Build a Mentally Tough Team Quickly: Key Strategies for Coaches

Your athlete just made a mistake. Her body language shifts. If she doesn’t reset now, the game’s gone. Here’s how you coach the comeback! Learn the reset system here → https://coachfreetraining.com
 
In this video, I’m sharing the 3 core routines I teach athletes so they can recover from failure, handle pressure, and silence negative self-talk in real-time.
 
🎯 Learn:

• The “Snapback Routine” that gets athletes back in the moment
• How to rewire self-talk (instead of spiraling)
• The 3-2-1 Brave pre-practice mental reset

 
🎙 I'm Coach Bre, mental performance coach, co-founder of The Elite Competitor, and four-time state championship volleyball coach. These are the tools that transformed my program—and they’re simple enough for every coach to use.

🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction to Mental Toughness
00:41 Assessing Mistake Recovery
03:41 Building a Snapback Routine
05:59 Mastering Self-Talk
11:22 Handling Pressure Situations
14:37 Conclusion and Resources

📌 Ready to strengthen your team’s mental game?
🔹 Grab my FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Get started with the Plug & Play Mental Game → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
🔹 Subscribe →  @CoachHerGame ​

Head to coachfreetraining.com to grab our free training for coaches to quickly level-up your team's mental game!

Transcript

1:04

Coaches. If you've ever felt like more of a therapist than a coach, you're spending more time coaching the emotions of the game and getting your team's head back in the game. You're not alone. You probably know that mental toughness is really important to your team's success, but how do you do it? Where do you start and where do you find the time? As a 14 year head volleyball coach myself, I've won four state championships. And I'm a mental performance coach for athletes, and I'm here to make it a little easier for you. Today we're gonna talk about the three areas of mental toughness in your team, how to assess where your team stands, where the gaps are, and how to close those gaps with proven strategies that you can use even if you don't have a lot of time. So let's jump into it. The first category around mental toughness. So if you're really like assessing or. Auditing your team's mental strength is how they bounce back from mistakes you already know. And you probably say to your team all the time, it's not the mistake that matters, it's how you respond. You probably also say things like, it's okay to make mistakes. You can make aggressive errors. That's what I'm looking for. So you're encouraging them to take risks? To make errors. To make mistakes, and then learn from them. And the problem is that most athletes. Don't know how to actually learn from them. So they'll make the mistake and then they get in their own heads and then one mistake turns into 2, 3, 4, and then they're spiraling. And now you've gotta put in like the next person on your bench and maybe your bench is not even that deep. So you're like, oh my gosh. And then you spend the rest of the game trying to like get that player's head back in the game when you're really wasting time, you're like, you're there to coach the sport. And you're wasting all of this time kind trying to kind of get their head back in. So this first category really matters. This is kind of one of the things that separates good teams from great teams and good athletes, from great athletes, is how fast they bounce back from mistakes. And I want you to kind of think about your sport and how fast your athletes need to bounce back. So I coach Volley. And there's about 10 to 15 seconds between rally, so they've gotta get back and in the game in less time than that. So if you coach basketball, maybe there's not a lot of time at all, like the game keeps moving unless there's a timeout or something like that. If you coach golf, maybe they have a little more time, but I want you to think about your sport and like how long do your players have to get over a mistake? For most sports, it's not very long, and the problem is that athletes take longer than that. To get back into the game. And mostly it's because they just have never been taught a way to do that. And you are already telling them, like you're trying to kinda shift their mindset around the importance of it, but they don't actually have any skills to do it. So here are a couple of questions I want you to ask yourself to kind of assess or audit, like your team's mental toughness in the area of bouncing back from mistakes. It's just yes or no in your head. Okay? Number one, does your team bounce back quickly from mistakes? Without letting it affect the next play, or the flip side of that is, you know, they're able to bounce back and it doesn't really affect the next play. Or does it take them a little bit to get over their mistake? Right. Or you have to like pull somebody out in order to give them time to get over their mistake. Okay, another question. Do your athletes lose confidence after making a mistake and it affects their overall performance for the rest of the game? So this is where you see an athlete, like within the first little bit of