Douglas Della Toffalo, How Can Sports Psychology Help Athletes?

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 Douglas Della Toffalo, How Can Sports Psychology Help Athletes?

Athletes often ask me this question: "How do I know when a poor performance
or error is a physical or a mental problem?" From my experience, here are a
few hints that it may be a mental breakdown:

1. You perform much better in practice than during competition

2. You have a tough time performing well when others are watching you

3. You maintain many doubts about your sport before or during games

4. You feel anxious or scared when you perform in competition

5. You are not sure why you play your sport or what motivates you

6. You only participate in sports to feel better about yourself as a person

7. You lose focus or have mental lapses during critical times of the game

8. You can't perform the way you did pre-injury, but are physically 100%

9. Everything is fine, but you just want to improve your mental attitude

Sports psychology sometimes get a bad reputation because of the association
of psychology with pathology. That is why I prefer to call what I do mental
game coaching or mental training, which athletes understand. Mental game
coaching is for athletes who want to improve upon their current performance
and take their games to the next level with the help of a mental coach like
myself.

But most athletes, unfortunately, seek out my services because of an
particular performance barrier or decrease in performance. As a mental game
coach, I often become the last resort after athletes have tried other means
to get beyond performance slumps. I wish it wasn't this way, but athletes
wait until some needs to be "fixed" and they have exhausted all other
resources before they commit to mental game coaching.

How can sport psychology help you perform better? Here is the most obvious
list:

1. Improve focus and deal with distractions.

2. Grow confidence in athletes who have many doubts.

3. Develop coping skills to deal with setbacks and errors.

4. Find the right zone of intensity for your sport.

5. Help teams develop communication skills and cohesion.

6. To instill a healthy belief system and weed out irrational thoughts.

7. Improve and balance motivation for optimal performance.

8. Get back into competition after an injury is healed fully.

9. To develop game-specific strategies and game plans.

10. To identify and enter the "zone" more often.

Sport psychology may not be for every single athlete. Not everyone involved
in sport wants to "improve performance." Sport psychology is probably not
for recreation athletes who just like the social component of sport. Most of
my students are committed to excellence and seeing how far they can go. They
love competition and testing themselves against the best in their sport.
They want every possible advantage they can learn including the mental edge
over the competition.
Dr. Patrick J. Cohn is a leading mental game coach who consults with Tour
Pros and amateurs. He is the author of Going Low, Peak Performance Golf, The
Mental Game of Golf and The Mental Art of Putting.
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