3 Mental Training Skills You Can Teach in Under 15 Minutes

3 mental skills coaches can actually teach - no extra prep, no sports psychology degree, all under 15 minutes. Get the free training → coachfreetraining.com

Your athletes have the talent. But talent doesn't help when she's spiraling after one mistake.

The fix isn't another pep talk. It's three teachable skills she can use in real time, on the court, when the pressure hits.

👋🏼 I'm Coach Bre, a 4-time state champion volleyball coach and Certified Mental Performance Coach. I've spent 14+ years coaching girl athletes and built The Elite Competitor to give coaches proven, plug-and-play mental training systems that actually work.  

In this episode, I'm breaking down:
👉 The Snapback Routine - a 2-second failure recovery system (breath + reset word + reset signal)
👉 Visualization - why her brain fires the same neural pathways in a mental rep as a real one
👉 The anxiety reframe backed by Harvard research - one phrase that measurably improves performance

Telling isn't teaching. These three skills hand your athletes the mechanism, not just the message.

🕓 Key Moments: 
00:00 Introduction
00:59 Why Athletes Fall Apart Under Pressure
01:16 Skill #1: The Snapback Routine
02:44 Snapback in Action: Championship Story
03:47 Skill #2: Visualization
04:21 How to Use Visualization With Your Team
05:51 Skill #3: Reframe Nervousness as Excitement
07:20 Wrap-Up & Free Training

💬 Drop a comment below - which of these three skills are you trying first with your team?

📩 Work with Coach Bre: coachfreetraining.com

📌 Free Tools & Next Steps
🎓 Free Mental Training Resource for Coaches: coachfreetraining.com
📲 Instagram: @coachhergame
🎙 Podcast: Coach Her Game Podcast
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame
🔹 Championship Program Membership: champions.elitecompetitor.com
🔹 Player Impact Plan: https://elitecompetitor.kit.com/6639eaaf9f

🔔 Subscribe for weekly mental training strategies built specifically for coaches of girl athletes.

P.S. Here's what the research shows:  
⚡️ When athletes mentally rehearse a skill in vivid detail, the neural pathways fire the same way as during physical practice. (Cleveland Clinic)
⚡️ Athletes who reframed pre-competition anxiety as excitement showed measurably higher performance than those who tried to calm down. (Wood Brooks, A., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014)
⚡️Only 9% of high school coaches report receiving formal training in sport psychology or mental performance. (Journal of Athletic Training, 2021)

The Coach Her Game 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.  

#coachinggirls #mentalperformance #girlsinsports #highschoolcoach #athletemindset

