Sport psychology focuses on a variety of psychological concepts and approaches, including positive psychology, mindfulness, and cognitive-behavioural approaches. These are often applied across your coaching practice in combination to meet individual and/or group needs. 

Sport psychology can benefit individuals as they return from injury. Additionally:

• the approaches can be used in team dynamics and are central to leadership development
• it enables participants to regulate their emotions and enhance their performance as they develop skills and compete.

Coaching is a people business and to maximise an individual’s potential, you must consider their holistic development. Mental skills just like physical skills must be learned, practised, and developed over time. This is because thoughts, feelings and emotions, and mental states influence and impact in your participants’ ability to practice and perform.

In simple terms, our psychological state influences and is influenced by our biological and social states. Psychological factors include an individual’s thoughts, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. These influence coping mechanisms, emotional regulation, cognitive processes, and mental well-being.

The Bio-Psycho-Social Model is a holistic framework used to understand the complex interactions and connectedness of biological, psychological, and social factors that influence a person's wider health, functioning, and well-being. It recognises that an individual's health and functioning are influenced by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors, rather than a single isolated aspect.

When applying the model in a sporting and physical activity environment, it highlights the need to consider and apply an integrated approach to your coaching to maximise the individual’s development and performance.  

Consider how a person may feel when attending a session for the first time. They may be:

• nervous
• worried about their ability
• thinking about whether have they the right equipment
• wondering how hard or challenging the session will be
• wondering whether will they know anyone
• wondering who will be there
• experiencing self-doubt about whether they should be there
• wondering what the coach is like
• even thinking about how they get into the building.

All these thoughts and emotions will influence how they feel. Their muscles may be tense, they may have a sick feeling in their stomach, their mind may be racing, they may have hunched shoulders, and they may have a shortened stride. Any given situation, experience and scenario is influenced by biological, psychological and social factors.

If you’re wondering which social factors apply, consider that:

• they may not know anyone
• they may be worried about the cost of the equipment
• they might not be able to pay the ‘subs’
• they didn’t feel they fitted in or that the people were like them.

As a result, they may be reluctant to go again, or even walk through the door! A famous athlete once shared that instead of getting off the bus the first time they were asked to go to training, they stayed on the loop and went home, and this happened a few times before they eventually attended.

Holistic development

Holistic coaching is about developing the whole person and is an integral part of the coaching process for all coaches at all levels, in all environments and age groups.

Coaching should first and foremost be person-centred to support individuals to be their best selves and leverage a person’s full potential. A holistic approach will positively and deeply impact all aspects of a person’s life beyond the sporting environment. This is achieved by adopting and prioritising the long-term development of participants over short-term success.

You must go deeper than the surface level when connecting with your participants to find out what is important to them. By taking the time to truly understand them, you can create a personalised and meaningful programme for each individual by supporting them in all aspects of their development, including:

• personal
• emotional
• social
• psychological
• physical
• cognitive.

A deeper understanding provides you with insight to enable you to identify and address complex issues and provide the appropriate support at the right time, whilst ensuring that the approach meets the individual’s motivations and that they are fully engaged in their development. A higher level of connection will enhance your relationship, improve the synergy between you and have the potential to significantly increase performance in addition to a positive experience.

This does require regular communication and opportunities to interact, share and connect. It highlights the importance of the coaching team and wider support network to engage with each other. This additional investment takes time, can be time-consuming and requires adaptation as you gain a deeper understanding of the individual and things change. The balancing and adjusting of needs across the various aspects and their needs can be complex and challenging. The benefits of the experience for participants and coaches are worth this investment as you reap the rewards.

Development should be individualised to meet the needs of the participant and their phase of development, which will vary throughout the season, year, programme and cycle.

Barnaby Sargent-Megicks explores the how of holistic development and highlights the climates and key qualities of the coaching environment that help promote the domains of a holistic development environment

Holistic development is influenced by:

• the coaching environment
• the people within the environment (coaches, support staff and wider network)
• how this interacts with other environments a young person lives within (school, home, community, other sporting environments).