the game, they've kind of decided, well, things aren't going well, so there goes the rest of the game. Okay. It's like if we start out rocky, then it's really hard to turn the ship around. Okay. Last question. Have you as a coach taught your athletes a specific routine or a method to mentally recover from mistakes? Yes or no. Okay. So those are kind of the three things. If you answered no in any of those categories, then there might be a gap there in your team's ability to come back from mistakes. So in order to help them in this way, we really, we teach like a a three part system here. Number one is recognizing that athletes who can get over mistakes fast, have a mindset shift around mistakes in general. And you're probably already checking the box in this area. This just means that. They are okay with making mistakes. They're not seeing them as something to be avoided. They're not hesitating or avoiding mistakes, and you have already been doing that by telling them things like, Hey, it's okay to make aggressive errors. It's okay to make mistakes, so you're checking that box. Number two is though athletes have to be aware of situations that cause them to kind of go into these spirals. So for some athletes, it's. You know, missing a shot or hitting a ball outta bounds or missing their surf. For others, it's a rough, makes a bad call. A coach yells at them, a teammate yells at them, and they kind of go into this spiral. And we tell athletes, it's kind of like a traffic light. Green is flow state. That's where we want our athletes to be. They're playing their best. They're, you know, just not really thinking too much. Yellow is like something like that happens, something like that I just described. And so they're like, oh, something's off. And then red is, they're spiraling. It's really hard. For you to coach them back into the game because they're almost like a dysregulated toddler. Like they don't actually know how to recover. And so athletes need to be able to recognize those situations that send them into yellow before it gets to red, and when they do when, so they have that awareness. Step three is they have a failure recovery system. So we teach something called a snapback routine. It's a combination of a breath to engage their parasympathetic nervous system. That's the opposite of the fight or flight. A reset word at the top that is predetermined based on past really good playing experiences and how they wanna play in the moment. And then on the exhale, they're doing some sort of grounding signal. So we call it a reset signal. So it's as simple as like snapping a finger or like looking at the antenna, something very simple to kind of ground them in the moment. And that alone takes like two seconds, helps them get back into the present moment. So. A snapback routine is essential when it comes to your player's ability to get back in the present moment quickly when something happens in a game that throws them off, which is is gonna happen. And I do have a free training where you can learn how to do this with your team. It's at coach free training.com. I teach this skill plus the two others that I'm gonna talk about in the next two parts of this. So coach free training.com if you want more on how to actually implement this. With your team. Okay. The second category, kinda this bucket is self-talk. And so what your athletes are saying to themselves really matters. You already know this. If you're like an athlete is beating herself up in her head, then she's not gonna play well, and we know this to be true as well. Kind of some sports psychology behind this is that. Situations happen. Okay. Situations are typically out of your athlete's control, most of them at least. So regarding playing time or the score or whatever ref does, or the mistake that they made, they can't do anything about it, but they can decide what they think about it. And situations lead to thoughts. Thoughts lead to feelings. Feelings lead to action. Action leads to results. And so it really starts with the thought. So if your athlete makes a mistake or whatever, and she immediately thinks I suck. Uh, what the heck? What, what was that? Or, you know, they're, and serve, receive, for example, that's a volleyball term. And they're thinking, don't serve the ball to me. They just made a mistake. That's gonna help, that's gonna actually lead to a feeling of like. Uneasiness disappointment. It's not gonna be like a very positive, very good feeling and feelings lead to action. So if she's feeling like, oh my gosh, like embarrassed or disappointed or something like that, and now she maybe is avoiding the ball, she like doesn't want the ball to come to her. So she is actually like taking herself outta serve, receive a little bit or hesitating and that's gonna get her her results. So she then makes another error, right? Because we know when our athletes' like. Hesitate and pull back. They tend to make more errors. And then that's gonna put her back in the situation of still making more mistakes, which is gonna just like, go around the spiral. So we can actually like, interrupt that pattern by what they're thinking and what they're saying to themselves. And now you don't know what they're