Mindset Progress Monitoring: Tracking Mental and Physical Skills

A team throughout a season must adopt the mindset of continuous growth and learning in order to arrive at the end of its season as a champion. The pressure of a team's expectations can interfere with its ability to maintain consistent concentration on improvement. As the team earns positive and negative results, it's easy for its identity to start becoming established in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies. What we might see is a team underperforming because its effort isn't directed in a specific way with the right objectives. Without a specific concentration in practices and games, the team's players can fall into the "talent trap."
 
The "talent trap" is a fixation on past results which equals a limited potential for future growth. In order to break out of the mindset that talent is going to win games for teams, coaching staffs and their players need to buy in to the importance of process-focused improvement through the details of the game. This is very different from how the team appears to others as well as how its ranking and previous wins and losses should dictate the outcome of a future game. The best team doesn't always win, but the team that plays best in a game will!
 
In order to emphasize a constant improvement emphasis, teams and athletes need to practice becoming more self-aware and team-aware. It's perhaps helpful to list all the skill sets needed to play at a high level and then rate the team on where it is now compared to where it wants to be through a simple 1-10 rating scale. Individual players also should practice creating a self-rating skill-set dashboard that includes passing, transition, shooting, shot-blocking, driving, and tactics or fundamentals. The point is that it gives players a starting point, and they can then take that skill-rating dashboard with them to focus on key aspects they want to improve.
 
A mental self-rating dashboard could include the following (and more!):
 
Confidence: 1-10
Confidence during close game moments: 1-10
Focus pre-game: 1-10
Energy regulation pre-game: 1-10
Nerves regulation pre-game: 1-10
Nerves during the game: 1-10
Use of pre-game routines: 1-10
In-game emotional control: 1-10
In-game attention control: 1-10
Using mental skills (e.g., breathing, self-talk, imagery) pre-game: 1-10
Using mental skills (e.g., breathing, self-talk, imagery) in-game: 1-10
Resilience after setbacks or mistakes: 1-10
Communication with teammates on defense: 1-10
Communication with teammates on offense: 1-10
Making plays in clutch moments: 1-10
Working with pressure: 1-10
 
This isn't an exhaustive list, but it shows some of the areas to work on and improve. Teams and athletes could make their own lists of physical and mental skills to self-rate and then define them by identifying actual plays and actions for evidence.
 
The ultimate purpose of creating a mental and physical self-rating dashboard is to track progress toward improved behavior change. Too often athletes and teams hope to see improvement without adding enough structure to the actual improvement they want. Skill improvement is essentially action-oriented behavior change in a positive direction toward achieving outcome goals set by teams and athletes. Working to put more structure around the improvement takes more luckout of the equation and increases a sense of control in the eyes of the athletes. Their belief that their efforts are helping them improve is what really matters and gets them to their desired destinations.
 
Contact Brian through his website: www.athletementalskillscoach.com 
Follow Brian on Twitter @BA_POS_MINDand on Facebook www.facebook.com/AthleteMentalSkillsCoach/