Ten steps to a successful holistic development environment

Barnaby Sargent-Megicks shares ten starting steps to success to help you design and develop your holistic development environment.

1. Adapt your environment policies to include definitions of success that feature holistic development.
2. Plan daily sessions with objectives reflecting the three domains of holistic development.
3. Deliberately foster life skill teaching moments with a combination of deliberate-implicit, deliberate-explicit strategies and non-deliberate-explicit.
4. Work with parents as an anchor stakeholder in holistic development.
5. Communicate regularly with external stakeholders such as other coaches or school contacts, to gather information and align objectives.
6. Seek to develop athlete empowerment, particularly their skills and confidence to have a voice. Support athletes to become the athletes and people they want to become.
7. Create a culture of positive mental well-being. Explicitly and regularly discuss this with athletes and empower all involved to have awareness and concern.
8. Learn about athletes’ lives, enabling personalised development and an improved ability to care.
9. View internal (peers in the same environment) and external (peers in other environments) competition as development tools, not unquestioned and for the sake of sporting norms. Always justify ‘why’ for competition.
10. Foster a culture of peer support with those of the same and other ages or stages of athletes. Create formal and informal role model interaction opportunities. 

Changes in our emotional state are natural responses as our body responds to potential threats, which we are hard-wired to constantly be aware of. 

Whilst the risk of being eaten by a wild animal is now very small, the same ‘early warning system’ is still in place. Changes in our body provide an important source of information about our emotional state. 

Anxiety 

Anxiety is a negative emotional state similar to stress with symptoms such as feelings of worry, nervousness and apprehension. The difference is that anxiety can occur without stress and is persistent.  

There are two types of anxiety: trait and state.

It is likely that there will always be someone who is anxious for part of your session. 

Some people will be anxious about other people in the session watching them take part due to a fear of failing, or a fear of embarrassing themselves in front of these people.

What can you do?

• Observe and look out for people feeling anxious. You can notice this through their body language and what they are saying.
• If you see that someone in your session is anxious, try and see if you can change the situation they are in to reduce their anxiety.
• You could also talk with them quietly and find out what is bothering them. Discretion is key here as you don’t want to add to this person’s stress by broadcasting their worries to the whole session.
• Have empathy with people who are anxious and let them know that you understand and that you are available to help them. 
• Ensure that progressions in learning are achievable and related to that person’s goals and motivations.  

Remember:

• Anxiety is a state that can be influenced.
• Helping people manage their anxiety will help them become confident. 
• Look for anxious body language behaviours (fidgeting or freezing).
• Don’t feel you need to solve everyone’s problems.
• Get feedback from people to see if the strategies that you try to reduce anxiety work. 

Stress and performance

Stress occurs when we experience threats known as stressors and they become bigger or smaller based on the perceived demand that they place on us and our ability to manage the demand, sometimes called resources. Demands are often not a single stressor and include performance stressors, personal stressors and contextual stressors (such as work, education, schedules, commitments and access to training facilities).

If we perceive a demand as a threat, we then consider whether we have the resources to meet that threat. If we see the demand as a challenge, we then are unlikely to see this as a stress. Many factors influence a participant’s perception of the demands placed upon them including their current ability, level of competition or coaching environment and personality.  In addition, well-being factors including illness, sleep and nutrition can influence how an individual responds in a situation.

Examples include:

• Making the final in a competition.
• Participating in a knockout style of competition.
• Having family and friends come to watch an event.
• Transitioning from junior to senior training sessions.
• Joining a new group or team.
• Changing playing position within the team.
• Being asked to captain or lead the group.
• Arriving late at a venue and impacting preparation.
• Expectations placed on the individual from the coaching team and/ or family.

This is an extremely important consideration in your coaching and preparation of participants. Consider how they perceive demands and how you develop the resources they have to manage any perceived threats. 

The response involves some involuntary physical changes (hypothalamus) to prepare our bodies for action, including:

• release of adrenaline
• increased heart rate
• increased number of breaths per minute
• sweating
• movement of blood from our skin to muscles.

