Coaching Mind's Podcast: Perform at your best!

#143 - Confidence Pt 4: Breath, Reset, Recover: Building Confidence You Can Trust

• Mental Training Plan

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In this episode of the Coaching Minds Podcast, Ben Carnes, founder of The Mental Training Plan, breaks down the next layer of the Confidence Wall: how to train confidence like a muscle.

Learn practical, science-backed tools that help athletes hardwire belief into their body and nervous system through three powerful bricks:

  1. The Breath Brick – how controlled breathing regulates the vagus nerve and restores focus.
  2. The Reset Brick – how pros like Drew Brees and Victor Oladipo flush mistakes and get back in rhythm.
  3. The Recovery Brick – why sleep, rest, and recovery are the secret advantage most athletes ignore.

Whether you’re a coach, athlete, or parent, you’ll walk away with real tools you can use to help your athletes perform under pressure and bounce back stronger after mistakes.

📘 Get the book Confidence on Amazon (includes free workbook download)
https://amzn.to/46RhDJJ 

Are you an ATHLETE looking to take your training to the next level? Check out our website to learn more about 1-on-1 training opportunities:
mentaltrainingplan.com/athletes

Are you a COACH looking for an affordable year-round mental performance training program? Check out the MTP Academy available through our website:
mentaltrainingplan.com/teams

