Stop Hoping for Mental Toughness - Start Training It (3 Strategies)

Mental toughness isn't something athletes stumble upon. It's something you train every single day → https://coachfreetraining.com

If your athletes check out during hard drills or lack competitive drive, it's not a physical problem. It's a mental one.

As a championship head coach with 14 years of experience, I'm breaking down three drill-based strategies to train mental toughness in your gym. This isn't motivational speeches. This is intentional, daily training that builds focus, competition, and performance under pressure.

What You'll Learn:
Why mental toughness is trained, not stumbled upon
How to optimize pre-practice time to train focus and connection
The 3-2-1 BRAVE daily mindset routine (5-7 minutes that saves you 20-30 minutes of wasted practice)
The competitive cauldron system that trains competitive drive
How to create pressure situations that train athletes to perform when it counts

👋🏼 I'm Coach Bre - a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a long-time head volleyball coach and 4-time state champion.

🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction: The Mental Game Problem
00:50 Strategy 1: Optimize Pre-Practice Time
06:06 Strategy 2: Implement Competitive Cauldron System
07:35 Weekly Competition Tracking
09:21 Strategy 3: Create Pressure Situations
11:14 Recap and Final Thoughts

💬 Coaches - comment below: What's one mental skill you wish you could train your athletes to have tomorrow?

Next Steps:📌
🔹 Grab our in-depth FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
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P.S. A few stats worth knowing:

• Athletes who practice mental skills show 15-20% improvement in performance consistency under pressure (Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2022)
• Teams that implement structured mental training programs report 40% fewer in-game mental errors (International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2023)
• 85% of high school coaches believe mental training is important, but only 23% feel confident teaching it (National Federation of State High School Associations, 2023)

The Coach Her Game YouTube channel is hosted by The Elite Competitor and is dedicated to helping coaches of girl athletes strengthen their mental game and team culture in order to develop a competitive edge.

