Mental Performance Coaching Can Make The Difference
Zack Etter is a Mental Performance Coach, who along with Leon Abravanel wrote My Mental Playbook – a great guide to optimal performance for athletes. Here is Zack Etter’s article on the power of Mental Performance.
How can a soccer player achieve optimal performance? How can they get to the next level and elevate their game? There comes a point when elite soccer players need more than great physical attributes and tactical skills and it is their mental performance that makes the difference. The mental side of the game is important and often overlooked.
An athlete’s ability to perform at a high level, in addition to being physically capable and understanding how to play the game, requires elite mental toughness. In sports, and in life, succeeding at a high level means being able to overcome adversity, respond positively to difficult situations, and demands a willingness to be coachable and learn new skills.
There’s no way around hard work. Embrace it. You have to put in the hours because there’s always something which
Roger Federeroyu can improve.
Athletes who are committed to improvement and develop mental skills that will lead to peak performance have a Growth Mindset. I recently wrote a book called My Mental Playbook: The Optimal Performance System for Athletes that explains in detail the mental skills that athletes should use to help their performance. The book is broken up into mental skills that can be used during pre-game warmups, during games, and after games. However, before the book discusses Performance Psychology, it begins with a chapter on Growth Mindset and its importance not just in sports, but in life as well.
Having a Growth Mindset means possessing a burning desire to improve skills and knowledge of the game, as well as a willingness to try to increase performance by any means necessary.
Athletes with this mindset believe that skills are a result of hard work, and therefore effort is essential to their success.
These athletes are extremely coachable because they view receiving feedback is an opportunity to improve.
Successful soccer players
See the table below to see the difference between athletes who have a Growth Mindset and athletes who have a Fixed Mindset.
| Attitude On | FIXED Mindset | GROWTH Mindset |
| Skills | You are born with it | It can be developed |
| Challenges | Avoid | Embrace |
| Obstacles | Give Up | Persist |
| Effort | Pointless | Essential |
| Criticism | Worthless | Learn from It |
| Other’s Success | Threatened | Inspired |
| Performance | Plateau Early | Continued Progress |
I work with teams and athletes across a variety of different sports, helping athletes develop mental skills to increase their performance. In many ways, sports parallels life.
Having a Growth Mindset provides athletes the ability to get back to work after disappointment, persist through challenges, respond positively to feedback, and to be inspired by the success of others.
These athletes will be able to carry this mindset over to any aspect of their life. They will see challenges in school as an opportunity to learn, they’ll view feedback from their boss as a chance to improve, they’ll give great effort in everything they do, and make continued progress throughout their life.
For more information on My Mental Playbook, please visit MyMentalPlaybook
Zack Etter | M. ED is a Mental Performance Coach who recently graduated from Springfield College where he received his M.Ed. in Athletic Counseling. While at Springfield College, he worked with over 70 athletes on 8 different college and youth sports teams where he gave workshops that facilitate mental skills. He also held individual
Zack graduated from The University of Connecticut with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology in 2014. While he was a student there he began his career coaching football at St. Paul Catholic High School in Bristol, Connecticut. He then went on to be an assistant coach for three different division-1 programs from 2013-2016 including The University of Connecticut, Fordham University, and The University of Delaware. In the summer of 2017, Zack worked with the Dallas Cowboys as a coach for youth and high school athletes at their summer camps at the team’s headquarters in Frisco, Texas.