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, welcome to the Coaching Minds Podcast, the official podcast of Metal Training Plan. Today is part four of our confidence series. If you did not listen to episode number 140, where we sort of launched the Prime Five series, what's the science behind this? How do we know that high-performing athletes excel in these five areas? So episode 141, we looked at the first section of my book, basically building belief through reps, proof, preparation, kind of the idea that if you don't put in the work, you haven't earned the right to be confident. Last episode, number 142, we talked about body language and how that impacts not just your confidence, but the confidence of teammates, coaches, even opponents. We looked at identity and self-talk. And all along the way, we've been talking about this metaphor, stacking bricks. If this is new to you, if you did not listen to those first three episodes, would highly encourage you to pause this, go back and give those a listen, start there. But all throughout this journey, we've been talking about this kind of metaphor of stacking bricks. Almost like we're building this wall of confidence, not to hide behind, but to stand on top of, to fight from. There's certainly some foundational pieces with without those, things are gonna crumble. And as we continue to build this wall higher and higher, if we're skipping parts, if we're missing parts, there's gonna be holes in this wall. And when pressure starts to build up, either from the inside or from the outside, there's some potential for that to do some damage. One of the things that hopefully, especially for the coaches that you've been paying attention to is this Goldilocks principle, where, you know, we don't, we're not trying to have too much science where this becomes neuropsychology class and people start, you know, their eyes roll in the back of their head and they get bored out of their minds. But on the other side, when there's no science at all, this almost feels fake or it feels fluffy, or it feels like, yeah, that's nice that you have that opinion. But when we can back this up and say, look, here's the here's the science behind how high-performing athletes use this. Or maybe from your sport, you find a professional, a college athlete, uh an Olympic athlete who can talk about how they've used some of these tools in the past or why confidence has been so important to them. How athletes like Kobe Bryant built that mamba mentality, built that deep down inside, they knew when the game was on the line, they had what it took, they were prepared, they were ready, and they wanted the ball in their hands. Today we're talking about trained confidence. We're talking about this idea that you can build confidence just like a muscle through tools, through breath, through recovery. And the three bricks that we're gonna take a look at are the breath brick, the reset, and recovery. And this is where we can really start to hardwire resilience into our brain, into our nervous system to make sure we we've got the kind of belief that doesn't collapse when the moment gets big. My favorite story from the book is I I will never forget it was right after the collapse in the state championship game. And we went to this coaching clinic, and there was this high-performing individual, Dr. Jason Winkle, who wrote a book. He did, you know, he he was a bad dude. He trained with Navy SEALs, elite military units, he worked with SWAT teams, he worked with police task force. And within the first minute, he launches into this story about how, you know, a roadside bomb goes off and all of a sudden they're taking fire from this building. And so they get a they get a fire team up, they bust down the door, they throw in a flashbang, and now they've got 1.8 seconds to clear the room. And he's talking about how, you know, physically they have to be in control, they have to be able to perform fine motor skills like shooting the bad guys, not shooting any hostages emotionally. Their life is on the line. Someone is literally trying to kill them, and they have to make these split-second decisions, which bleeds right into, you know, mentally, they have to be able to think and then act, knowing that their life is on the line and everyone else and their team's life is on the line. And I'm sitting on the edge of my seat and I'm like, oh man, if this, if the if the military spent millions of dollars on researching this scenario and they found something that works, surely they're gonna be able to help my guys not collapse in a big moment in a state championship game. And I'll never forget how disappointed I was when he said, and the secret is breathing. And in that moment, it was like, I learned how to do this when I was zero days old. This this can't be the solution. This this can't be the secret. You're telling me the military spent millions and millions and millions of dollars to do research, and this is what they came up with. And we've talked about diaphragmatic breathing before. I will say, in a team setting, my absolute favorite thing to do is just put up this slide that says breathe. And then in my most fake positivity, fluffy voice, I'll say something like, Hey guys, the next time you're stressed, just take a deep breath. And I'll ask them, like, what how's that make you feel? What, like, what would you think if you were in a high pressure situation and somebody said, Let's just all take a breath? You'd be like, get the heck out of here. Like, I'm trying to win a basketball game. I'm trying to win a football game. What the heck are you talking about? Take a deep breath. And then we put up a diagram of the vagus nerve and we say, Well, what if I could tell you that every single organ in your body is connected to this nerve? And when you get into that fight or flight reaction mode, all of a sudden, there's kind of like a fire alarm pulsing up and down that nerve. And you've got things like butterflies in your stomach, your heart rate changes, your breathing rate changes, your muscles tense up, or maybe they get a little bit shaky. You have all your liver releases fats and sugars. All of a sudden, you got adrenaline coursing through your body, and you can't control any of those except for your lungs. And the fastest way to decrease the activity on that nerve is diaphragmatic breathing. I think it's good to have, again, like the Goldilocks principle, it's good to have enough science behind this that the kids realize, oh, maybe this is legit. Maybe I should actually try this. And then there's a few different ways we can teach this, right? Like if I'm if I'm working with middle school or below, we're just gonna do box breathing. We're gonna do the four by four by four by four, inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, pause for four. That's what the military primarily teaches. It's the fastest way to get 250,000 people to all control their mind and body in a very quick time frame with very little thinking. It doesn't take a lot of effort, it doesn't take a lot of brain power. If we're in a huddle, we can all kind of do this together. If I'm working with high school up to professional athletes, we're gonna go through and we're gonna have them come up with their own custom breathing plan because not everybody's lung capacity is the same. And so we'll have them take out a stopwatch and they'll actually time the inhale. They'll time, you know, once I fill my lungs with air, what's comfortable for me to hold. We want to make sure, you know, it's not like a contest at the pool to see who can hold their breath the longest, but we do need to give the lungs time to absorb that oxygen. We usually shoot for eight to 12 seconds for the for those first two, for the inhale and for the hold. And then for the exhale and the pause, again, we usually usually shoot for eight to 12 seconds. And I think there's a couple other things that we need to keep in mind also. When I first started teaching this, when when Jay when I heard this from Dr. Jason Winkle, like I didn't know of really anyone who was doing this in high school sports. Certainly, Olympic athletes, professional athletes have been doing it for a little while, but this was pretty new in high school. I'll say we're kind of getting to the point now where people will actually start to realize, and there are some hitting instructors around me that are teaching their batters to watch the pitcher. And if they're seeing that the pitcher's taking this big old deep breath before every single pitch, then that's when you know, like, oh, I got this guy. He's flustered, he's rattled. And so I've actually got some pitchers who are nervous about taking deep breaths because people have called him out for it, or somebody yells, he's taking a deep breath from the dugout. One of the major league pitchers that I worked with when the the pitch clock was still kind of new, he felt like he wanted to do some of the, he wanted to use his breathing pattern, but he also didn't feel like he had an unlimited amount of time. And so what we started doing, you know, obviously if the ball was hit, that's a that's a different story. But if the catcher has the ball, he would take a deep breath and he would hold it until he caught the ball coming back from the catcher. And then as he would walk back up to the rubber, he would do his exhale. So by the time he got back to the rubber and was starting to get set, he'd already gone through his breathing. Now, I'll say I've got a lot of golfers who you got plenty of time. Like you should be doing your breathing in between every single shot. If you're you're kind of feeling rushed, if you're not feeling like you're in the flow, if you're feeling like physically something is off, then a physical response to that is to use your breathing. One of my favorite things to do when I was a high school coach around this was to get some heart rate monitors or you know, find some guys that had a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or something like that and have races and see who can get their heart rate up the fastest and who can get their heart rate back down a certain threshold the fastest. And really, we're just trying to teach the kids that you can control your body because when they feel like they're in control, now there's this whole new level of confidence that's like, oh, yeah, maybe, maybe I can actually do this. Because I'm gonna tell you that that first state championship game, when we had kids out there and their hands were shaking so bad that they couldn't catch a football, they didn't have any confidence. And I would say even a go-to statement in that time is gonna be a little bit limited. Like they're having a physical reaction to this stress and this pressure, they need a physical response. And so the the worksheet here for breathing is is super simple. It's let's figure out when am I going to use this, and then just as simple as let's track this. If I was a high school coach, I would not teach this lesson. If I was a high school coach, my biggest, baddest, best athlete on the team, going to play at the highest, fill in the blank university, wherever, would talk about what there are times during a game where I'm stressed and I feel like I'm under pressure. And here's how I control that with my breathing, so that my entire team hears, oh, will they use it? Well, maybe maybe I should use it. Chapter 10 is the reset brick. And, you know, started off with the with the Drew Bree story. I loved that. He threw an interception, and you know, he's he called his mental performance coach, and he said basically on the plane ride home, you know, instead of replaying that over and over in your head, you need to visualize what would the perfect throw have been. If I was coaching another sport, I would probably find some other examples like that. Find an athlete who knew they screwed up, knew they didn't perform well enough, and then figure out what did they do to reset? How did they get ready for that next round? And then emphasize to our players we need to be able to accomplish this in a really short time frame because we don't always have a plane ride to get ready. Sometimes we got 10 seconds to get ready. Thinking back to the Victor Ola Depot example from you know a couple episodes ago, either A, he believed in his identity so strongly that he didn't need to be able to reset, or B, he had a tool and he had a way to be able to reset. But either way, after he experienced quote unquote failure on the court, he was able to just go back out and do his job. So, yes, ideally, we would love if our guys and gals don't need this. And you know what? There probably are some athletes that maybe don't need it right now or haven't needed it before. But I can tell you on that 2013 state championship team, we had a whole bunch of guys that had never experienced anything like that, that had never been in a situation or under that much pressure before. And all of a sudden, man, they sure wish they would have had something like this. As coaches, we need our athletes to truly believe that what you do after a mistake is what matters most. And I think a lot of times we need to take a serious look at how do we react? How do we respond? Do we raise our voice and yell and scream? If somebody had a video camera on me when one of my guys makes a mistake, am I starting and initiating that process? Am I helping him move on with a, hey, let's go, we got this? Or am I throwing my hands up