The second pathway carries information from all parts of the brain to the frontal lobes in the neo-cortex, which uses this information for ‘thinking’ including reasoning, language, decision-making, problem-solving and monitoring our emotional state.

These physical cues are designed to increase our performance at times of stress when we perceive a threat, preparing us to take on or escape from a challenge. 

The performance/arousal curve

Regulation

To maintain peak performance, we need to be able to manage our emotional and physical arousal.

Here are a few ideas:

Read the Understanding Self Guide to explore self-awareness, self-regulation, and understanding and managing your stressors further.

Developing mindsets 

Mindset can be described as the mental attitude you have about yourself and how you perceive and approach challenges, setbacks, and opportunities. A growth mindset changes a participant’s behaviours and approach to setbacks.

Your participant's mindset will affect how they approach, engage and respond to activities in a session. Some people may embrace a challenge, whereas others may choose to avoid it.

A profound insight on the power of mindset comes from Yaya Toure,  former professional footballer, and now coach.  He highlights how your mindset influences your outcomes.

He speaks about the importance of maintaining a positive, focused mindset regardless of external factors and circumstances. Developing this mental habit allowed him to perform at his best consistently, and he found that acquiring a growth-oriented mindset can lead to increased motivation, better problem-solving, and a more dynamic culture for the individual and the groups that they work within.

Fostering a growth mindset is essential in sport and physical activity. A person with a growth mindset believes that their abilities are not limited and can be improved through hard work, effort, learning and persistence. Their attitude when they face setbacks and challenges, how they process failure and adapt and evolve from these opportunities are all influenced by this.

 It doesn’t mean that they like making mistakes or don’t care about getting things wrong; the difference is in how they respond to setbacks. It’s very much in the initial moment and how they react to the feeling that determines a person’s mindset.

Why wouldn’t you want to coach a group of people with this attitude?

It empowers participants to approach activities, training sessions, competitions, and mistakes with a sense of optimism and resolve as they face, learn from and overcome challenges. They see setbacks as feedback and try different approaches to find a solution. 

BelievePerform, the UK’s leading source of performance psychology, well-being and mental health content for coaches, offers key advice to enable you to improve your participant’s ability to handle pressure and help them build a growth mindset:

1. Understand how and why pressure affects them. Help them identify their stress triggers.
2. Encourage them to control what can be controlled. Behaviours, emotions and thoughts are within their control. Opponents, referees, weather, the crowd and the pitch are not.
3. Help them challenge their thoughts. Asking ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ helps break the negative spiral and catastrophising.
4. Apply pressure in training. Design a training programme that mimics performance conditions.
5. Imagery. If participants can see themselves performing successfully, it gives them the belief it is achievable, even perhaps inevitable!
6. Teach them to understand and respect their body: eat, sleep and rest.
7. Support them to manage their emotions and understand how emotions can influence behaviour and thoughts. Introduce verbal and behavioural cues (a specific word or action) that help them refocus. For example, a goalkeeper may wipe his hands on a towel after conceding a goal. A judoka may untie and retie his belt.
8. Encourage them to relax. Consider introducing deep breathing, ratio breathing or progressive muscle relaxation into practice sessions. This will help to control physiological and psychological stressors and help them stay ‘in the moment’, ignore negative thoughts and focus on the task itself, not outcomes.
9. Help them shift negative thoughts into a growth mindset. For example:

‘I keep making mistakes’ can be changed to: ‘Mistakes help me learn.’ 

‘This is impossible’ can be changed to: ‘This will take time and hard work.’ 

‘I can’t do it’ can be changed to: ‘I will train my brain to do this.’

The brain is complex and controls our thoughts, memories, emotions, senses, motor skills, vision and bodily functions such as breathing, temperature regulation and hunger. Combined with the spinal cord, it extends to make up the central nervous system and is responsible for taking messages from the brain to the rest of the body, and from the rest of the body to the brain. 

