One of the greatest challenges of using mental skills during performance involves knowing which mental skills to use, how, and when to use them. Just like with physical skills, performers should practice mental skills until mastering them. The off-season or pre-season may be the best time to learn, practice, and master mental skills because performers can make adjustments, learn which mental skills work best for them given their performance tasks, and how to use them under less pressure to perform. In addition, these skills can be practiced repetitively enough to become habit, eventually automatically showing up when needed with much less effort, freeing up effort to focus, just play, and perform in an optimal flow state.
Unfortunately, many performers seek mental skills training when performance isn’t going so well, often in the middle of a season, hoping to apply them readily and quickly turn around their performance. Performers can still certainly learn to use mental skills effectively mid-season, but selecting and timing the use of mental skills based on the context of performance tasks may require more time, effort, thinking, and practice, straining effort and resources that could otherwise be devoted to performance itself. Consulting a certified mental performance coach or certified sport psychologist can help performers reduce the mental and emotional burden of learning, applying mental skills, and performing mid-season.
One of the many ways athletes get tripped up when learning new mental skills, for instance, is by using step-by-step focusing and/or positive self-talk for well-learned tasks. Attentional focus and positive self-talk skills have been shown to benefit athletes as part of an evidence-based mental skills package, but research also shows that when and how performers use focus and self-talk can determine whether self-talk helps or hurts performance. For skilled performers, step-by-step attentional focus strategies, and self-talk consistent with self-instruction, have been shown to decrease the quality of performance in both skilled golfers and soccer players. For novice performers just learning tasks, this strategy may actually acquire physical skills and performance.
If you’ve mastered physical skills, thinking about the steps involved is overkill, and overthinking can interfere with optimal performance. While focus and positive self-talk can be helpful, instead of using them to overthink well-learned physical skills during competitive performance, it’s usually better to apply these skills before performance as a mental warm-up or after performance to learn which adjustments to make in the future. The take home message here is novice performers just learning physical skills should focus and perhaps use instructional self-talk to acquire skills. Advanced performers should typically clear their minds and just play, although they may need to acquire mental skills to get to this point, skills often best learned in the offseason or pre-season. The subtleties of sport psychology can make all of the difference for performers, so consider deeply learning mental skills by reading and practicing extensively and/or consulting a certified mental performance coach or certified sport psychologist.
