Mental Toughness Training for Volleyball: Get Your Team to Bounce Back Fast

Tired of watching your team fall apart after a single mistake? 😩 This video is your team mental toughness game-changer. Be sure to also visit 👉🏼 https://coachfreetraining.com to learn the "Snapback Routine" to get your team moving past mistakes in 3 seconds or less!

As a 4-time state champion coach, I've been there. I get the frustration of seeing talent get wasted by a lack of mental resilience. That's why in this video, we're diving deep into:

🏐 The #1 mindset shift your athletes NEED to bounce back from mistakes (it's NOT what you think!)
🧠 Why athletes (especially girl athletes) fear failure and choke under pressure
🔑 The simple, proven method to help your team recover FASTER and play with confidence

Stop just telling them to "get over it." Start teaching them HOW.

⏱ Key Moments
00:00 Introduction: The Frustration of Mistakes
00:36 Building Mental Toughness in Athletes
01:26 Understanding the Fear of Failure
03:12 Strategies for Coaches to Normalize Mistakes
08:55 Conclusion: Training Mental Toughness

🔥 Register for our free training to learn the "Snapback Routine" and get your team moving past mistakes in 3 seconds or less! Go to 👉🏼 https://coachfreetraining.com

📢 Coaches, drop a comment below! What’s your biggest challenge for your team when it comes to mistakes? 👇 Let’s chat!