From birth the brain goes through a significant growth spurt. By the age of six, it is 90% of the size of an adult brain. During adolescence and puberty, the brain begins the process of remodelling, a critical time before it can function as an adult brain. The brain continues to develop and mature until an adult reaches their mid to late twenties.

It’s crucial to recognise that adolescents are not simply mini-adults. 

The changes that occur during adolescence impact the thinking and process parts of the brain as the brain evolves, pruning away the connections that are not used and strengthening other connections to make the brain more efficient and effective. This ‘use it or lose it’ approach begins at the back of the brain and gradually progresses to the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain.  

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for decision-making in the brain, providing the ability for young people to plan, organise, consider the consequences of their actions, solve problems and control their impulses. All this occurs during the key adolescent years, with friendship groups, family dynamics, education choices and sporting opportunities happening.

While the prefrontal cortex is still developing, adolescents rely on another part of the brain called the amygdala to make decisions and solve problems. The amygdala controls our instinctive behaviour, emotions, impulses and aggression. During this time, we will see a change in how a young person acts. Sometimes they will be mature, logical and rational in their behaviour and at times they will be illogical, emotional and impulsive. This occurs as the brain is still developing.

During this stage of development adolescents might:

• choose high-risk activities and be involved in risky behaviour
• show and express stronger emotions
• show their emotions more often
• make impulsive decisions and choices.

Brain structure

In simple terms, the brain consists of three layers: the reptilian and limbic layers which we explored earlier through emotional regulation, and the outer layer called the neo-cortex.

It’s important to remember that the three layers do not operate independently, they have numerous connections and influence each other, and there are situations when one aspect may become more dominant.

The reptilian part of the brain includes the brainstem and basal ganglia which is responsible for breathing, digestion, heart rate and blood pressure.

The limbic part of the brain is made up of four parts: the hypothalamus, amygdala, thalamus and hippocampus. The amygdala performs a role in how we experience emotions and feelings. The hypothalamus controls involuntary physical changes.

The neo-cortex is the outermost layer of the brain that is responsible for higher-order and rational thinking. The neo-cortex (neo means new) is the last part of the brain to fully develop, and includes the cerebrum which contains the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe and temporal lobe.

• The frontal lobe is responsible for planning, judgement, empathy, and impulse control.
• The parietal lobe is responsible for our touch, movement and spatial awareness.
• The occipital lobe controls our vision.
• The cerebellum is at the back of our head, under the cerebrum. It controls coordination and balance.

Understanding the different layers and parts of the brain, where they are located, and their primary functions, helps us understand how the brain develops.

The main differences between the adolescent and adult brain:

Although this insight into brain development doesn't provide an excuse for adolescent behaviour and choices (risk/reward), it can provide an explanation and greater understanding of the influences that affect the teenage brain, equipping you to better support your teenage participants.

Talking brain development with participants: Example of a coaching conversation

At the beginning of the session, the coach asks the team to gather around as they have something to share.

“Did you know your brain is kind of like a smartphone? Well, you know how your phone gets updates? Your brain does something very similar but even more awesome. It’s called neuroplasticity. Neuro means the brain and plasticity means changeable. Your brain is constantly updating and upgrading itself to function even better.

"It works like this; your brain has billions of cells called neurons. These talk to each other through connections, which are called synapses. Every time you practice or learn a new skill; these connections get stronger and more efficient. They upgrade the message. As you practice, to begin with, it can feel uncomfortable or awkward and you make lots of mistakes, that’s because your brain is working out the best way for the neurons to connect and send messages. The more you practice, the easier it is for your brain to work out the best way to make the neurons fire together. The stronger the connections become, the better you can perform the skill until eventually, you can do the action or movement without thinking about it. That’s neuroplasticity in action.  

"While this happens a lot when you are younger, it doesn’t stop, and we can keep developing and improving our whole life. Want to see it working? Tie your shoelace. Now try and tie them using your other hand to make the loop. Hard isn’t it! Now practice doing it for a few minutes. See how it has got easier, and more efficient? That’s because the neural pathways are getting stronger and upgrading the synapses every time.

