Round 1 is up for most of us tomorrow and between now and then you still have the chance to become a better player via this post.
Mindset could not be anymore under utilised in local/amateur football but can have a dramatic effect on your game day performance on an individual level.
If you can develop a team mindset/mental framework then you can far exceed expectations based on your player talent alone.
My go-to performance mindset guru is Dan Abrahams who I follow on Twitter and have posted about a few times before but the psychological co-active is so deep I have at least another 10 posts on it purely from Dan's content in my archives.
Here's 10 psychological tips that you can pick and choose from for your round 1 game.
- The secret to winning is to go out to fail because giving yourself permission to fail is your best chance of playing on the front foot rather then on the back foot, to play with freedom rather then fear and to play to win rather then to lose.
- Develop a mindset feedback loop by giving yourself a mark out of 10 for mindset and then asking yourself why so high? What do you have to do next time to be even better? Try to create a process where a mindset feedback loop becomes the norm in your preparation.
- Determine and use some action-based key words which describes the way you want to execute your actions while playing and can give you a better chance to compete in your best mindset while self-managing under pressure. You'll have seen this before with players writing words on their arm, tape etc.
- Nail your pre-game narrative with thoughts like I’m going to take charge of myself, I’m going to be the best individual I can be and the best teammate, nothing will take me away from my best mindset, I can’t force a great performance and I will have my best possible game.
- Be prepared to deal with in-game losing as you won’t win every contest so you need to develop the mental skills to help you respond to every lost moment with focus and determination.
- We're all returning from longer than normal lay-offs from footy so be kind to yourself by lowering expectations of performance, raise expectations around mindset, keep your language rationale (avoid musts, awfulising etc), keep an open dialogue with coaches, scale pain and create a threshold of when to stop/take a break.
- Try mental contrasting by asking yourself what do I want to achieve? Where am I right now? What obstacles are going to stop me from reaching my goal? How will I deal with these obstacles?
- Optimise your mindset by putting it first and telling yourself to take charge of yourself to give yourself the best chance to take charge of the opposition.
- Nail your game day preparation via picturing a great performance, have a competitive mental framework ready, avoid thinking too much about the game until 2hrs before the 1st bounce, mentally warm up as you physically warm up and have an individual last 10min routine
- Some extra game day questions might be what does my best game look/feel like? How can I contribute to the game today? If it’s not going great how can I mentally deal with that? Who do I want to be on the ground?
