Top 5 Mental Toughness Skills Every Young Athlete Needs NOW!

Speak your greatness into existence. The most important conversation your young athlete has every single day is the one they have with themselves. That little voice is either building them up or tearing them down. Most kids have never been taught to work on their inside voice. (That is unless they're being loud. #differentinsidevoice)

There are a lot of ways to take control of the voice inside your head, but one of the best ways is something very few people talk about. It's called Mirror Work.

Mirror Work is the practice of looking in the mirror, making eye contact with yourself, and saying what you want to be true. Mirror work is one of the best ways to talk directly to your subconscious mind. Here's how to do it:

• Stand in front of the mirror
• Make eye contact with yourself, and...
• Say what you want to be your reality

Most people never look directly at themselves in the mirror — really look. Doing this one thing and saying what you want changes something in your mind. With Mirror Work, you can change what you believe on a cellular level. That means you can also change what you do and how you do it. #doyourmirrorwork #futuregoat

Watch the video below to see what we're talking about and how it can work for your athlete.

Write down your goals! Writing down your goals is a cheat code. Athletes who write down their goals are something like 90% more likely to achieve them. That's right — just by writing them down, the odds of completing your goals go through the roof!

When young athletes write down their goals by hand, something neurologically happens as well. Writing down goals by hand engages both the logical left brain and the creative right brain at the same time. It encodes the goal into the brain and puts everything mentally to work to make it happen. It's like giving specific directions to one of the most powerful machines in the world — your subconscious mind.

However, here's the thing that trips up a lot of athletes. You have to write your goals in present tense. A lot of athletes make the mistake of writing their goals in future tense. Pro tip: the future is never here. We are always in the present. It's always now. It's always today. So write down your goals in the now. "I am the most prepared player on this field." Then watch your subconscious mind do its magic!

Write your goals down and keep them simple. One to three lines at the most.

Use social media to watch the pros and NOT the joes! We can't have a conversation about mental toughness for young athletes and ignore social media — it's kinda everywhere! Now here's something you probably haven't thought about when it comes to the scroll monster: social media can be your young athlete's biggest gift. Wait — WHUUUT??? Stick with us for a sec.

Your athlete can use social media to do what we call embedding — or watching the pros and not the joes. When your young athlete sees an action or skill that they want to perfect done at a high level by a pro, their brain encodes it. This is the same way they learned to walk. They watched a lot of pros. (Yes, you are a pro at walking.)

Thanks to social media, your young athletes can see how that pro soccer player kicks the ball, warms up, and even works out these days. Just by watching them they can embed how an elite athlete runs, jumps, or throws. Watching the pros and not the joes can embed proper technique directly into your young athlete's mind.

The solution isn't to remove social media — it's to make sure it's showing them what they need to see. In their scroll they can see how Aaron Judge approaches the plate. They can see how elite pitchers lock in before a big at-bat. It's all there and it's all free!

Train rough! Did you ever wonder why Rocky Balboa trained in a meat locker while his opponent used a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility? Do you ever wonder how he knew that would work? Well, Sylvester Stallone got it from watching the greatest boxer of all time — Muhammad Ali!

Ali's training camp was a bare-minimum, chop-wood-carry-water, train-rough situation and that training made him a world champion. Training in rough conditions makes the match or the game feel easy.

There's a principle in sports psychology called Practice Variability — the idea that exposing athletes to imperfect, unpredictable, and demanding training conditions accelerates both physical skill development and mental fortitude. When your young athlete only trains under ideal circumstances, their nervous system calibrates to ideal circumstances. The first time anything feels "off" on game day — a noisy gym, rough ice, a bad warm-up — their system goes into mild panic mode.

But when an athlete has trained in rough conditions — outdoors on a bad field, in a situation that isn't as nice — their nervous system adapts. Uncertainty stops being a threat and becomes familiar. The game, with its controlled conditions and marked boundaries, starts to feel EASY!

Your subconscious mind can't tell the difference between something real and something imagined. That's right — visualizing yourself winning is just as powerful as actually winning. This is why visualization is our favorite mental exercise of them all!

Kobe Bryant used visualization. Michael Phelps used visualization. It works. It works! When you see yourself winning in your mind, it has to show up. #eventually Rehearse winning in your mind before you ever step onto the court, field, or floor.

Visualization is like playing the game before the game. It's like working through the nerves before working through the nerves.

But here's the piece most people miss: the best visualization isn't just imagining everything going perfectly. The most powerful version includes working through what happens when things go wrong. You can literally visualize yourself working through the thing you're afraid of. You can go through a missed routine, a bad call — and mentally rehearse how your athlete recovers and continues to compete at a high level. That's what Michael Phelps did. Take a look at this video!