Mental Training FACT vs FICTION: What Every Coach Needs to Know

FACT vs FICTION on mental toughness. Get the truth and time-efficient tools you can use today. Free training: https://coachfreetraining.com
 
Coaches, let’s cut through the noise. In this episode, we bust the biggest mental toughness myths holding teams back and show you effective mental training that actually fits in a busy season. You’ll get quick mental reps your high school athletes can use immediately on the court, field, or track! Learn how to teach the mental skills they need to perform in pressure moments, recover from mistakes, and play with real confidence. ⚡
 
🎙️I’m Coach Bre, a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a long-time head volleyball coach & 4x state champion. 🏐🏆 I’ll walk you through practical coaching strategies grounded in sports psychology—from a simple Snapback routine to fast visualization reps so your athletes become true elite competitors without adding hours to practice.
 
🎯 What you’ll learn (fast):
✅ The truth about mental toughness (facts vs fiction)
✅ A 2-second reset routine (Snapback) for recovering from mistakes
✅ Time-efficient mental training you can run in 5 minutes/day or 20 minutes/week
✅ How to train confidence with 3-2-1 BRAVE (quick journaling + visualization)
✅ Game-ready coaching tips for female athletes in real pressure moments

🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction to the Mental Game 
01:14 Debunking the Myth of Mental Toughness 
03:17 Effective Mental Training Tools: Snapback Routine 
06:13 Training Confidence: The 3-2-1 Brave Routine 
10:22 Experience vs. Mental Skills Training 
11:43 Time-Efficient Mental Training 
12:58 Mental Training for All Athletes 
15:11 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
 
👇 Try these with your team this week:
✔️ Use the SnapBack routine after every error for one drill block
✔️ Run a 2-minute visualization (“see the next play”) before live play
✔️ End practice with one piece of evidence that confidence is growing
 
📢 Coaches — comment below: Which mental toughness myth do you still hear, and what time-efficient mental rep will you test this week? 👇
 
📌 Free Tools & Next Steps
🔹 Grab our in-depth FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame
 
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Head to coachfreetraining.com to grab our free training for coaches to quickly level-up your team's mental game!

