Weaving in mental skills
Many of you know, but some don’t, but I am married to an exceptional sport psychologist (just keep her happy and leave the ‘s’ off sport!) Partly because of our relationship and partly because I grew up in New Zealand, I have always weaved mental skills into practices, games and feedback loops. There are a lot of places we could start, but I wanted to pick three and focus on how I use them as a coach.
The first is creating space to evolve your self-perception and identity. I wrote about Owning a Place in the Circle, which includes stepping into an identity. This goes beyond as I try to create an opening for players to change as their skillset grows, their leadership experiences improve and their world view develops. What do I mean? I think players need space to experiment with their identity — they need to play with how they interact with the game, the team and the world. As they start to do this, each player will make adaptations and changes…some will be intentional, some will be situational and some will be subconscious.
I think as a coach, we have to be around and available to challenge sometimes, listen at other times and reflect back frequently. Why? Honestly, when a player starts to expand outside their comfort zone, they aren’t always aware of how they are perceived. I think it is our job as coaches to help them develop their perception and harness things that work. Sometimes it is also our job to help them shed or adapt behaviors that aren’t aligned with their intention. My goal as a coach is amplify their strengths, develop actions plans to overcome their challenges and to ensure they have self-awareness.
The second way that I use mental skills is by helping players build confidence in their skillset. Rugby is a dynamic sport, so visualization can be difficult for many parts of the game. There are a lot of variables and it is hard to write a script. What I like to do is to increase awareness of effective use of a player’s skillset in a game like situation. When a player uses his/her skillset at the right moment, I try to call it out in the moment at practice and have a teammate or coach follow-up with the player. I think that by creating awareness of positive impacts builds the confidence of the player and the confidence of the team in the player.
Another way I like to leverage this is to call out a player’s idiosyncracies in a huddle. I will often ask, “If this player has the ball, what do we expect them to do?” When a player hears that their teammates know them, they develop more confidence in that skillset. For each rostered player, I work really hard to reinforce a key aspect that the team knows they will do well. For a playmaker, I might tell them, “Trust your eyes, you see the game well and we need this to be able to go forward.” For a strong defender, “Lead by creating width on defense to give yourself the opportunity for the big stop.”
The third way is that I use different types of pressure at practice to help increase their ability to deal with pressure in a match. Sometimes, I will shorten the time they have to make a decision, other times, I will allow the opposition to cheat (normally, I make this an assistant coach who can play offside). At other times, I will increase the terribleness of my reffing (it becomes very biased) or I will send a playoff for no reason. My goal with this is that the each playing group focuses on the things that they can control. They learn to adapt as they play. What is the key to stopping this from just becoming chaos? The debrief at the end of the activity — when players and coaches call out the times when the players got it right or problem solve how they could’ve got it right.
Additionally, I’ve written a bit about learning from Scenarios here. But in this context, I would give the team a scenario at training and they would have to execute. Afterward, we can debrief and maybe find a better solution. Sometimes, I will give the team another shot and other times, I will leave them stewing on a bad rep. Why? They frustration and peevishness are part of the emotions that pressure create in a game. If I am always finishing on a good rep, I don’t believe that I am creating enough pressure on a one-time performance of the players. I will add the caveat, you can’t do this all the time, since practice is a place to get better. But sometimes, throwing it in creates a focus and urgency to get things right under pressure.
So there are three favorite ways that I consciously add in mental skills into practice. What are some of your favorite ways to do it?