thinking, but some of you do know some of what they say, they think they say out loud to you. So they're probably, you know, uh, if you've been around your team for any amount of time, you get to know them and they start saying things like. You know, oh, I suck. Or why did I do that? And so you do get a little insight into what's going on in their brain by what they say out loud. And then you can also tell in their body language, right? If they're like slumping their shoulders or turning their back on the team, like all of those are signs that they're like internal self-talk is not probably very productive. So some things to three questions that you can ask yourself to kinda audit and assess what's happening in this bucket of self-talk is this. Do your athletes tend to use negative self-talk? Things like, I can't do this, or I always mess up during games. Okay. Or practices. And again, you don't know exactly what's going on in their heads, but some of them do say these things out loud, so that gives you an indication. If they're saying it out loud, they're definitely thinking it. Okay. Number two, are your athletes able to replace negative thoughts with positive affirmations or reset words in real time? Now, this might also be hard, but if it's like, I don't know, because you haven't taught it, then it's probably a no. So if they don't actually know how to like turn these things around, you know, they're not like catching themselves, they're like, ugh, uh, that was frustrating. But, you know, and then turning it around. And number three, kind of on you as a coach, do you regularly teach your athletes how to identify and change their negative self-talk patterns during practices or games? And so if you haven't taught this. Then they're probably not doing it because they don't have the skill. Okay. And so what we do is we teach them a really simple way to always have kind of a bank of neutral thoughts that they can fall back on, or a reset word. So even just a reset word that they learn as part of their snapback routine is a really good thing to kind of like. Fall back on in those moments where they wanna spiral and have negative self-talk because it's like, I can always just say that word and it brings me back to neutral at at least. And so we do something called a 3, 2, 1, brave every day at the beginning of practice. And that is athletes writing down in a journal. They come to the board after pre-practice and they write down their three affirmations. And so athletes actually come up with three affirmations that that guide them through the whole season. So we do a little workshop at the beginning. That help helps them identify like what their goals are for the season, what their vision is. Who they wanna be as an athlete. And then out of that they come up with three affirmations. So these are positive first person, present tense. These aren't these like just nebulous, you know? I am confident, I'm strong, I'm the best person. Everybody likes me. No, these are like actually connected to what they want, like their deep desires as an athlete and they can help just kind of, okay. You know, I don't know how the outcome of this is going to go. I don't know what I'm gonna do next play, but I do know. That I am a strong fast offender, right? Or I am positive under pressure. Just these things that they keep coming back to the two in the three, two. And brave is a little bit of journaling. So I give them some prompts. The one is one thing that they're grateful for, so we're just trying to help them focus on the good and find the good. And then another one in there. So it's 3, 2, 1, but there's two ones. Um, is find one piece of evidence that one of your affirmations is coming true. So really like hunting the good wherever they are to. Really like help their brain identify like things are going my way. And then they do a little visualization called Brave Um, and that is basically visualizing these affirmations so they see them in real time and that actually helps kind of prep their brain to be able to recreate them in practice and in competitions. There's a lot of research around that in sports psychology and how our brain actually doesn't know the difference between real and imagined if athletes are visualizing correctly. So. That whole routine, that 3, 2, 1, brave takes five to seven minutes. And it really helps them kind of be aware of what their self-talk is. And then in moments where their self-talk is kind of going all over the place, or you can identify like, yeah, this is the situation where their self-talk is like, uh, not great, then we can prompt them like, Hey, say your reset words, say one of your affirmations. Things like that can help bring'em back to the present moment. Okay. The third category is around pressure. Pressure can make or break an athlete's performance. I have coached very talented teams who have not played to the potential that, you know, people have identified during our season because they're talented, but they can't deal with the pressure. Or we get into games where like, you know, one most mistake kind of throws things off, or, um, we get down or we get behind and they can't come back and there's just this pressure that