"The same happens when we work on skills and movement. You're adding layers to the synapses and wiring your brain to work faster and better to improve your skills, and you’re upgrading your brain at every session. Next time you struggle to grasp something or feel like you’re not progressing, remember your brain is just adding the layers to help it fire the neurons."

What does this mean for coaching?

As a coach:

• Role model positive behaviours.
• Encourage positive behaviour.
• Promote and encourage good thinking skills.
• Highlight the importance of regular good sleep hygiene with your participants.
• Regulate your emotions during practice and competitions.
• Match your language level to the level of your participants' understanding. For important information check their understanding by asking them to explain in their own words what they have just heard.

In your coaching sessions:

• Create a positive environment.
• Create a familiar routine for sessions to provide structure.
• Provide clear boundaries and opportunities to discuss and negotiate those boundaries.
• At the start of sessions, have a quick check-in where individuals share a recent growth moment; a time when they noticed their emotions and mindset and showed improvement or overcame a challenge.
• Encourage your participants to find ways to express and control new emotions.
•  Talk about brain health and sleep. Explain it’s a performance improver.
• Allow your participants to engage with healthy risk choices; this could be playing different positions, competing at a higher level, trying a new technique in a competition or changing a tactical plan/strategy.
• Promote and support new and different experiences.
• Help your participants to work through and talk about possible courses of action and the potential consequences of their actions.
• Discuss as a group and weigh up positive consequences or rewards against negative ones in different situations. This could include strategies, tactics, race plans and approaches in sessions. Ask participants to make a list of possible options and their outcomes.
• Build structure, routines and boundaries that provide opportunities to negotiate these with your participants.
• Offer frequent and regular praise to reward positive desired behaviours. This will reinforce positive pathways within their brains.
• Introduce imagery into sessions, explaining how mental rehearsal and practice can also strengthen the neural pathways.
• Check in with the person, not the participant. Take opportunities to talk about feelings: yours and the individuals'. Support them to recognise feelings held by other participants, parents and other people (match officials, teachers, support staff).

To become successful, participants must not only develop technical, tactical, and physical abilities, but they must also develop psychological performance skills.

Psychological Characteristics of Developing Excellence (PCDEs) are ten important psychological characteristics within a participant's kitbag, enabling them to prepare and perform consistently at their best in practice, competition and challenging situations learned and developed over time.

Think of the PCDEs as a ‘hand of cards’ that participants can select a particular combination to address the challenges they face.

PCDEs have been crucial in the development of excellence and causal in the achievement of excellence.

These skills include:

These skills should be planned for and incorporated into your coaching programme. It's a good idea to take a gradual approach during practice, layering the learning before performing and using these in a competition setting. Having a full set of skills and the confidence to use these helps reduce the impacts of the challenges faced.

Introducing psycho-social and psycho-behavioural development into your programme through a considered and layered approach enables participants to experience and develop skills before they need them in competition. 

The use of challenges, sometimes referred to as ‘speedbumps’ slows them down, challenges their approach and encourages them to find solutions, solve problems and think, what if? 

The use of appropriate support is crucial to ensure that each individual is ‘comfortable with being uncomfortable’. As a coach once said, ‘sometimes you need to tip them out of the boat, and then help them back in.’

PCDEs should be developed through five interactions:

• The promoting of the characteristic.
• Coach behaviours to promote and support these.
• Being specific on what they look like in your environment.
• Providing opportunities to practice and explore these.
• Supporting participants to apply the tools themselves.

Specify very clearly how you want your participants to behave, based on aspects that will strengthen their performance and mental skills profile. Consider how they and you can see and measure these. Then design approaches and employ coaching behaviours that encourage and develop these behaviours in practice.

What is quality practice?

Firstly, it’s not what you have planned and delivered, it’s how your participants maximise the opportunities during the sessions.

Do you take time to discuss what high-quality practice looks like? What does quality practice mean to your participants?

