Six Mental Skills That Build Mental Toughness in Youth Athletes

There are six different mental skills that make up a mentally tough young athlete.

The six skills include:

• Self-Confidence
• Strong Focus
• Managing Mistakes
• Calming Nerves
• Goal Setting
• Having Fun

Self-Confidence

The first skill is self confidence. This refers to your child having trust in themselves and their skills.

The more confident they are, the less they're going to doubt themselves and the less they're going to second guess and hesitate when they're out there playing.

And the more confident they are, the more aggressive they're going to be playing as well.

Tip to Build Confidence

A tip that you can use to begin building self-confidence in your young athlete is to have them focus on what they do well.

When I'm working with athletes, I talk to them a lot about the experience of success. In order to become more confident, we need to have the experience of seeing ourselves do well.

That's why confidence grows naturally the more you perform well during games.

But sometimes it's really easy for us to think,"I wasn't good enough," and focus only on mistakes.

So what you can do is have your young athlete focus on what they did well after practices and games. Over time, this will give them the opportunity to see themselves as successful.

Strong Focus

The next mental skill is strong focus.

This is where they have the ability to center their attention on what they're doing.

With a young athlete, when it comes to improving their focus, what we want to work on first is getting them to be able to recognize when they become distracted, and then work on refocusing themselves when they do become distracted.

Tip to Improve Focus

A tip that you can begin applying is using what's known as a thought-stopping phrase.

A thought-stopping phrase is a simple statement that they memorize and apply in moments when they are becoming distracted.

Here are a few examples of thought-stopping phrases:

• Let it go, focus on the next play.
• Take a breath, let it go.
• Stop, be present.

Managing Mistakes

The third mental skill is managing mistakes. The ability to manage mistakes means that your young athlete recognizes, in the moment, that they've made a mistake and they're able to move on quickly.

Because of how frustrating mistakes are, it's easy to lose composure after a mistake. But this will only increase their chances of making more mistakes.

So, they need to learn how to recognize when they're upset, and then work on calming themselves down.

Tip to Manage Mistakes

A tip that you can begin applying to help them manage mistakes is to work on reframing what mistakes mean to them.

What you can have them do is begin looking back over their mistakes after practices and games and ask themselves the question, how can I learn from this?

What this is going to do is it's going to take mistakes from things that are only negative and only mean they weren't good enough, and it's going to turn them into a way for them to improve as a player.

Calming Nerves

The next mental skill is calming nerves before games.

The ability to calm nerves and reduce anxiety before games is an incredibly powerful skill for any athlete to learn, especially younger athletes.

Tip to Reduce Nerves

The best tip to reduce nerves before games is to begin using something known as count breathing.

Count breathing is where your young athlete will breathe in for a count of five, for example, and then breathe out for a count of five. And they keep doing this over and over again.

This is going to do two things.

1. The counting itself will center their attention in the present moment. One of the main driving forces for anxiety in younger athletes is thinking too much about the future. So, the more they can focus on what they're doing right now and keep their attention in the present moment, the better. 
2. The other thing the breathing will do is reduce the physical symptoms of nervousness and anxiety they're experiencing.

Goal Setting

The next mental skill is goal setting.

This involves the skill of setting long-term goals and setting more short-term goals. 

Long-term goals are great for motivation, while short-term goals are great for improving their focus on performance during games.

Tip for Goal Setting

The tip for this one is to begin getting your young athlete to set process goals for practices and games.

A very simple example is a softball player setting the process goal of watching the ball all the way to her bat.

That's a simple, but good process goal.

You want to be sure that the process goals your child sets are 100% controllable.

Enjoying Themselves

The last mental skill is enjoying themselves.

This means that they're training themselves to focus on what they enjoy. Because the more they have fun while they play, the better they're going to play.

But it's also about identifying what keeps them from enjoying themselves.

Tip to Have More Fun

Before games, ask your young athlete, what are you looking forward to for today's game? What are you excited about?

And then afterwards, you could even ask them, what did you enjoy about today's game? Did you have fun with today's game?

Final Thoughts

Those are the six mental skills that your young athlete needs to build mental toughness, and a tip that you can use to start building each skill.

Now, if you want a more in depth approach to building these six mental skills, then you need the Mentally Tough Kid course.

With the Mentally Tough Kid course, I've taken these six mental skills and turned them into six different modules.

Within each module, there's going to be five videos for your young athlete to follow along with. And within each video, there's an exercise for them to complete within their workbook.

It's a very actionable program that's going to get your young athlete started with building mental toughness.

Click the button below to learn more about the Mentally Tough Kid course.

Thank you for reading, and I wish you and your young athlete the best of success in all that you do.