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

Transcript

1:04

If you've got athletes who check out during hard drills, if it takes you half of the practice to even get them focused and ready to play, or you lack competition on your team, I hate to say it, but it's not a physical problem. It's a mental one. And as a head coach myself, for the past 14 years, I've won four state championships as a coach. And I'll tell you firsthand that mental toughness isn't something that you stumble upon. It's something that you train every single day. In your practices and if you have no idea where to start or what drills to do, or what activities or skills to teach on how to get your athletes to compete and to focus and really have that drive in your gym. Then stick around. This episode is for you. I'm going over three drill based strategies to incorporate mental toughness in your team. Things that you can be doing in your gym right now. So I'm gonna get into it right away. Number one, the first thing that you need to do is to optimize your pre-practice time. Athletes come into the gym, they do their jobs, and then they come to the board. So I have a big whiteboard in my gym where I write pre-practice activities on the board, and I have like. Three different pre-practice things that they rotate through and they look at the board, they know exactly what to do. There's things that I just don't want to waste time doing in practice. So there's like footwork drills, um, there's blocking things. There's um, some, some fundamentals, things like that, that they just get those reps in early and get them out of the way. Some other really important things that I do in pre-practice is I make sure that there's some connection in there, so they're connecting with other teammates. Um, we have a big little sister type mentorship program that we do, so they connect there, they connect with a coach. So I'm usually at the whiteboard, like high fiving or giving fist bumps or checking in with athletes. Athletes also check in during their pre-practice, so they on the other side of the board are recording some information, but that's just part of this pre-practice. That kind of sets the tone because when athletes come in and they're like. You know, lagging and they're not really sure what to do. Or they grab a ball and they just start hitting against the wall, or they do some arbitrary arm warmup. Like it's really not setting the tone for how they're going to compete. So pre-practice is what, where you can actually like tighten things into, come up with some pre-practice activities that you can rotate through if you practice on the field. I mean, you could have it on a clipboard, you could have your captains make sure that, you know, they're, they're leading it. Like it's, it's a very simple way for your athletes to get to work right away. Now the other thing that I do at the beginning of practice that helps kind of build in some of this mental toughness and this focus, because the problem that I was running into was that it would take me like half a practice for girls to really like. Wake up, meaning they're coming into practice after school. They've got like all sorts of things that they are, have been dealing with at school, with friendships in academics and all the things they're doing that's, they're coming in with all of that on their minds. And it would take a while for them to like get into the group. You know, we would start practices slow. Um, you know, I would have to get on them a little bit. Uh, we'd have to run a set of lines and I'd be like, why do we have to do this every day? For you guys to focus and it just got frustrating. Well, when we started implementing mental training in our program about six years ago, one of the things that we started implementing was a daily mindset routine at the beginning of practice. So they do their pre-practice activities, they're connecting, they're getting those like. Reps out of the way. And then I call my whole program together. There's 36 girls in my program. I coach high school varsity volleyball. So we've got three teams, three to four teams. Um, depending on the season, they come to the whiteboard and they do something called 3, 2, 1, brave and 3, 2, 1. Brave is our daily mindset routine. That just helps. Focus them. Um, it's three that stands like an acronym. So the three stands for three affirmations. They have a journal. They write their three affirmations in there. Now these are affirmations that they have found at the beginning of the season. They're based on goals. I have a whole like, workshop on how to do that. I go over that at the coach free training, by the way. Um, they then have two minutes of journaling. I usually give'em a prompt that is related to something that's going on in our season. So I'll have something like, what does it look like to be a good teammate today, or. Um, what does it look like for you to show up and give a hundred percent today, something like that? Um, so they have two minutes also just to kinda get, get stuff out. Um, one thing that they're grateful for, because there's a lot of research around gratitude and, um, when athletes are, you know, looking for the good in their environment, they find more of it and then one piece of evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true. So they have these affirmations that they're kind of anchoring to all season and they're looking for evidence. They're hunting the good of finding. Evidence that they are coming true, that this is getting better for me. Right. Um, when I, an example of an affirmation might be, I'm a fast, aggressive defender and they're finding evidence of. Them becoming that. And again, when they look for it, they find more of it. They create more of it when they're more aware of it. And then we do a short visualization that's called Brave, and that helps them visualize their affirmations. We've got some breath work in there so that they can regulate their nervous system. It gives them a chance to like check in with themselves and just kinda shift their energy to be ready for practice. Now that whole thing takes between five and seven minutes. And if you're like, oh, five to seven minutes of, you know, focusing on their mindset, visualizing breath work seems like a waste of time. I'll tell you right now, what's a waste of time is spending half of practice trying to get your team to compete and to play. And so spending five to seven minutes is an investment that I choose to make in my athletes because I know that I'm gonna get more out of that than I actually put in because, so now we can actually start practice and things are good from the beginning. They're competing, they're ready, they're focused, they're not, you know. Worried or thinking about that thing from earlier in the day because they've already, they've already processed it. They've already dealt with it in our three, two, and brave little daily mindset routine. So that's another part of like pre-practice that's going to help your team be more mentally tough because part of mentally mental toughness is focus. What are you focusing on? You know, mentally tough players can narrow their focus to the task at hand. Mentally weak players are all over the place and distracted and they can't focus themselves. And so this is a skill that athletes