It’s important to explore the behaviours you will see when quality practice is taking place. An easy way to explain this is to ask your participants what a person watching your coaching sessions will see and hear when the session is high quality.  

Quality practice is often not achieved because the participants are not aware of the purpose of the session, and ‘go through the motions’. They may arrive not prepared mentally and physically for the session or may not understand what quality looks like.

You may ask:

• What is the intensity level needed for the session?
• What does good look like to the individuals and group?
• How can they arrive at practice ready to give their best?

Tips in your coaching sessions:

• Create habits. A session board enables the participants to know what is happening in the session. This could be physically in the training area, written in the changing rooms or virtual via a group app.
• Ask players to check in so that they are mentally ready as well as physically present.
• Be clear on the session outcomes and purpose and ask participants to link this to their personal goals if working in a group.
• Discuss the importance of time. You can’t go backwards. Do they value their time? 
• Use cue words or phrases to highlight the current quality and intensity level in practice. Constantly challenging participants on their energy, commitment levels and quality practice can be draining for everyone involved. The use of cue words or triggers to highlight the need to pick things up can have a more positive impact, prevents breaks in the session and is easy to administer. Participants can also apply this to themselves or the group in practice.

Commitment

Coach Story

Let’s consider commitment. For many of us, this will be a very important characteristic, yet what it looks like, how we define it and what we see as important may differ. Speak to your coaching team and be specific. What does commitment look like? What does it look like in practice? In competition? What will participants be seeing, hearing and doing? When you are clear on what it looks like then you can develop it.

Below are two examples of how one organisation created a plan to develop commitment within their programme.

First selective environment (base of the talent pathway, localised centre, large numbers and inclusive focus, under 14 age group)

Regional Development Centre (next stage of the pathway, nine regions, 45 players, under 14 age group)

An individualised emphasis on the development of psycho-behavioural and psycho-social skills are the keys to achievement whatever the challenge, in life, education, work and sport.

Steps to success:

• Realisation of current ability, competence and self-reinforcement.
• Taking responsibility for your own development.
• Aspiring to excellence and taking personal responsibility for their own performance.

Coping with pressure

A crucial factor in ensuring the success of your participants is to help them develop resilience and confidence. 

These two elements play a vital role in enabling individuals to cope with pressure and challenges that they may encounter in their personal or sporting lives, supporting them to overcome obstacles, stay motivated, and achieve their desired outcomes.

Goal setting

Goal setting is an important aspect of sport and physical activity participation. Participants anticipate and prefer coaches to be aware of their intentions or goals and plan their training and development accordingly. 

The theory of goal setting has its origins in self-reflection. It suggests that having a goal affects your actions by:

• directing attention
• mobilising effort
• enhancing persistence

This leads to new strategies.

Coaches identify goal setting as one of the most important psychological skills for participant success and, importantly, one of the easiest coaching skills to improve.

However, the world of coaching is a complex social environment, and goal setting should be considered an art rather than a science. In other words, there is no simple template to follow. Instead, you must be ready to be flexible and innovative in an ever-changing world.

Research into goal setting highlights the dynamic nature of goal setting in sport. While not everyone is likely to have access to a professional sport psychologist, there are four lessons that you can take from the research.

Goal setting is dynamic and ever-changing 

A coach needs to be flexible with the goal setting process, understand why some ideas don’t work and be willing to think of new ideas to meet the goal for the participant.

The relationship with the participant is crucial 

The success of goal setting depends on the relationship between the people setting the goals. You need to be able to talk to a participant to understand their needs and therefore what goals they should set.

When things are not going as planned, it requires a good relationship to be able to challenge the participant and get a positive response in behaviour.

Goal setting takes time 

One theme that emerged from the research was how much time the psychologist spent talking with the participant. Don’t expect the goals, or the methods to achieve them, to reveal themselves immediately.

Participants need to be self-aware 

In both setting goals and evaluating progress, participants need to be able to give an accurate assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. Make sure your participants have the correct self-reflection skills before you work with them to set appropriate goals.