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

Transcript

1:04

Coach, tell me I'm not alone. And one of the most frustrating things as a coach is to watch your team not be able to respond to mistakes. They make a mistake and now all of a sudden their shoulders are slumping, their head is down. They're not taking risks. They're hesitating. And now that one mistake turns into two, three, four, and you're on the sideline trying to figure out what to do. So you yell next play, shake it off and nothing seems to work. And now instead of a team that is playing freely and doing well, they're tensing up and they're playing it safe. You got to pull that player out, put somebody else in, and now you're spending the rest of the game trying to get their head back in the game. If that's you, then this video is for you. We are talking today about how to build your athlete's mental toughness so that they can move past mistakes. And as a long time head volleyball coach myself, a four time state champion coach. I get it. I've been there more times than I can count. And so today we are going to cover the key mindset shift that all athletes need in order to get over mistakes fast. Why athletes actually fear failure and hesitate after a mistake and what you can do as a coach to help them recover. faster the key mindset shift that your athletes need, and you probably are already telling them this, is that mistakes are necessary to get better. Like I said, as a coach, you probably believe this, and maybe you have been telling your athletes this the whole season. You're like, you need to make mistakes. Mistakes are part of the game. It just matters how you respond to them, but nothing really seems to get into their brains. But what's really important about this mindset shift is that Average athletes actually see mistakes as failure. Most athletes, even the ones that you are telling mistakes are okay, actually associate messing up with failing. And especially if you coach girl athletes, they're tying a lot of these mistakes to their self worth. I know we're going to go a little bit deep here, but if you have athletes that are perfectionists, and they go out and they need everything to be perfect in order to play well and feel good about themselves, mistakes are a threat to that. As a result, they're going to avoid risk. So when athletes see mistakes as failure, they're going to avoid them. Like we try to avoid, we actively avoid the things that are not going to make us feel good and including mistakes. And so that is why you see your athletes out there, like hesitating, playing it safe, or maybe they play really well in practice, but then they get into a game and you're like, wow, this looks like a different player because practice typically has more freedom to make mistakes. And then we get into the game. All of a sudden there's this pressure and, um, you know, people are watching and, you know, My parents are there and my teammates and what am I, what is my coach going to do? And now they're avoiding mistakes instead of playing free. Average athletes base their confidence on not making mistakes. They see mistakes as the number one thing to avoid. So they just practice hard and then just cross their fingers and hope they don't make mistakes in a competition when inevitably mistakes are going to happen. Those of you that coach team sports and really individual sports, you know, It's a game of errors. And so it's not a, if I'll make a mistake, it's when, and then without the skills to properly recover, your athletes are just going to be out there hesitating, spiraling, kind of changing their approach or their skills a little bit, which you know, as a coach leads to. more mistakes. So what can we do here? We need to shift this mindset because confident athletes who know how to get over mistakes understand that mistakes are part of the game. And again, I know you're probably saying this, I'm going to give you some strategies and a little bit on how you can shift your language around this and some things you can do in practice to actually normalize mistakes a little bit more if you're not already doing that. But confident athletes actually view mistakes differently right out the gate. They don't see them as something to avoid. Key reasons why is because confident athletes who know how to get over mistakes have a specific routine. To do that, we call our routine a snapback routine. And if you wanna know more about the snapback routine, this is a three second or less routine that athletes can use to get over mistakes fast. head to our free training for coaches. It's at CoachFreeTraining.com I break down the snapback routine. It's a very simple routine that you can teach your athletes so that they can get over mistakes quicker. And the reason why I think to have a failure recovery system like that, a snapback routine. are more confident is that they can go play and risk and play free because they know how to get over a mistake. They're like, mistakes don't really matter that much because I have a way to recover. I have a snapback routine that has been practiced. And the other thing that confident athletes do is that they move on quickly. And like I said, In order to move on quickly, they have to have a way to do that. And unfortunately, you just yelling from the sidelines, shake it off, next play. Although those are really great things to say, some things that are wrong with that is that sometimes they can't even hear you. Like you're on the sideline, they're in the zone playing, and especially if you coach a sport where they're far away from you, on the other side of the court or the field or wherever. Not to mention, like, if they're a golfer and just out on the course on their own, they're not actually going to hear you say, shake it off or next play. The other thing about that is that saying those things actually is not teaching them how to move on quickly. It's actually not teaching them how to move on to the next play or how to shake it off. So they do need a skill. to be able to do that so that your words have meaning. And when they do have that skill, they're not going to hesitate after a mistake. They're going to be able to risk. They're going to be able to actually do what you want them to do out there, which is play free and just get over that mistake fast and stop dwelling on it. So the key thing here is that confident athletes view mistakes differently than average athletes. And part of that is because they have a skill that they have trained in order to quickly get over mistakes And like I said, if you want to check that out, go to FreeCoachTraining.Com That's where we break down our snapback routine, which is a quick failure recovery method that all of our athletes have, all of my athletes that I coach have so that on the sidelines, all I have to do is say, Hey, what's your reset word. Okay. Or when I call a timeout, like, Hey, let's do our snapback routine real quick. All right. So we have a shared common language and athletes know what I'm talking about. And I don't have to look like that crazy coach on the sidelines saying like, shake it off, move on to the next play. And like, Oh, you, you know, you know how it looks. Okay. So even better if athletes can have their own routine. Okay. Let's go into why athletes actually fear mistakes in the first place. You probably have a hunch on why this