Performance and improvement can sometimes feel like a linear process. You put in the time and effort consistently as a means to get closer to achieving your goals. It can be easy to get caught up demanding greatness from yourself based on the performance you last had. However, this dynamic can often hinder, instead of enhance, your performance. You are not as good or bad as our last game or training session. You operate within a range of performance.

Parents do everything they can to help their athletes reach their goals. This is a letter from one sport psychologist to those parents providing four great tips to help support their athletes mentally and emotionally. Be the best sport psychology minded parents you can be!

It’s time to say goodbye to 2022 and hello to 2023. This time of year, most people take a few minutes to pause and reflect on what they’ve accomplished this year. Then, they create a resolution for the upcoming year. Without a doubt, one of the most common resolutions is related to getting in shape. You make sure that you are physically in shape, but what are you doing to ensure that you are in shape mentally?

The tenth and final Essential is learning to Focus and Refocus. Focus is having your brain paying full attention to the aspects that are important to your performance in that moment. In some sports, this focus is on one particular component that is mainly internal, such as driving out of the blocks at the start of the race. For other sports, there are a lot of external components that have to be simultaneously analyzed, like when a quarterback is finding an open receiver. What is the same in each situation is the need to focus the brain on what is important and push out the distractions that pull away from those components.

The ninth Essential is learning to Maintain a Growth Mindset. A growth mindset is one of two mindsets coined by Dr. Carol Dweck (the other is a fixed mindset). These mindsets describe ways that people view the qualities that we possess, the failures that we experience, and the role of effort. Adding in one three-letter word helps you shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

The eighth Essential is learning to Maintain Confidence. By far, this is one of the most common challenges that athletes mention when I work with them. There is this belief that confidence is necessary for athletes to achieve all that they are capable of in their sport. While I’m not convinced that it is necessary, having confidence certainly makes it easier for athletes to accomplish their goals and achieve high levels of success. When the doubt starts to creep in, all you need is one simple shift to create big results.