Goal setting in action

An effective goal-setting process involves four stages: preparation, goal setting, planning and follow-up. Through exploring the participant’s priorities and needs, they can create a roadmap to achieving their goals.

Framing a goal is very helpful and prevents participants from feeling pressured to come up with an immediate answer. 

The Grow Model is helpful in framing participants' goals. 

The planning stage of the goal setting process includes:

• developing goal commitment
• identifying strategies and barriers to attainment
• strategies for feedback and monitoring.

Effective goal setting helps participants maintain their motivation, stay focused and track their progress.

Keep your participants on track to reach their chosen destination with these quick tips:

• Break big goals into smaller chunks, but not too many! 
• Connect people who have similar goals in and around your sessions. 
• Encourage people to revisit goals regularly. Know when people are likely to achieve their goal/s and talk to them about the next thing they would like to work towards. 
• Discuss when the most likely relapse points could be, as these can interrupt progression towards goals. Progression is not always a linear path, so accepting bad days or weeks can be the norm.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, as making mistakes is a vital aspect of the learning process. 
• Be proactive in noticing, recognising and rewarding people when they meet their goals.

Imagery

Imagery, also known as visualisation, is a mental technique where individuals create or recreate experiences in their minds. Using all their senses, visual, sounds, smells, touch and sometimes even taste, participants create the imagined situation as clearly, vividly, and realistically as possible. With regular practice, imagery can be used in practice, competition and even whilst injured to enhance performance, boost confidence, and improve focus.

Make time after attempting imagery to discuss the experience, how it felt, and which aspects were clearer, bolder, and more vivid. Explore together what they found easy or difficult and encourage them to practice regularly. Layering and adding to imagery activities increases the clarity for the individual.

Benefits of imagery to performance include:

• Enhancing performance: Imagery can improve physical skills through mentally rehearsing movements, techniques, tactics, and strategies.
• Increasing confidence: Visualising successful performances boosts self-belief and self-esteem and reduces anxiety.
• Improving focus: Regular practice helps participants concentrate better during competitions and pressure situations.
• Supporting skill acquisition: Mental rehearsal can accelerate the learning of new techniques.
• Handling pressure: Rehearsing situations and mentally preparing ‘what if’ scenarios help build resilience, reducing the unknown and the unfamiliar and changing their perception of pressure as the individual becomes familiar with the situation and feels confident that they can meet the demands.
• Problem-solving: Participants can mentally prepare for various scenarios, situations and outcomes that may occur in competition and plan how they will manage the moment and themselves.
• Recovering from injury: Imagery has been proven to aid in recovery and rehabilitation by maintaining neural pathways and positive thinking.
• Managing stress: Imagery techniques can help prepare an individual before competition and reduce pre-competition nerves and stress.
• The use of goal setting: Imagery helps participants vividly imagine achieving their goals and what success looks like, increasing motivation as they connect with the achievement.
• Coping with discomfort: Some individuals use imagery to manage discomfort or even pain during training or competition.
• Emotional regulation: Visualisation can help participants to calm and control their responses, which allows them to manage and regulate their emotions. 

Building imagery into your coaching programme

Make time within your sessions to introduce, use and optimise imagery. Supporting and scaffolding the technique will help participants understand the approach. Setting time aside for imagery also reinforces the value that you place on developing the skill. Use imagery within participants’ development plans and within practices in sessions. Don’t just make it a special mental skills training session, but instead bring it to life in practice and competitions. 

Use questions that encourage participants to recall, remember and use imagery in sessions. Help individuals to build a memory bank of special moments that they can reconnect to, including things like a great performance, or when they completed a difficult move or technique in training. Encourage them to capture that in their memory, as this can help them connect to achievements. Attaching a cue word to the moment will help them recall and remember this moment as they imagine this happening again.

The use of video can help participants recall and remember key moments that they can then hold in their memory and add to. Over time individuals can create in their mind a ‘greatest hits’ of their achievements. 

Remind your participants that just like any form of training, it takes practice, it won’t always work every time, and they need to keep working on it regularly.