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Are You Using Mental Training?

Olympic, Professional, And Other Star Athletes Use This Secret Weapon. How About You?

Bill Cole, MS, MA
Founder and CEO
William B. Cole Consultants
Silicon Valley, Californi
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Mental Game Coach Bill Cole Peak Performance Playbook

Mental training should be an integral part of your sports training program. Choose a coach who is an expert in this area, because it can make the difference between winning and coming close. Are you using mental training to enhance your sport success? Discover what it is all about. Here are five aspects of mental training I suggest you incorporate into your game.    548 words.

Do you have the right mental approach in your sport? Are you playing head games to your advantage? As a leading mental game coach, I use mental training in my practice to help my athlete clients achieve higher levels of success in their learning, training and performances. How about you? Are you using mental training to enhance your sport success? Let's discover what it is all about. Here are five aspects of mental training I suggest you incorporate into your game.


  1. Mental Training Helps You Visualize Success. If you have trouble nailing a skill, visualization can help dramatically. If you feel stuck on a mental issue in competition, visualization can help get you past it. Visualization is a huge part of the mental training toolkit.

  2. Mental Training Helps You Train with Positive Habits. Ever hear of GIGO? That's Garbage In, Garbage Out. That means if you train haphazardly or sloppily, you will become sloppy and random with your skills. If you focus, use precision and pay attention to excellence, that's what you will get in your skills, and also very likely in your performances.

  3. Mental Training Helps You Use The Principle Of Specificity. If you practice any which way, and don't replicate how your actual competition will be, when you arrive on game day you will feel strange, unprepared and out of it. To get the confidence flowing you need to train with specificity. That's where you set up training to feel and sound like the real thing. That way, there are no surprises.

  4. Mental Training Helps You Use Mental Rehearsal. You can gain a competitive advantage with your mind if you play the game in advance. That's right. You can mentally rehearse what you will be doing in competition. You can plan for contingencies, problems or map out your strategy and see yourself winning before you actually do it. That gives you tremendous confidence.

  5. Mental Training Helps You Reduce Stress Symptoms. How stressed do you get in practice? Maybe not much. How stressed do you get in competition? Maybe too much. A mental training coach can help you discover, manage and eliminate stressful symptoms that interfere with your learning and performance.


Mental training should be an integral part of your sports training program. Choose a coach who is an expert in this area, because it can make the difference between winning and coming close, and the difference between torturing yourself in training and loving the process. Good luck!

To learn more about mental training, see related article 
A Mental Training System Checklist: 50 Mental Game Tools Peak Performers Use.

For a comprehensive overview of your mental abilities you need an assessment instrument that identifies your complete mental strengths and weaknesses. Here is a free, easy-to-take 65-item sport psychology assessment tool you can score right on the spot. This assessment gives you a quick snapshot of your strengths and weaknesses in your mental game. You can use this as a guide in creating your own mental training program, or as the basis for a program you undertake with mental coach Bill Cole, MS, MA to improve your mental game. This assessment would be an excellent first step to help you get the big picture about your mental game.

Bill Cole, MS, MA, a leading authority on peak performance, mental toughness and coaching, is founder and CEO of William B. Cole Consultants, a consulting firm that helps organizations and professionals achieve more success in business, life and sports. He is also the Founder and President of the International Mental Game Coaching Association (www.mentalgamecoaching.com), an organization dedicated to advancing the research, development, professionalism and growth of mental game coaching worldwide. He is a multiple Hall-Of-Fame honoree as an athlete, coach and school alumnus, an award-winning scholar-athlete, published book author and articles author, and has coached at the highest levels of major-league pro sports, big-time college athletics and corporate America. For a free, extensive article archive, or for questions and comments visit him at www.MentalGameCoach.com.

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