3 Easy Mental Skills Every Coach Can Teach Fast!

🎯 Coaches: Want fast, effective ways to build confident, focused athletes at practice? These 3 mental training drills take just minutes!  Learn more coaching tips here → https://coachfreetraining.com
 
Mental toughness doesn’t have to take hours to train. In this video, I’m sharing the exact mindset drills I run with my high school volleyball team every day—each one designed to strengthen athlete confidence, focus, and resilience (in under 5 minutes 💥).
 
🎙️ I’m Coach Bre – a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a longtime head volleyball coach and 4x state champion. I’ve coached hundreds of athletes and helped programs go from inconsistent to unshakable—by adding these simple sports psych tools into their practices.
 
Inside this episode, you’ll learn:
 ✅ A fast failure recovery method (Snapback Routine) to bounce back from mistakes
 ✅ Our 3-2-1 Brave Method™: journaling + breathwork + affirmations
 ✅ How to use visualization training to help athletes play with poise under pressure
 ✅ How these drills are built into our Plug and Play Elite Mental Game system
 ✅ BONUS: How to help athletes rewrite negative self-talk before it affects performance
 
Perfect for busy high school coaches who want results without overhauling their practice plan—these drills help you integrate mental performance training seamlessly.
 
🕓 Key moments:
 00:00 – Intro
 00:14 – Skill 1: Snapback Routine (Failure Recovery)
 02:00 – The 3-2-1 BRAVE Routine
 03:32 – Guided Visualization and Breathwork
 04:32 – Energy Reset and Practice Readiness
 04:50 – Where to Learn More (Free Training & Tools)
 05:24 – Wrap-Up & Real-Life Mom Moment
 
👇 Coaches, comment below: Which sports psych drill are you most excited to implement?
 
📌 Ready to strengthen your team’s mental game?
 🔹 Watch our FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
 🔹 Follow on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
 🔹 Get the plug & play mental game system → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg

Head to coachfreetraining.com to grab our free training for coaches to quickly level-up your team's mental game!

Transcript

1:04

If you're a coach wanting to implement mental training into your practices, but you're worried that you don't have enough time, I'm gonna show you the three skills that I teach every single day in my practices that take less than five minutes. So I'm here, just got done with practice just for diamond ads. I'm here with my, my kiddos, somewhere in the background, any coaches that are also moms and juggling it all. But here's the three things that I, I taught today. There are woven into my practice. Number one. Every day we teach some sort of failure recovery method. This is called for us the snapback routine. So before the season or like at the beginning of the season, every athlete created their own snapback routine. It's a combination of a breath at the top, they say reset word that is found based on their best playing experiences. And on the exhale they're doing some sort of re um, or reset signal, some sort of grounding signal. So touching their fingers together or like looking at the antenna. And I coach volleyball. Something very simple, and the snapback routine takes like two seconds. And like I said, this is a failure recovery system. So instead of athletes spiraling after mistakes or feeling bad about themselves or like any of that, they do their snapback routine and then they're back in the, in the present moment and they can perform better. And so we train this every day. Woven into practice. So sometimes I'll have like a station where when they get to that station, they need to do their snapback routine, or I will cue them at the start of a water break. I'll say, everyone do your, your snapback routine before you go get water. Or if we're doing drills like serving and passing, um, there's a lot of like opportunity between serves if they shank that ball. Okay. Do your snapback routine before the next serve. So we're, we're we that into practice? It hardly takes any time. Okay. Now the other two are kind of, um, packaged together. It is, uh, self-talk and visualization. Okay? So self-talk, how athletes are talking to themselves is so important. You already know this because you're probably teaching. All the physical skills and you have, you know, talented players and that, but that's the easy part of coaching, right, is like the physical part of the game. It doesn't matter how physically trained they are, how good they are, if they can't perform what it matters, or they're crumbling under pressure or they're back there saying like, don't serve the ball to me, or like feeling bad about themselves. Their self-talk is so important. So every day we do something called the 3, 2, 1, brave, right? It's a daily mindset routine. It takes five minutes or less. So I get everyone together at the whiteboard. Um, at the start of practice, they come with their journals. They already know like their notebooks. They already know the routine. They write down their three affirmations, and these are found at the beginning of season as well based on their goals for the season. And those goals and what they want are turned into three affirmations, which are like positive first person present tense statements. So an example would be like, I am a fast aggressive defender. Like I, let's just use that as an example. So they write those down every day. So that's just like something that's routine and they're reminding themselves of who they are and who they wanna be. Two minutes of journaling. They can either like free write and free journal, or I give them prompts based on like what I want them to really be thinking about. Like what does it look like to be a good teammate today? Or what does it look like to give full effort today? Things like that to kinda get those things out. And then one piece of gratitude, because we know like we, what we find we create more of. So we want them to be like hunting the good, what we say. So like, what are you grateful for? And then one piece of evidence that one of those affirmations is coming true. So if the affirmation is like. I'm a fast, aggressive defender. What evidence do you have from practice today that you did that or from, you know, the games this week or whatever. So again, hunting the good finding in like things in their environment to support who they're becoming. And so that helps them with their self-talk, um, what they're focusing on because our brain has a negativity bias. And so do your athletes and they're gonna find like all the things that are wrong with. Things that are going on. And then visualization. So the brave at the end of that is a visualization that we do. It also includes some breath work. It takes like two minutes. Um, with our program Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for Teams, which you can learn about at our free training@coachfreetraining.com. Also have the ability for coaches to facilitate just by playing this visualization for their athletes. Or athletes can listen to it through their AirPods, they can download'em to their phone. But anyways, the BRAVE stands for, um, the Bee, like I said, is breaths. They do five intentional breaths. At the top of each breath, they say their reset word to themselves and then they exhale and then they say their three affirmations. The A stands for affirmation. The V stands for visualization. So they actually visualize each of those affirmations, and I have them do it specifically. So if they're, one of their affirmations is I'm a fast, aggressive defender, they say that to themselves and then they see themselves doing it. And I have them write down beforehand like, what are 10 examples of what this looks like? Like literally out on the court. And they just visualize one of them. It takes like 15. Seconds, maybe even less than that. So they watch themselves in their mind, like laying out for a ball. Okay. Um, and then the, the e at the end of BRAVE stands for just inner energy shifts. So at the end of the brave visualization, they're ready to go. They're feeling good. Um, they've done some breath work to kind of regulate their nervous system. They visualize themselves playing well, they're off and ready to go to practice. Um, and like I said, that 3, 2, 1 brave takes five minutes at the beginning of practice. It's woven into what we do. So if you want to learn more on how to do this with your team, first of all, go to coach free training.com. That's where we like, where I teach you all those skills. I also teach, um, and talk about the plug and play elite mental game for teams. So you can just do this like seamlessly. Um, also have another video that you can head to if you are specifically wanting some guidance on the snapback routine. So if you wanna help your athletes develop their own snapback routines, um, head to that video because I laid it all out. There is Phil. All right, I hope this is helpful. I'm going back to my kids. We're gonna leave. We're gonna leave and get outta here now.