Transcript

1:04

Coaches when it comes to the mental game, there's a lot of fluff and a lot of noise out there. Some of it is true, most of it is not. But if we're not careful, we could be focusing on the wrong things and miss buy-in from our athletes and honestly waste a lot of time. I will be honest when it comes to this idea of the mental game, I do feel like it's sort of a nebulous idea that us, as coaches know is really important, but we don't really know exactly what to do. Well, I'm gonna clear up the confusion in today's episode. I will break down the common. Myths that I hear around mental training and what truly are the facts and what you can be confident in spending your time around that will actually work to build your team's competitive edge. And if I haven't met you yet, I'm Coach Bree. I am a mental performance coach for athletes. I'm also a 14 year head volleyball coach, one four state championships as a coach. And a lot of that came through mental training when. It mattered. Most obviously Allah also came from having talented teams that are training hard. But really when that is paired with the mental game, that's where the magic happens and that's where the secret sauce is. And I know a lot of coaches that are listening are like, yeah, gimme some of that. Because what do I do? How do I give my girls an extra edge? How do I give them an extra boost? And that's exactly what we're gonna be talking about today. Alright. Let's talk about the first. Kind of fiction myth thing that I hear around the mental game, and that is mental toughness is just pushing harder and grinding more, and. And this honestly is pretty harmful advice, just to say like, you need to be more mentally tough. No pain, no gain. This is kind of like the real bro approach to mental training. Like, just suck it up, grind it out. And I get, this is where I get into like TikTok and Facebook, you know, little, little debates usually with men who are like, oh yeah, this mental training is for soft people and this is gonna, um, you know, create a generation of snowflakes teaching, you know, emotional resilience. Skills and how to navigate situations in a way that actually helps athletes instead. Mo I, I don't wanna throw men under the bus, but it's, it, it's, it's 99.9% men that are saying this, that they, she just needs to be mentally tough and she just needs to suck it up. That's not an actual strategy. When athletes shuts down after making a mistake, she isn't weak. She does need a tool. And what the problem is, is that we typically don't teach tools. We say things as coaches like. Shake it off or move on. And we expect that these things and these phrases are going to work when they don't. It's not like it's a bad thing to say, shake it off or move on. But it's not actually giving them a skill. It's just like saying, Hey, be confident and expecting that that is going to work. So teaching actual skills like a snapback routine, something that athletes can do in the moment. To move past mistakes. That's an actual, uh, you know, routine and skill that is rooted in sports psychology that college athletes use, professional athletes use. This is a widely known strategy that athletes have access to in middle school and high school. If you teach them, that will actually help them in those moments so that they will develop mental toughness, meaning they have a skill to move on. Fast beyond just somebody telling them to be mentally tough and no pain, no gain, and that just causes them to shut down even more and spiral even more, or just internalize things even more. Okay, so we call our routine a snapback routine. It's a combination of an intentional breath, a reset word at the top, and on the exhale some sort of reset signal. If you watch high level players, they all have some sort of reset routine, especially if you watch like baseball pitchers, if you watch volleyball players like in between rallies. So we teach a really simple routine. It takes two seconds or less, and athletes now have a way that they can respond in some of those moments where they are. You know, feeling a little bit flustered or their like thoughts are going negative or away into the crowd and wondering like, oh, who's watching me? And you know, feeling embarrassed, whatever. All of those things that happen. Those of you that actually coach girls sports, that's the other thing is that a lot of these men who are commenting on things like have no business being in sports and aren't actually coaches, and so those of us that are in it, we know and we can see when our girls are spiraling on the court and how hard it is as a coach. To kind of write the ship and turn things around. You're like, what do I say? What do I do? And you're spending a lot of energy trying to figure it out. When if they just had a simple tool that they could do, um, to coach themselves, it would be a lot easier. So that is actually useful. A snapback routine or a failure recovery system, whatever you, whatever you wanna call it, whatever you wanna teach it now. If you wanna teach it the way that I teach it, head to our free training. It's at coach free training.com. That's where I break down really simple strategies that you can use with your team, including the snapback routine. Okay? Myth number two. Mental skills cannot be trained. Either athletes have it or they don't. This is another a. That I get on TikTok and you know, whenever you kind of put your point of view out there and you get people who are like disagreeing with you, which is a great thing, um, because those people don't belong in our world. But, you know, sometimes I hear people saying, well then she just shouldn't be in sports. If she can't handle mistakes, she can't handle pressure. Um. If she can't handle those situations, then she shouldn't be in sports. That's absolutely not true. When athletes learn how to play sports, you know, at a very young age, and then they grow up, um, and continue to play, and the pressure and the expectations get more and more and more, uh, they're not actually typically taught how to deal with that pressure and how, what, you know, how they internalize things and all of that like that is not just inherent your athletes. Don't just have it or not. Now, you might have athletes that are a little bit more like extroverted or have personality traits that lean towards like, you know, more confidence. And so that could make you think like, oh, well they're just born more confident. No, a baby isn't born. And we're like, oh, either