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Today?s Mental Skills Tip ? Coaches and team leaders should make it a priority to nurture three traits within the culture of their teams: enthusiasm, excellence, and forgiveness. The first two are common goals, but the importance of forgiveness for consistency is often underappreciated. Without forgiveness, mistakes make the goal of enthusiasm impossible to maintain. Having both excellence and forgiveness as priorities strikes the balance of always pushing harder, but never losing emotional control when mistakes and bad luck inevitably occur.
The goal is to give your best effort one play at a time. You have to be focused and confident to achieve this goal. How are mentally tough competitors able to maintain their confidence and focus no matter what just happened? Part of the equation is certainly a relentless focus on controlling the controllables, but another part is the skill of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the only key skill of great competitors, it is also a common characteristic of happy people.
To focus, you have to forget about the past. The normal (and great way) to do this is to think,"forget the past, it's over with. What's next?" The more you do this, the more often it works. Still, there are occasions when it doesn't work. You are upset or frustrated at a mistake by yourself or someone else, or maybe the fact that life's not fair. When this occurs, you will either remain irritated and unfocused, or forgive so you can forget about it. Forgiveness isn't just a performance enhancement skill, it's also critical for happiness in life. It should be practiced and steadily improved, just like any skill.
Many tough athletes are poor at this skill. Their personality leads them to beat themselves up for their mistakes and gloss over the many good things they are doing. This is the exact opposite of how to consciously build confidence. Why should you forgive a mistake or bad luck? Because if you don't, you will probably not let it go, causing the problem to snowball. Athletes understand this readily, but many forget the other reason. As a result, they typically will not forgive, despite their knowledge that doing so would be useful. The other reason: nobody is perfect.
Accepting that all people are flawed and going to make mistakes on the field does not mean that it is acceptable to be mediocre. True, everyone makes mistakes so forgiveness is wise, but it is also a mark of a champion to keep pushing forward. Coach Wooden knew how to balance out these seemingly contradictory ideas. He taught," Strive for perfection, but never expect it."
COACHING POINT - Avoid the words "should" and "supposed to" in both thoughts and spoken word. This is no easy task for coaches, many of whom have deep habits of thinking those words. I certainly did when I was a college baseball coach. Yet, simply changing "should" to "could" allows excellence to be pursued without guilt.
CoachTraub
The goal is to give your best effort one play at a time. You have to be focused and confident to achieve this goal. How are mentally tough competitors able to maintain their confidence and focus no matter what just happened? Part of the equation is certainly a relentless focus on controlling the controllables, but another part is the skill of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the only key skill of great competitors, it is also a common characteristic of happy people.
To focus, you have to forget about the past. The normal (and great way) to do this is to think,"forget the past, it's over with. What's next?" The more you do this, the more often it works. Still, there are occasions when it doesn't work. You are upset or frustrated at a mistake by yourself or someone else, or maybe the fact that life's not fair. When this occurs, you will either remain irritated and unfocused, or forgive so you can forget about it. Forgiveness isn't just a performance enhancement skill, it's also critical for happiness in life. It should be practiced and steadily improved, just like any skill.
Many tough athletes are poor at this skill. Their personality leads them to beat themselves up for their mistakes and gloss over the many good things they are doing. This is the exact opposite of how to consciously build confidence. Why should you forgive a mistake or bad luck? Because if you don't, you will probably not let it go, causing the problem to snowball. Athletes understand this readily, but many forget the other reason. As a result, they typically will not forgive, despite their knowledge that doing so would be useful. The other reason: nobody is perfect.
Accepting that all people are flawed and going to make mistakes on the field does not mean that it is acceptable to be mediocre. True, everyone makes mistakes so forgiveness is wise, but it is also a mark of a champion to keep pushing forward. Coach Wooden knew how to balance out these seemingly contradictory ideas. He taught," Strive for perfection, but never expect it."
COACHING POINT - Avoid the words "should" and "supposed to" in both thoughts and spoken word. This is no easy task for coaches, many of whom have deep habits of thinking those words. I certainly did when I was a college baseball coach. Yet, simply changing "should" to "could" allows excellence to be pursued without guilt.
CoachTraub