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

Transcript

1:04

All right, coach. Your athletes have the skills. They're talented. They go to practice, they're training hard, they're putting in the reps, but the second, the pressure is on in a competition, something shifts and you feel it as a coach, they freeze, or one mistake kind of sends them into a mental. Spiral for the rest of the game. I know it's frustrating, but honestly it's actually not a toughness problem. Their brain is doing something very specific under pressure and probably nobody has actually taught them what to do about it. And that's honestly on us a little bit as coaches, and that's what today's video is about. And if I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I am a mental performance coach for athletes, but I'm also a 14 year head volleyball coach. Won four state championships as a coach, and I've also not won a lot of championships as a coach. And the difference between those seasons didn't really come down to talent. It came down to the mental game. And the pattern that I kept seeing over and over with my athletes, and probably the same with yours, is that the athletes who fall apart under pressure are not necessarily less talented. They just were never taught the skills to be able to mentally respond in the moments where it mattered most. So today I'm gonna u give you three skills that I teach to my team every single season. They're all teachable. You can do it with your team too, and they all take under 15 minutes. So let's get right into it. Skill number one. The snapback routine. Now this is like a failure recovery system, and here's the truth. When your athletes are spiraling after mistakes or you're trying to get their head back into the game, we typically say things like shake it off next play. And those aren't bad things to say, but it's actually not teaching them to do that thing like. Telling isn't teaching. I wish it were, I wish I could just say like, go run a slide. Even though I haven't ever taught them that and they just knew what to do. Right? So shake it off next play. That's a direction. But the snapback routine is actually a mechanism and your athletes need the mechanism on how to actually shake it off. So here's how it works. Uh, we teach a breath. A reset word, A reset signal. Okay. So that's the formula for it. This is prefo, like the, the, the reset word is prefo based on best past playing experiences, how they wanna show up in that moment. Some athletes choose words that are like, fun, free, fierce, calm. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes, um, it's a choice word. Um, but it's all in their head, right? I don't know. All of my athletes reset words. They choose that on their own, and it's. Custom to them. And then the reset signal, same thing. It should be simple like adjusting a hair tie, adjusting a sock, looking at a stationary object. But that, that routine takes two seconds or less and my athletes practice it. We actually like do a little workshop to learn how to do it, and then we practice it in lower six environments in practice before we actually need to use it in a game. And it shows up big if you actually practice it. This is something that showed up big in our 2024 championship when we were down championship point and we had to, you know, stay steady to come back. I literally called a time out and I was like. All we're gonna do is our snapback routine. I had a common language. They knew what it was'cause like they knew like what to do tactically out there, like strategy wise, they knew what to do. But I needed them to lock in mentally and be able to meet the moment. And not only did we come back from being down championship point, we ended up winning the fourth set when we were facing, not winning. And then, uh, won the fifth set to win state in a game that I was like, I don't even know if we, like, how did we even get here? Right? And so again, you don't rise. The level of level of the competition, you actually fall to what you've trained. So training a failure recovery system is a really important skill that all athletes need to know how to do. Okay. If you wanna go deeper into how to teach this to your athletes, this is something I go over on my free training for coaches that's at coach free training.com. I go over this skill and a little bit more depth, and I talk about our program for coaches called Plug and Play Elite messaging for teams where you can literally just like. Plug and play and teach the skill to your team without needing a lot of extra practice time or knowing how to be, you know, a sports psychologist, because most of us are not. Okay? All right. Now, skill number two, visualization. This is kind of, when you think of a sports sport, sports psychology and mental training, like visualization often comes to mind, but you don't wanna sleep on this skill because I already know maybe what some of you're thinking, like, uh, are my athletes actually gonna do this? But. Just stick with me. The Cleveland Clinic has published research showing that when an athlete mentally rehearses a skill in vivid detail, the neural pathways in her brain fire the same way as if she's actually performing that skill. So her brain can truly not tell a difference between a mental rep and a real one. Which means the two minutes before practice or competition are not just downtime, they're training time. So the question is though, what are your athletes firing in their brains during that two minutes? And here's how you can use it 30 to 60 seconds before a big drill, before a game at the end of warmups, um, walk them through. One of these pressure scenarios. Okay, so they see themselves making the play, what they want to see themselves doing, how it feels. We have to recruit all five senses. I use visualization every single day. At the beginning of practice, we do something called daily, uh, 3, 2, 1, brave. It's our daily mindset routine. And I do like a very short three minute visualization where they are visualizing their three affirmations for the season, which those are found based on like a little, um, a little activity that I do to help them know what they want, and then they turn those into affirmations and they're visualizing them every day. Um, I also do visualization before games, so I have them like mentally rehearse, uh, what they wanna do out there, and it just helps'em also kind of come out with a little more calm in them. Right? So they're, they're more confident because they've actually mentally rehearsed some of these things. So. Inside my mental training program for coaches, um, plug and play Elite mental game for teams I have ready to go visualizations. You can either read them to your team, like I have the script, or you can play them for your team. They can also get them to their phone. Um, they can get all of them downloaded to their phone so they can just listen to them. So that's a really easy way to make sure that your athletes are utilizing visualization without a lot of lift on your end. So again, um, coach free training.com is where you can go to learn about our program and get a little discount on our program as well. Okay, skill number three. This is the, this is a really simple one. It's one I wish somebody would've told me, like, well, 15 years ago, maybe more, because I often said the wrong thing to nervous athletes for way too long. And as an athlete myself, like didn't really treat this the right way. So here's a scenario. Your athlete comes to you before game wide, eyes tight, like coach'em so nervous, and most of us say, you'll be fine. Just relax. You know, they'll be nervous, but here's the problem. That doesn't work. Not because the intention is wrong, but because the science does not back it up. So Harvard researcher Alison Woodbrook, studied exactly this. Here's what she found. Anxiety and excitement create the exact same physical response in the body racing. Heart tight, chest, stomach flipping. That sensation is physically identical to whether your athlete is terrified or fired up, and the body can't tell the difference between the two. So when athletes tried to calm themselves down before a competition, performance didn't necessarily improve. When athletes told themselves, I'm excited, instead of I'm nervous, performance went up measurably. Okay, that's pretty cool. So same feeling, different label, different performance. So the next time she comes to you or your team comes to you before a big game, instead of saying, just relax or don't be nervous, say that feeling means your body is ready to compete. Tell yourself you are excited. Okay? So that's like a really simple swap. Um, you can teach that in, you know, couple minutes, run a quick scenario at practice, have athletes think about a high pressure moment, have that nervous feeling, that nervous energy and say out loud, I'm excited. And have them notice the difference in how that lands and. How they show up. All right, so those are three quick things that you could be teaching your athletes a snapback routine visualization that, um, you know, shifting from I'm nervous to. I'm excited. Those are just really simple ways you can pepper some mental training. But if you want to know more, definitely check out our free training for coaches. That's a coach free training.com and go more in depth. And I talk about a really easy way within our program that you can teach these skills to your team without actually having to take a ton of practice time through our program called Plug and Play Elite, miss Looking for Teams. You literally get your team together. Press play and I do the teaching for you and it's really great. All right, so head there, coach free training.com and I'll see you in the next episode of the Coach or Game podcast.