they're confident or they aren't. It's a combination of their life experiences and you know, all all of those things. But what we do know is that confidence and mental skills can be trained. They can be taught just like can, you know, passing, shooting, dribbling, all of those skills that you teach every single day. Confidence can be taught as well. And the way that we teach confidence to our athletes, we actually do a daily mindset routine. We call it three, two, one, brave, and it stands for a few different things. So the three stands for three affirmations. So they write down every day their three affirmations. Now these aren't just like. Pulled out of thin air. Um, and like just said, I am smart. I am strong. No, we do a little workshop at the beginning of the season. I actually just got done with mine. I just started my season. So last Saturday we spent 20 minutes doing a little workshop, um, helping athletes explore what they want in their sport. And I was like, if you had a magic wand and you could have anything you want, what would it be? And I just let them go free with what they were thinking. They pulled out three themes. They turned those into affirmations, which are positive. First person present tense statements because. There is research around how we rewire our subconscious mind. Part of that is creating new images in their minds for what they want to have happen. And so those affirmations are pulled out. And then, um, when we incorporate them into their daily mindset routine, they write them down every day because our brain is always listening. It's always picking up on cues from our environment. It's always, it's always listening to the things. So we wanna be feeding it good things. That's what I tell athletes. Two stands for two minutes of journaling. I typically have them reflect on some sort of prompt, it doesn't have to be two minutes, it could be like 30 seconds or 60 seconds, and it's allowing them to reflect on like, you know, something that I think is maybe important for that day. It could be What does it look like to give your best today at practice? Or how can you encourage a teammate today? Or what are you gonna do when things get rough at practice? So she's kind of, you know, e either reflecting or, um, you know, future pacing on what she's going to do when she gets into those situations, which is confidence building. Okay, confidence building. Because now I have a plan for how I'm going to respond. So that's two. The three is three information, two is two minutes of journaling. One. One thing that you're grateful for, there is research around gratitude and how that impacts how athletes play and how they show up. And if they're looking for the good in their environment, they're gonna find more of the good. And when they're doing that, they're gonna. Play better. All right. I'll tell you kinda the science behind why that happens, um, in a second. And then the other one, so there's the 3, 2, 1. There's two parts to the whim is one piece of evidence that one of your affirmations is coming true. This is huge. Evidence builds confidence, evidence that athletes are getting better, getting closer to their goals, improving from where they were yesterday. Builds confidence. And so if they are constantly looking in their environment, they, they have enough, um, you know, opportunity in their environment to find negative things that are happening to them. There's so much of that. So we have to train their brains to find the good, the gratitude and find the evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true. It could be as simple as. You know, I was able to get a ball that I didn't think I could get. Okay. Or maybe I got, you know, recognized by a coach, um, in a certain way. It could be very small, it could be a feeling, it could be something bigger. But the evidence is key because then they're stacking some qualitative, um, data that supports that they are getting better and that improves their confidence. Okay? Now the brave is a visualization, so it's very. Simple, quick visualization. Brave is an acronym as well, but basically they are focusing on their breath. So they have five breaths with their reset word at the top. They visualize each of their affirmations, so like a scene from one of their affirmations. An example would be like, I'm a fast, um, quick, or I am, let's see, what's a, what's one that I read recently? Um, I am a quick aggressive defender, and so maybe an example of that is. That she is reading the ball and, and going for every ball getting a touch on every ball. So she just visualizes that really fast. Um, and then at the end of that, they go off into practice and that visualization takes about two minutes. It allows them to get some breath work in. They get practice with their reset word, they visualize their affirmations and they're off to practice. So that, that routine takes about five minutes. And I'll tell you what, I get that five minutes back, like over and over and over again.'cause now my athletes are like going into practice focus. They're ready to go. Um. You know where I'm not wasting 20 minutes of practice trying to get them like on track. And every day they're finding evidence of themselves getting better and more confident. Okay. So these skills can be trained and the daily mindset routine is just like one way that I do that. Okay? Myth number three. Athletes are just gonna figure it out with experience. If they play enough games so they practice enough, they'll figure it out. And how to deal with pressure. The reality is the more time goes, the more, um, opportunity they have to reinforce bad habits, like negative self-talk or like avoidance of things that they shouldn't be avoiding. And we know that to be true. I mean, I played my sport in college. I played volleyball in college, and I'm sure you did too. And you could probably say for yourself that like the higher that you go, the more pressure that there is. Right. When an athlete comes into my program as a freshman and they make cte, there's not as much pressure as a senior who's on varsity defending four state titles, and they don't just like, you know, build the experience to be able to handle some of those things. Yes, they get experience, but if they're not, if they do not have good mental skills as a freshman, that is what's going to show up as a senior, but just in a bigger magnitude. So, for example, if there's a freshman that comes in and you know, every mistake that she makes or. When things don't go her way, she