Why Your Athletes Can't Shake Off Mistakes (And What Actually Works)

Stop saying "shake it off" without teaching them HOW. Here's the 2-second system that actually works → https://coachfreetraining.com 

When your athletes spiral after mistakes, it's not because they're weak. It's because their brain is in fight-or-flight mode and you're asking them to regulate without giving them the tools. 

In this video, I'm breaking down the neuroscience of why "shake it off" doesn't work and teaching you the exact Snapback Routine I use with my 4x State Championship team. This is the skill that takes athletes from spiraling for minutes to resetting in 2 seconds.

 🧐 What You'll Learn:

• Why "shake it off" fails (the amygdala threat response)
• The traffic light system for mental state awareness (green/yellow/red)
• The complete Snapback Routine: breath, reset word, reset signal
• How to teach this in 15 minutes without losing practice time
• Why athletes must practice this in low-stakes before using it in games 

👋🏼 I'm Coach Bre - a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a long-time head volleyball coach and 4-time state champion. 

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction
00:50 Understanding the Brain Science
02:50 The Traffic Light System
03:36 Recognizing Yellow Moments
04:18 The Snapback Routine
05:49 Implementing the Snapback
06:27 Bonus: Coaching Quiet Teams 

💬 Coaches - comment below: What's your biggest challenge when your athletes get in their heads after mistakes 

📌 Free Tools & Next Steps

🔹 Grab our in-depth FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame   

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P.S. A few stats worth knowing:

• Athletes who report high psychological safety are 27% more likely to perform at their peak in high-pressure situations. (Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2022)
• Mental skills training can improve athletic performance by 13-23%, with visualization and self-talk showing the strongest effects. (Sports Medicine Journal, 2021)
• 70% of youth athletes report that performance anxiety negatively impacts their ability to focus during competition, yet only 12% receive formal mental skills training from coaches. (Aspen Institute Project Play, 2023) 

The Coach Her Game YouTube channel is hosted by The Elite Competitor and is dedicated to helping coaches of girl athletes strengthen their mental game and team culture in order to develop a competitive edge. 