happens. And the first part about it, I'm not going to get too deep into some of this neuroscience going on, but I think it's important that all coaches know this. And that is that there is psychological safety at play here. Psychological safety is really important, especially for girl athletes to play their best. And what this means is that our brain is designed to keep us safe, physically safe, but also psychologically safe. And that means, do I still fit in here? Am I accepted here? You know, they're scanning their environment to make sure like, am I, am I good? And so when they make a That is actually a threat to their psychological safety. Because when they make a mistake, they have this fear of disappointing people, of getting punished. You know, some of us as coaches, like, yeah, there is some consequence and some punishment that comes along with making errors. One of which is you give a point to the other team. Okay. So there's all of that kind of playing in there. subconscious mind. And they, this is popping up. It's a threat to their psychological safety. And when this happens, there's a part of their brain called the amygdala that senses threat. And so when they make that error, and some of these things are happening at the subconscious level where they're like, Oh my gosh, am I going to get pulled out? Um, do my teammates still like me? You know, like all of these things that you're like, come on, just get over it. But it's happening in their brain. Their amygdala is picking up on that. And then when that happens, their sympathetic nervous system kicks in. That is the nervous system that's responsible for their fight or flight or freeze or fawn response. So that's when you see athletes out there and they are like freezing and you're like, what's going on? Or, you know, they're making silly errors, things that they normally wouldn't do. That's because they're in this dysregulated state. state. So in this state, it's really hard to come back from a mistake if they don't have a routine to do it. Okay. And that is basically the brain's threat response. It's how the brain is going to respond to that mistake in their environment. Now, the really good thing about this is that This can be trained, okay? But if they don't have that training, they don't know how to respond, then they're going to be stuck in this dysregulated state. And that's typically what you see. They make a mistake out there, or maybe it's like, not even a mistake, it's like the ref makes a bad call, or their teammate, like, says something that kind of doesn't make sense. You know, jolts them or a coach yells at them, you know, anything like that, that kind of pulls them out of flow state is a threat to their, you know, their psychological safety. I know that sounds deep, but it is true. And they don't have a way to respond. And so that's what like compounds it. And that's what makes it worse is because they're like, I don't know how to do this. Like coach is telling me to shake it off. My teammates are saying, Hey, next play. But like, I don't actually know how to do that. And that's where, again, A snapback routine or a failure recovery system comes in. So again, if you want to know exactly how we do that with our athletes in our program and how I do it with my team, head to coachfreetraining. com. I break it all down there but what can we do? What we do as coaches there's a couple of things, um, that are really important. One of which is that your words do matter. And as much as you're saying, like, shake it off and next play, like, in the moment, in the game, when it's actually happening, that's not as effective as what you're training and how you're talking about mistakes. Stakes outside of competition. So what does practice look like? How are you talking about mistakes? What opportunities do you give your athletes to respond to mistakes in a positive way? I'm gonna give you some examples of this in a second, but one of the key things again, is teach them how to respond and telling Isn't teaching, telling your athletes to shake it off? Telling your athletes next play. Telling your athletes, hey, mistakes don't matter, just your response matters. But then you don't give them a way to respond is not teaching them how to do that. And I buried my head in the sand so long as a coach thinking I didn't need to teach the mental side of the game to my athletes. I was nailing it on the physical side and that's probably what you are doing too. But then we would lose games to silly errors. We would lose games because we're worried about the last play and not focused about what's happening in the moment. We would lose games because the pressure of the moment became too much. We did not have mental toughness. We had physical toughness, right? We were training really well. We had all the talent that we needed to go far, but it just was not coming together because of what was happening up here in their brain. So you have to actually train it and teach it. It's not as hard as you think. If you go to coachfreetraining. com, we break those things down for you. Hey, the other thing about it is normalized mistakes in practice. I kind of talked about this a little bit but Um in practice is just a great opportunity for your athletes to make mistakes and for you to praise mistakes I know that sounds like very counterintuitive but hey if you made a mistake, but it was like an aggressive error like Praise the heck out of how you went for it. If you see an athlete who makes a mistake and then they're able to bounce back, maybe they are using a failure recovery method or they're using the snapback routine. Notice that pointed out at the end of practice, you can even pepper this in, um, you know, on a weekly or bi weekly basis. Like what mistake did you make this week that you learned from? And so how are you talking about it? Um, I love in my gym to give redos. So if we're, um, doing some sort of drill and I coach volleyball. for doing some sort of drill, um, where I can, they make an error. So they shank a pass or they hit in the net. I give them that ball again. And I'm like, Hey, you got this. Try again. All right. And so basically instead of allowing them to dwell on their mistakes, they're seeing like, they get another opportunity and now my next opportunity opportunity, I want them to be just as aggressive as they were before. So those are just some like quick ideas of how you can, you know, create that environment for your athletes inside your practice. structure. Okay. Now, if you want more ideas, you're going to want to check out this next video, all about how to help your athletes even further, like give them awareness of what's going on in their bodies and in their brains when they make a mistake so that they can respond. Because a lot of athletes have no idea what's going on. They just get overtaken by this fight or flight response, but here's what can actually happen. They can, I say, I kind of described like a traffic light. Green is flow state where they should be. Yellow is, you know, something happened. It feels a little off. Red is really hard to come back. The key here is that we want to catch athletes and get them aware of when they get to yellow before they get to red. So in this next video, I'm going to talk about how you can continue to develop that mental toughness so that they can get over mistakes faster. I'll see you there.