they don't know how to manage. And so it's really important that athletes have. Skills to stay calm, stay in control of their thoughts and their actions. Like all of that, like you can have the most talented team in the world. If they can't handle the pressure, then they're never gonna be play to their potential. Like it just won't happen. And so some things that you can look for and identify. In your program is this, does your team stay focused and composed during high pressure moments such as the final minutes of a game or the final points of a game? I'll tell you right now, that answer would've been clear, no, about seven years ago in my program, because we lost two back to back seasons in this winner to state loser out situation, reverse sweep style. So if you know volleyball, it means like we were about to win and then we lost the whole thing. Like, like just like that it seemed like, but we were like, what the heck happened? Okay. So that's on you though as a coach to kind of look at that on your team. I had to do some self-reflection in this area too. Do your athletes freeze, make poor decisions or get visibly nervous when facing pressure situations? So do you notice some things come out? Do you notice tears? Do you notice, you know, little, uh, nervous habits that are not helping your athlete? Okay. And then the third question is, as a coach, have you implemented a pregame routine or visualization techniques to help your athletes mentally prepare? For these high pressure situations? Or are you just crossing your fingers and hoping that it works out okay? And not to knock that, because that's how I spent the first like half of my coaching career is just like, we'll see how we do. We'll see what team shows up tonight. That's not coaching strategy. That's not, that's not an actual method that will help your athletes just crossing your fingers and hoping that something good happens. Okay? And so in order to help your athletes deal with the pressure of competition. You have to help them with their pre-game routine. And I mean that sounds maybe harder than it is. The first thing that we help athletes do is identify what we call their hype number. So it's a scale of one to 10 how hyped they need to be in order to play their best. And this is based on the inverted U theory, their Y keys dots in law, which states that as the level of arousal increases to the point where athletes play their best, like then they're going to actually play to their potential. So if athletes know that they need to be at a seven on a scale of one to 10, 10 is like. They need to be able to run through a brick wall. That's how hype they need to be. Their level of performance is going to be greatest at a seven, but we know that if they go over a seven, their performance is going to decline. If they go under a seven, their performance will also decline. So it's this inverted U that is peaking at whatever their hype number is. And so athletes need to know what that is for them, and it's gonna be different for all of your athletes, which is why. Like a blanket pregame routine doesn't really work because all of your athletes are different. So they have to know and identify what that is for them, what that feels like, and then simple things to get them there. And simple ways to bring them back down if they're too hyped. So it could be visualization, it could be some breath work. All of these little tiny tools that will help them pre-game so that they walk out and they're prepared. And you don't have to be on this rollercoaster of like what team is gonna show up tonight because they've all done their pre-game routine. Now these three areas, if you wanna go deeper, go to coach free training.com. That is where I break all of it down. I also talk about our plug and play Elite mental game system. This is the mental training system that I use to teach mental training to my team as little as 20 to 30 minutes a week, sometimes even less than that, to just give them these really tangible skills and also so that you can take that off of your plate. Are not a sports psychology major likely. Okay? Um, you're a coach and you wanna get back to what you love doing, which is coaching. You already wear a ton of hats. You already are stretched for time, for space, for everything. And so plug and play elite mental game for teams makes it really simple for you to just like, literally plug and play so that they have these skills that they need so your team can actually play to their potential and you can get back to coaching. Your sport. Okay. All right. So coach free training.com is where you can check that out. I hope this was helpful for you just to, you know, dive into and audit your team a little bit and see like, okay, which areas do we struggle? Which areas are we doing really well? Maybe it's like we do come back well from mistakes, but. Under pressure. We really have a hard time, and that's what we need to double click on and zoom in for this season. So little tips to get you started, but if you want more, go to coach free training.com. All right, coaches. I am Coach Bree, a mental performance coach for athletes, the host of the Coach Game podcast. I will see you in the next episode.