#mentaltraining #coachinggirls #athleteconfidence #youthsports #snapbackroutine

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

Transcript

1:04

A coach recently reached out to me with this question looking for mental coaching help. I've got a fresh team and these girls getting in their heads so fast and I'm at a loss as to what to say to help them get over their mistakes. What do you tell your girls to help? I will take any and all advice, and I love this question because it's so honest. We've all been there, right? Like we're playing a game and they just get in their heads and then it's a spiral from there. And she's not asking how do I motivate them or what speech should I give them? She's asking, what do I actually say? But here's the truth, it's not about what she say. It's about what you teach them to do. So if you have athletes who get in their heads fast and you're sort of at a loss, this video is for you. If I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I am a head volleyball coach, have been for the past 14 years. I'm also a certified mental performance coach. Um, and so I've, I've been here. I've been there and I get it. So let's talk through how we can actually help your athletes when they do get in their heads. And here's the thing, I want you to understand what is. Actually happening in your athlete's brain. It's important that you know some of the neuroscience behind this because when they make a mistake out there and they don't really have the skills to recover, which is the situation that we're talking about, if they're in their heads and they can't get outta their heads, then they don't have the mental skill to recover in that moment. And what we typically do as coaches is we tell them things like shake it off, next play, move on. These are not bad things to say, but they're not actually helpful in that moment because they don't know how. They clearly don't know how to shake it off. They don't know how to move on to the next play because they're not doing it. Okay, so here's what's going on in their brain. There's the part of the brain called the amygdala that picks up and senses threat in our environment. And you're like, well, what do you mean by threat? Well, the thing about it is that when your athletes are in this situation where they're playing in front of a lot of people in front of you, there's a scoreboard. It matters. And then they make a mistake. That's a threat to their psychological safety. Psychological safety means, do I fit in in this group? Um, do my teammates still like me? What's my coach gonna do? Like, they're kind of worried about all that stuff. And so mistakes automatically signal a threat to that psychological safety, and their body then gets threat, uh, flooded with too much adrenaline. Um, it starts to overthink her. Their executive functioning kind of goes offline. That's why you're like, what are you doing out there? Like, this is a simple thing and now you're making a silly little error. They are quite frankly, dysregulated in that moment when you see them spiraling and when they're spiraling like that. Nothing you say in that moment is actually going to help them. They need a skill that they have practiced ahead of time to know how to get out of that situation. And you, you just, just yelling from the sideline, shake it off next play. They're like, I'm trying. I don't know how. Okay. And so we have to be able to equip them ahead of time. With some skills to be able to recognize when they're in a situation where they can come back fast. Okay? I tell this to athletes. It's like a traffic light Green is what we call flow state. That's a sports psychology term. We want your athletes to be in flow state for as much as possible, right? It's where they're not thinking very much, they're just doing their thing. They're out there playing, okay? Yellow is something happens, right? Like, uh, ref makes a bad call. A teammate says something that they didn't expect. They make a mistake. You say something, something to them and they're like kind of flustered. That's yellow. So they're like, uh, okay. Um, red is, they're spiraling. You typically have to pull them out of the match in a situation like that because they're so far in their heads they can't get out, and they're now making silly errors and we've gotta give'em a break. Okay. We typically see athletes go from green to red. That's how you encounter them out there. Right? They're like, they, they were fine. And now they're not. Okay. We have to teach athletes the skill of recognizing when they get too yellow. Okay? So they have to be aware of like common situations that throw them off. So what I do with my athletes is we workshop that a little bit. We ask them. Or I ask them, what are situations that typically throw you off in a competition? Is it when a ref makes a bad call? Is it when you make a certain mistake? Is it when a coach says something to you that kind of throws you off because they yelled at you? Or something like that? What is it that typically throws you into yellow? Yellow is not so bad. We can come back from yellow, but if we don't have a skill to come back from yellow, then we're gonna go to red, and that's when coach has to pull you out because you're too far in your head and we need to give you a break. Okay? So we want athletes to recognize when they get to yellow. How to come back down to green. And what we teach them, what I teach them is a failure recovery system called the snapback routine. So every one of my athletes has their own custom snapback routine. It's a combination of three things. One breath to engage their parasympathetic nervous system, a reset word at the top of that breath, and then on their exhale, they're doing some sort of reset signal to help ground them in the present moment so that they can come back down to green. Okay? So depending on what sport you coach athletes have. Not that long to get over a mistake, right? In volleyball, we've got 15 seconds between rallies In basketball, unless there's a timeout, it's pretty continuous. So athletes need to have a skill that allows them to come back from their mistakes in less time than their sport requires them. Okay, so the snapback routine, the breath, the reset word, the reset signal. All of that takes about two seconds to actually do. Now, if your sport that you coach is continuous and they don't have two seconds, just them saying their reset word to themselves is enough to help them kind of reset in the present moment and get back to what they're doing. Get back to green rather than go to red. Okay. So the snapback routine is custom to them. I don't know all of my athletes' reset words, but we now have a common language. I can say, say your reset word or let's do your snapback routine. We call a timeout. We've got that common language, they have that skill and they've practiced it in practice in lower six environments, in a timeout, um, in practice during a water break. Things like that so that they can actually use it in a competition and in a competition. Now you can say things like, shake it off, and they actually have a skill to back that up. Okay, now if you wanna learn more about how to teach the snapback routine to your players, head to my free training. It's at coach free training.com. I break down that skill plus a, a couple other mental training skills that I teach my team as well that are just really easy to implement as a coach, but make a big difference in how they show up. So the snapback routine is one of them. So go ahead and, um, go over to that training at the end of this and that will help you understand kind of how we actually implement the snapback routine. Again, the breath, the reset word, and the reset signal. Okay. So that alone is going to actually be a game changer for you. So now they actually have a. Skill to come back after mistakes. Now here's the thing that I was dealing with as a coach. They had some mental training skills. Um, you know, they had their snapback routine, but last season I was coaching this team of really nice quiet girls. And so I was like, they knew how to come back from mistakes, but they wouldn't talk to each other, especially at the beginning of the season. And you had a hard time communicating. And so if you're in that situation where you're like, some of these issues that we have. When we're performing it is because they're not talking to each other. They're too nice. No one wants to be aggressive or go for the ball. I actually recorded a video all about this. If you are coaching a team right now of nice but quiet girls and you need to get them to talk head over to the video that I recorded about this because the skills that I teach in that video are what took that team at the beginning of the season from not talking balls dropping to. State champions at the end of the season. If you would've like told me we were gonna be state champions at the end of that 20, 24 season, I would've been like, eh, nope, that's not happening. Okay. So I'll see you over in that next video if that's your situation right now.