The Fearless Warrior Podcast

071: Mindset Myths Busted: Stop Telling Your Athletes to Visualize Success

• Amanda Schaefer

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On today's episode we bust the myth that our athletes need to "visualize success." We discuss the varying abilities of athletes to visualize, the importance of tailoring techniques to individual learning styles, and how coaches can better prepare their teams.

Episode Highlights:
• Debunking the myth about instant visualization success
• Comparing the learning process of mental skills to physical skills
• Recognizing individual differences in athletes' ability to visualize
• The relevance of aphantasia and learning preferences

If you are coach looking for support in teaching mental skills to your players, check out the replay recording of our recent Coaches Workshop here

To book a FREE call with Coach Kara, our Director of Team Performance, to discuss strategies and resources we provide to help teams, click here

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the fearless warrior podcast, a place for athletes, coaches and parents who know the value of a strong mindset. I'm your host, coach AB, a mental performance coach on a mission, former softball coach, wife and mom of three. Each episode we will dive deep into all things mental performance, mindset tools and how to rewire the brain for success. So if your goal is to gain the mental edge and learn the secrets of mental performance, mindset tools and how to rewire the brain for success, so if your goal is to gain the mental edge and learn the secrets of mental performance, you're in the right place. Let's tune in to today's episode. Welcome back to the Mindset Myths Busted series.

Speaker 1:

Today's topic is stop telling your athletes to visualize success. I know it sounds really weird because I'm a mental performance coach and I teach visualization, but hear me out, here's my hot take. I'm going to lead with this question would you start hitting practice with the machine set to 60 and immediately telling your hitters to hop in the cage? No, the answer is no, and I know it sounds kind of silly, but we would never skip warmups. We would never just immediately jump into a highly advanced skill for our hitters and expect them to be successful, and so when we're asking our athletes to visualize success, we're immediately jumping into an advanced skill. We have to start, just like physical skills. We warm up the body, we progress into more complicated drills, we start with T-work, then maybe front toss, and then we hop in the cage with the machine, and the biggest mistake that we make is that we assume that our athletes know how to do a skill. Another example that we just recently used in our coaches workshop is would you assume that your pitcher would know how to throw a curveball? Again, it seems silly, but the answer is no. We would teach her the grip, and even if we taught her the grip, we still wouldn't expect her to immediately hop on the mound and to be able to throw a curveball right away. This is a skill that takes days, weeks and months to perfect and to eventually be able to throw in a game, and so we teach her these physical skills.

Speaker 1:

The same can be true for mental skills. Mental skills are no different and they can be practiced like any physical skill. With time, our athletes can get better and better at them. So we wonder why our athletes feel weird about mental skills. Because our coaches often make this mistake where we assume the mental game is easy or what's wrong with us if we can't visualize success. And I just want to give you a tip to back it down and chunk it down. We teach different types of visualizations where athletes can practice tapping into what they're seeing using their five senses. We teach the Pet Lab method how to actually visualize before you even do a visualization, and so I see it.

Speaker 1:

All too often Coaches think that they're teaching mental skills by jumping into visualizing things like visualize us winning the game. That's too long of a visualization and it's too vague. Or visualizing your first home run, but your physical body and your mind has every evidence that I've never hit a home run before. So how do I know what it feels like to visualize myself hitting a home run? Again, it leaves an athlete wondering what's wrong with me, why can't I do this, when really they just haven't been taught the basics. So if an athlete is practicing this, the other thing that we run into is what if they can't actually do this skill?

Speaker 1:

Aphantasia is a term that makes it difficult or impossible to create mental images, so it's a. I don't know if it's considered a diagnosis, but people with aphantasia they can still think they can hear, they can process information. But people with aphantasia? They can still think they can hear, they can process information. No-transcript.

Speaker 1:

Now, some of your athletes may have difficulty because they have aphantasia, but some of the athletes may not be visual learners. They may be kinesthetic learners, they may be auditory learners and so if visualization isn't their strongest suit, it's going to be hard for them to make this their strongest skill. And Coach Kara on our coaches workshop had a great point Different skills work for different athletes. We've worked with hundreds of athletes inside our programs and not all of them like visualization. So if we're putting this blanket skill and expecting our entire team or all of our individual athletes to just know how to do this and it may not be their favorite skill Maybe an athlete needs to lean into self-talk more, or maybe they like routines or failure recovery or grounding techniques. Every athlete is going to be different, just the same as every athlete is going to be different when we teach them physical skills. So I want you to imagine this is the example that we use how to find out if your athletes can visualize or if that's their visual preference, and we show an image. I have this on my computer. We have this in our slides in the coaches workshop that you can have access to. We'll link it below in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

We have five apples and when we look at these five apples, the first apple is if you close your eyes it's clear as day. It's detailed, it's colored. There's a leaf, it's an apple. When you close your eyes you can see that it's an apple. The next apple is maybe it's a cartoonish apple. So it has an outline, it has some colors. We know that it's an apple, but it's not very realistic. The next one is maybe we see one solid shape or one solid color, but there's not a whole lot of details. It's just we know that we're supposed to be seeing an apple.

Speaker 1:

We know what an apple looks like. It's just kind of blurry or vague. And then the next apple that you see is just it's an outline. It's it's very vague. Maybe it's black and white, there's not a lot of detail to it. Again, it's very vague. Maybe it's black and white, there's not a lot of detail to it. Again, it's very cartoonish. And then the last one is maybe we can't see anything.

Speaker 1:

And you know that you're seeing an apple. You know what an apple looks like, you just can't see it in your mind, and so there's different degrees that your athletes are going to be able to visualize, and so, when you can start to tap into this as a coach, how cool is that that we can start to see and meet where our athletes are at. So, again, going back to the title of this, don't just immediately assume that your athletes, a know how to visualize. B that they can visualize, that they've had enough reps doing this, and so the point of this again, if you're a coach and you've made this mistake we all have but now that you're listening to this podcast and you're diving into these resources, you're starting to understand the nuances of mental skills, the research behind mental skills, why they're so important and how we can start to teach them differently.

Speaker 1:

And so the good news is is that, if you're a coach and you're listening to this, we have a step-by-step resource that we are making available to teams nationwide, and it's step-by-step because it takes the guesswork out of it for you as coaches. You don't have to be Googling, you don't have to be wondering if what you're teaching your athletes are correct or if you're setting them up for success or failure. It's research-backed and it's everything that we teach to all the teams that consult with us. So if you want to watch that coach's workshop, at the end of that coach's workshop we have our step-by-step curriculum that we're unveiling Again. We want to teach as many coaches about this as possible, so the coach's workshop is absolutely free. We hosted it already, so it's a replay training. It's a 45-minute replay video.

Speaker 1:

You can learn more about this. You can see the images of the apples, and I'm also giving away my practice plan templates. So if you're a coach and this sounds like something exactly you've been looking for, hit us up in the show notes. On the other hand, if you're a parent and you want your coaches to pay attention to this, you can forward this as well. We also have our individual program, the fearless warrior program, where we also teach visualization inside that program as well.

Speaker 1:

If you have any questions about this, I would love to have conversations with all of you. Our dms are open on social media. We love educating as many parents, coaches and players about this as possible. So I hope that myth has been busted for you why we don't want to teach our athletes to visualize success and what we want them to visualize. Instead, we want to progress them through how to visualize first, and then we can start getting more and more advanced with those successful visualizations, like the games, the home runs, the hitting mechanics, the pitching mechanics. Until next time, I'll see you on our next episode.

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Amanda Schaefer

Host