure it out along the way.

That's a huge reason why so many athletes end up in what I call the "sideline spiral."

You know what I’m talking about….

They make one mistake. Their body language changes. They replay the mistake over and over. You try to give them a quick hive five or pep talk…. Doesn’t work.

They're no longer paying attention to what's happening in the game because they're still living thirty seconds in the past. Then another mistake happens, which confirms the story they've already started telling themselves which is usually something along the lines of ‘I suck and my teammates hate me and everyone in the stands thinks I suck’.

This is the moment where prepared mental performance training matters and yet so few people have a plan. Which is CRAZY because we know these moments are coming AND what we’ve been doing likely hasn’t worked at all in the past.

The reason this athlete gets off track is not the mistake itself, there simply wasn't a process for stopping the spiral before it takes them off track.

That's the difference mental performance coaching makes.

It isn't about creating perfect athletes who never struggle. It isn't about making everyone think positively all the time. Honestly, that's not real life and it won’t work with your athletes.

It's about giving athletes a process they can return to when things inevitably go sideways.

The longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that mental training needs to be simple and doable. Less is more. But it does need to be prioritized because…

It changes the way you coach everything else.

A batting practice becomes an opportunity to practice routines.

A timeout becomes an opportunity to teach emotional regulation.

A film session becomes an opportunity to reshape the story an athlete is telling themselves and create a teachable moment where they can get curious about what the brain is doing in that moment.

Team culture shifts because there are vulnerable, real conversations about the struggles that everyone has (where athletes likely felt alone in their struggle previously).

Eventually, mindset stops being a lesson.

It becomes part of the culture.

And here's something else I've learned that surprised me over the years.

Before we coach our athletes' mindset, we usually have to coach our own.

Our athletes are paying attention to much more than our words. They're watching how we respond after a tough loss.

They're watching what frustration looks like. They're watching how we handle pressure, uncertainty, criticism, and mistakes.

Whether we realize it or not, we're modeling mindset every single day.

That's why I always tell coaches that learning mental performance isn't just about becoming better for your athletes. It's about becoming a better leader, a better communicator, and often, a healthier human being yourself.

If you've been feeling that pull lately, that sense that your athletes need more than drills and game plans, but you're not quite sure where to start, I want you to know you're not alone.

In fact, that's exactly why the Mindset Coach Academy exists.

Not because coaches need another certification to hang on the wall.

Because they need a practical system that helps them teach confidence, resilience, focus, emotional regulation, and all of the things we ask athletes to have but were never shown how to develop.

The future of coaching isn't choosing between physical training and mental training.

The future is understanding they were never meant to be separated in the first place.

We have two ways to become a coach that coaches the mental game. The Mental Game Plan is for coaches that want to use mental performance training with their teams. The Mindset Coach Academy is for coaches that want to become mental performance coaches with paid clients.