becomes a victim and blames everybody else. Uh, I mean, I'm sure you've seen that happen where as a senior they're doing the same thing. Okay. But it's bigger. It's the implications are greater. And so if we don't give them skills to be able to navigate those situations, then. They're only gonna get bigger or more magnified the longer that they go, and those bad habits are going to be reinforced. Okay. All right. A couple of more myths that I've been hearing. All right. Number four, mental training takes too much time. And this is what I used to believe too. I used to be like, there's no time. I know I need it, but there's just. I don't know where the time is, to be honest. That's just because I didn't know anything about it and I went the hard route. I became a mental performance coach. I went to, uh, a certification. I like, took time. I, you know, I, I did the hard route. You don't have to do that. That's why I did it, and now I packaged it in a way to make it easy for you to just plug and play. Our plug and play program takes about 20 minutes a week, give or take. You can go faster, you can go slower. That daily mindset routine takes five minutes a day, and so just sprinkling in a little bit, a little bit goes a long way when it comes to mental training. So if you wanna find the fast way to do it, go to coach free training.com. I break down our methodology, but also talk about plug and play and you get a discount on it, but it does not take as much time as you think it does. And I fell into that trap for too many years because I didn't know anything about it. I thought it was gonna be like long talks and seminars and, you know, things that I wouldn't be able to do. And I don't know anything about sports psychology and so I'm not, you know, equipped to teach this. All of that was false and it was holding myself back, holding my team back. So I packaged it in a way for you to just plug and play. So definitely check out coach free training.com if you want a quick way to do this, but 20 minutes a week or five minutes a day, like. It doesn't take much time. And the last one, mental training is only for struggling athletes. I know that we all have athletes who are, you know, um, who find it harder to navigate some of the normal parts of being an athlete than others, but it's not just for those athletes. In fact, it's what gives athletes an edge. I've coached very talented teams over the years, teams who played to their potential like the past four years, and where mental training really made a difference when it mattered. I can tell you a lot of stories of where we came down to like. You know, this last state championship, we were down championship point. And so we had every reason to be out of it, right. And I was like, even in the back of my, my head, I was like, okay, second place. Alright, I gotta consider this, I guess. Um, but seeing the difference in mental training and just kind of the mental. Uh, response from my team when we were down that point and just kind of focusing on one play to get us back and then serving the next two points.'cause it tied it up, um, to, you know, stay alive for a fifth set. Um, and watching the other team kind of mentally. Crumble after that, um, made me so, so grateful that I invested that five minutes a day to do mental training so that they could lean back on those skills. And that's exactly what my girls told me and told reporters afterwards. They were like, I was just saying my, or doing my breath, saying my reset word, um, when I was back there on the line. Serving, and that's where confidence comes from. Athletes don't rise to the occasion, they fall to the level of their training. So if they don't have mental training, they will not fall to anything that you expect them to. Okay. I also heard another quote. I'm reading Chop wood Carry water again from Joshua Medcalf. And he, um, in that book said the bright lights, um, don't shine. They expose what the work that you did in the darkness. Okay, so the bright lights aren't like, oh, they're gonna bring out all of the things that you, you know, they're gonna bring, bring you up, and make you shine and make you look pretty. When in reality, the bright lights just expose. The training that you did in the darkness, and we call that training. Yes, the physical training.'cause we gotta put in tough work, but also the mental training, that's what it's going to expose under the bright lights when it matters the most. Okay. So, no, it's not just for struggling athletes. In fact, it's what gives the edge, especially of teams of similar ability. The ones that have trained their mental game will always come out on top. Alright, as a recap, remember. Real mental toughness is not just telling your athletes to be mentally tough and grind harder and suck it up and grow a pair. Don't worry. I've heard it all on, on, on our ads and everything, and, um, again, mostly from men who don't know what they're talking about, but it just shows the need for this work that if you're just expecting athletes to like, you know, toughen up and that's gonna give them skills to do it. First of all, um, if we're thinking that that's good for boy athletes, we're absolutely wrong in that too because we're just, you know, they, they also respond, um, the same way. They just are taught and conditioned to internalize things more. That doesn't mean that it's good. Okay. Um, mental skills are trainable. They're not just like, either you have it or you don. You have to have intentional reps. It's not just built with experience and you don't have to spend a lot of time doing it. Five minutes a day, 20 minutes a week. Okay? And the last thing, mental training is for all athletes if you wanna get an edge, but also simple emotional resilience skills that make your job as a coach easier so that you are not wasting as much time. Coaching the emotions of the game. They have the skills and that is a relief. Okay. I hope this cleared up some of the facts versus fictions, uh, around mental training. Don't get caught in the fiction. That's where I was for a couple years. I thought I was like not qualified to do this work. I thought it was gonna take too much time. I. Um, I already have too much on my plate, but I did go the hard route so that you can go the easy route and just literally plug and play and give your team these skills. So go to coach free training.com to check out how you can do that very seamlessly. All right, coaches, I'll see you in the next episode of the Coach Your Game podcast.