You’re midway through the season and you’re going up against a team with a far worse record. Last time you played this team, you OUTplayed them. Your team is going into the game confident (maybe even a little cocky) and all-but certain they’ll get that W. From every angle, this game should be a shut out. 

But as the game progresses, you notice:

• Your athletes are making careless mistakes
• You’re team is getting intercepted/rebounded/fouled out
• Tempers are running high
• Your team is inconsistent - timid one moment, overly aggressive the next

As the game continues, tensions rise high and frustration, disbelief, even a little panic bubbles to the surface. 

At the end of the game, you’ve lost… or maybe you’ve won. The score isn’t really the point. The point is that you played poorly.

You played down to your opponent. 

When we asked our Mental Training for Coaches Facebook group, “What do you do when your team...

Why would I want to stick out MORE by being the best?” 

....Said no man EVER (okay I’m exaggerating).

But if you coach women, you know what I’m talking about. Your female athletes don’t necessarily say this out loud, but their subconscious brain is SCREAMING it at them daily.

You see it in their performance; they play down to their teammates, don't take the last shot even though they are most likely to make it (is it fear of failure or fear of success?), don't score ‘too much’, play a great game or great half and then self-sabotage by playing down to a lower level of performance.

I know a little bit about this. I always wanted to be the best. And yet even I felt at a very young age the social COST of being the best. And it made me change my performance.

I stuck out on my high school team, I was from a different part of town, I was higher socioeconomically than many of my teammates, I was the arguably the best player as a...

In my opinion, one of the great joys of playing sports is that I can let out my inner bitch without apologizing. (and please don’t email me about using the word bitch… it’s the word that resonates with me.)

But it is an interesting thing isn’t it... when you really think about it? 

We are allowed to be rough and aggressive and competitive in a way that isn’t necessarily socially acceptable in everyday life (and dare I say for women in particular). Sports is this pure area that allows us to be free from being ‘nice’, even as we teach sportsmanship and leadership and all those other great attributes.

I get that. YOU get that. But do your ATHLETES get that?

Often times women still pay a price for being aggressive on the playing field, or they perceive that there will be a cost.

So many don’t take advantage of this safe space to let it all go. Whether it’s because they are nice ‘Christian girls’ (as one coach told...

You know the feeling. Your hands are sweaty. Your stomach is in knots and you may or may not have to pee like 5 times. Your heart is racing, and you cannot wait for this feeling to go away.

Logically, you know you are not in danger. It’s just a job interview, first date, game, public speaking, or difficult conversation. But your brain isn’t really listening to that argument. Yes, you are safe, but you just don’t feel like it.

Ahhh the fight or flight response. That glorious, automatic reaction of our sympathetic nervous system that has kept our species alive for 200,000 years (give or take). The response that works beautifully when necessary, but inconveniently comes to visit during seemingly innocuous situations like first dates or presentations.

We’ve all been there. And for most of us, we want to stop feeling that way immediately.

Our bodies are literally screaming at us to rectify the situation, change SOMETHING.

But what if the thing we really...

"I’ve been visualizing ever since I was 12 or 13 when my amazing mother introduced me to it," Bianca Andreescu said. "I find it very helpful ... I believe we create our reality with our mind."

No big deal, she just won the U.S. Open at 19 years old, defeating 23 time Grand Slam winner Serena Williams.

YOU know visualization is a powerful mental training tool for athletes. You may already be implementing it with your team, maybe by utilizing our popular BRAVR™ Method.

But I want to take a moment and REALLY talk about visualization. 

In my humble opinion, visualization is the single best tool for getting your subconscious brain aligned with what you are working toward. When you fail to do this, hard work doesn't mean as much as it should. You can easily work and work and work and self-sabotage every step of the way without even knowing it.

That’s why, when I work with athletes, I teach them to visualize. When I work with mindset...

I see it all the time. I start working with a client and suddenly they are able to:

• Lose 50 lbs despite the fact that I don’t teach ANYTHING about fitness or weight loss
• Quit smoking after YEARS of trying despite the fact that I know nothing about any smoking cessation tactics.
• Start 100k businesses after years of thinking about it.
• Go from crying and wanting to quit their sport to playing their best in a few weeks.

Am I just really good at what I do?  

Well yes, but I’m not a magician. As I tell my mindset coaching students, what we do is NOT heal people or get people to another level or pull out better performances; what we do is hold a space for them to find that in themselves. Now, this isn’t EASY to do. I will give us credit for that. But the work is done by the client. We don’t FIX them, we help them find the solutions inside them, to trust the path they’ve been scared to want; we help them step into another level with a steadying...

 I went skydiving one time. It wasn’t my idea. I was doing a summer internship and my boss surprised me with a skydiving day. We drove out to a hangar in the middle of Iowa cornfields. And he said, “it’s paid for, you can do it or not.”

So, I jumped. I knew I would never have another opportunity like that.

I’ve done other scary things- I’ve ran faster than I’d ever ran before, I’ve lifted weights I wasn’t sure I could do. I’ve swung from a trapeze 50 feet in the air. I’ve gone ziplining over the jungle.

But I’m not really an adrenaline junkie. I look at people that take serious physical risks (ummmm like Free Solo??? Don’t even get me started on the riskiness of some people) and I’m not one of them. I like to PUSH myself physically but setting yourself up for getting hurt is a whole other ballgame. I always say there is real fear and there is FAKE fear.

(And then there is the middle area of...

A few years ago I started learning about emotional labeling and it sort of blew my mind. Not the principle of it- it’s exactly what it sounds like… you identify your emotions and label them. But you do it in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you ARE the emotion. So instead of saying I’m stressed, or I’m sad, you say I FEEL sad or I FEEL stressed.

Which is a pretty awesome tool because it helps you recognized that, although it feels like it, we are not ACTUALLY our emotions. Emotions are based on our thoughts, our thoughts we have the power to change.

But I digress. What got me about this particularly mindset hack is that it’s so freaking SIMPLE! I wondered why I failed to learn about it until I was 30. But isn’t that the case with a lot of these tools- we FINALLY find the ones that work for us and we think ‘why did no one tell me this before?’

I was listening to a podcast this morning about emotional labeling which got my...

It’s easy to assume that because you HAVE support in your life that it’s the RIGHT support. Most of the time, I'd venture to say the support we have on an everyday basis is enough for doing what we are doing NOW. But if we are trying to get to another level, trying to break through to something bigger and bolder, the support structure around us is like the scaffolding needed to build a higher building. It has to rise for us to build higher.

Because here is the thing: There is the ‘I love you, I believe in you and your big goals’ type of support. And there is the “You can push yourself way more and I’ll support you every step of the way.” And it’s really hard for people to serve both types of support consistently. Yes, my husband can kick my butt at times (and definitely does) but EVERY time we sit down for a glass of wine, do I REALLY want him in that role? Does he want to be in that role all the time? Of course not.

...

Note: This video is about the Mindset Coach Certification. Applications for the Mindset Coach Certification are currently closed through spring of 2020. To be the first to know when applications open again, put your name on our waitlist.

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