have, um, that we give them so that they can practice that focus. Number two, use a competitive cauldron system. Now, I say that a little bit like. Tongue in cheek because you don't have to use the competitive cauldron system if you have no idea what that means. I'll tell you in a second, but some sort of way to encourage competition in your gym because competition does allow for athletes to be more mentally tough and have that competitive drive when you need it in a game. It does no good to always do this, like starters versus non-starters thing because like your starters aren't gonna get great competition all the time. And then your non-starters are going to also like not really be pushed either because it's like the play is just. Over. Okay. And so we mix people up. Now obviously there's a place for non-starters versus non-starters if we're trying to like install something or replicate something. But for the most part, we're mixing people up, especially in small group things. Um, and that allows for a really accurate representation of where each athlete stands in the program. So how this would look is, um, we do pre-practice, do our three, two, and brave. Then we would go off to our courts varsity, JV C team. A freshman team, they all go off to do their individual practices. Then we would go maybe into some like other sort of, uh, drill that would break down a skill emphasis that we have. Then we would, we typically end, um, or spend a large amount of practice, depending on the point in the season that we are on six on six. So that's like game like scenarios and those would be scored as well. But we give more weight to six on six drills because if you can win, basically what we wanna know is like, can you win with PE with a variety of people that you're playing with and against? So if you can win in a six on six drill, that's like very valuable to us because that's what we're playing most often. And so most of the time I multiply those scores by six. So say, you know, the winning team, the winning, um, six people got five points in that, in that six on six drill multiplied by. Six because we're gonna wait it, um, more than a small group drill. So you're gonna put 30 up and you just keep adding your score. So say you got 20 points in Neville's pepper, you got 30 points in the six on six drill, you now have 50 points for the day. And these numbers or these, uh, names that are on the board. Are all kind of, have, they have, they're, they're grouped by position. So I maybe have four outside hitters and they're grouped together and they've got my three middle hitters and they've got my opposites, my setters, my dss. And so you can kind of see within position group like, okay, today our outside hitter group, these four, like, you know, two people got 50 and then we've got some 48, 40 fours, whatever. Like, so athletes can kind of see like, oh, here's where I. Here's where I ended up today, um, against the other people in my position group. And then I usually keep the competitive cauldron for a week before I reset it. So I wipe the numbers so they can see at the end of the week, like, here's where, here's where I ended. And it's really important how you talk about this, like I said. So it is, it's a, it's a snapshot. It's not like you're using this to d determine playing time, although it could be a factor. It's for motivation as well. Like, here's where you are, this. Week, maybe set a goal for next week where you wanna be. And it just allows athletes to always be competing and develop that mental toughness because they're like, this matters. Every single thing that we do in our gym matters. Because in a game, every single play matters. Every single play in volleyball. Um, is, is awarded a point for you or the other team. And so, um, that helps us kind of breed some of that competitiveness. Um, because mental toughness isn't just about effort, right? It's about performing when it counts and the cauldron makes that a real thing for them. Um, it emulates some of that, that pressure. Number three, create pressure situations for your athletes. Um, mentally tough teams don't just, um, show up mentally tough, right? They practice these situations that you're going to be in and you can't just. You can't know every single situation that your team is going to be in, but you start to notice some patterns, right? There's gonna be situations where your team's gonna be down by a certain number of points and they've gotta battle back so you can recreate that score, um, in your gym. Okay? So you can score from a deficit. I do that often. Um, I do a fun game that athletes love. It's like a little jeopardy situation where I have little note cards and each note card is worth different points. And on the other side, it's a situation that they have to get out of. So. The, you know, they turn over one card and it's, um, the score is 2124. Your team has 21, and we gotta, we win at 25. Okay? And, um, you're serving the ball game to 25, all right? And they're like, okay, we're down. And if they win, if they accomplish that, they get the full amount of points for that. So say that is a 20 point card, but if they lose, then the other team gets to steal half those points. So like, you're kind of putting them in pressure situations. Um. Timed based challenges are another good thing. So, you know, we've gotta get certain number of passes or certain number of things. And under this amount of time, um, game point, we, we do a lot of like seal the deal type things. Meaning like, you, you can only get a big point or a game point if you do these three things. You have to convert three free balls. So it puts a little bit more pressure on them. It's like, I've gotta do this. You know, three times in order to get this big point. Um, if you want to learn more about that, so you want, you're like, I just need a plug and play way to teach them these skills so that I can just like coach harder and get back to what I wanna do, which is just coach. The sport, then go to our free training coach free training.com. I talk about plug and play Elite mental game there. And you also get a discount on the program when you go to the training. So that's a really easy way to just infuse mental training intentionally. So you can do these things. You can do these drill based things. Make sure pre-practice is dialed in so that you're setting the tone early. Make sure you have some sort of competitive system like the competitive cauldron. Make sure you're like emulating pressure situations so that you can try and, um, you know, create some adaptability in your team so that when they're facing those things in real game-like situations, they're like, we've been here, but then it doesn't also hurt. In fact, it helps a lot to equip them ahead of time with skills that they need. All right, coaches, I hope this was helpful. I know that practice is always. A tough thing sometimes, but honestly, it's now my favorite part of coaching is practice because that's where my players work the hardest, honestly. Like we create practices so that they're harder than a game. Um, it's where they grow the most, and it's just where I love being because it's where the work happens. So I hope that that happens to you. Um, I'm Coach Bree. I am the host of the Coach or Game podcast, and I'll see you in the next episode.