in the air, what are you doing? Or some other emotional reaction that's not coaching. It's just me throwing a hissy fit or me having a temper tantrum. I'm not saying we be soft. I'm not saying we never get on our guys, but I'm saying there is a time to coach and instruct, and there is a time to just forget about it, move on, play the next play. I think having some sort of reset ritual, that that tool number 25 on page 125. You know, I've had guys that wear uh they wear a rubber band on their wrist and they actually snap it so they have a physical reminder of, you know what, flush it, next play, moving on, whatever that looks like. I think it's helpful as coaches to know what those reset cues are for our guys so that we can re-emphasize them, or to have one for the entire team or to have one for the entire side of the ball. You know, maybe, maybe in film we talk through, hey, we've got to have a way. There was there was a bad play right there. We had a mistake. Let's talk through what are the emotions we're feeling? What are the, you know, what are the conversations that happened on the field? Okay. How do we handle it better next time? How should we react in the future? How are we going to control those emotions a little bit better in the future? All right, what's one word or what's two words to remind ourselves of that? And boom, you've got a team wide or your side of the ball, whoever's in that, whoever's in that room at that time, you've now got a reset cue that the entire locker room knows about. Now the question is, are you gonna use it? Are you gonna reinforce it? Are the coaches going to reset? Because I I can't, I can't just tee off on one of my guys and start yelling and screaming and what are you doing? I can't believe it. And then expect them that somehow they're gonna be, if I can't control my emotions, I'm not really doing a great job of preparing my guys to be able to control their emotions. Tool number 26 is the focus cycle. We're not gonna go into that. If you don't know what the focus cycle is, I would highly encourage you to pause this and listen to episode number 119 or go back and listen to 119. It's basically the tool that we created after the state championship failure. It's the tool that answers the question: how can I be in a room full of 210 guys who all have their own unique mental and physical and emotional things that are going on when they come up short? How do we help them control their mind and body? There you go. That's it. Everybody, everybody gets their own worksheet. Everybody leaves with a plan. It is the most common workshop we do. It's the most common large group or team training that we do. It's the activity that I do with athletes one-on-one. I wrote a book about it. There's podcasts about it. It's powerful. But at the end of the day, we have to answer the question when we screw up, how do we get ready for the next play? And sometimes, you know what? That that reset after a loss, we need to go home. We need to lick our wounds a little bit. We need to, you know, feel some of those emotions. There's nothing wrong with having some negative emotions after a loss. And then we need to come back in the next day, ready to learn. We need to come back in the next day, ready to watch that film, ready to start figuring out how do we prepare better, how do we play better. And again, from a timeline perspective, we don't always have overnight to do that. We also need to be able to condense that down and to be able to recover in the moment. Those reset cues and the focus cycle are incredibly helpful for those. Here's something else that I'll say on this topic, because I've had some coaches when I, you know, offer that, hey, we could do this focus cycle thing. And they say, Oh, well, we've already done that. And that would be like me as a football coach saying, Well, we're not, you know, we're not going to in, we're not going to install inside zone or we're not going to install power, we're not going to install this defense, because they already learned it once in middle school. Like we all know working with teenagers, especially, just because they hear something one time doesn't mean they've mastered it. At the same time, if this kid learned about it as a freshman and he used the focus cycle as a freshman, but now all of a sudden they're a junior and they're a starter, or they're a senior and they've never started before, and they're replacing the best, the greatest player in school history. Or all of a sudden, you know, they've been a starter before, but now they've been elevated and it's like, oh, I just signed with this D1 school, or I haven't signed with anybody yet. And now there's this pressure to perform so I can get a scholarship and live out my dreams at the next level. To think that our kids are the same person or the same athlete from their freshman year to their sophomore year to their junior year to their senior year is silly. It's ridiculous. It's not true. I can just tell you from working one-on-one with athletes, even across different sports, it's not true. I can't tell you the number of baseball players or softball players who are fine on the diamond, but then either on the volleyball court or on the football field, they got some junk going on in their head. Maybe one of the one of those sports, they just they love it, they do it for fun. Another sport, they're passionate about it, they want to play in college. We don't have any idea what's going on in the mind and in the body of our athletes. Shoot, half the time they don't even know what's going on. Half the time they can't even describe it to a coach. And that's the beauty of the focus cycle. That's the beauty of the tool, is to get them to be aware of what they're not paying attention to. Just like right now, you're not paying attention to what the bottom of your feet feel like because your brain doesn't think it's important. But if you wiggle your toes, all of a sudden you start paying attention. Oh, are my feet hot? Are they cold? Are they comfortable? Are they sweaty? Are they dry? If we can get our athletes paying attention when they just start to drift off toward negativity or they start to drift off into doubting whether they have what it takes to be successful, well, now all of a sudden it's just a little slight, tiny correction versus they've been building this moment up in their mind for days, months, weeks, whatever. And now it's this huge deal that they're trying to overcome. So get them aware, equip them with some tools, teach them how to take back control of their mind and body. If you don't know what the focus cycle is, I'm I'm telling you, it'll be worth your time. Listen to episode number 119 after this. And so if you downloaded the worksheet that goes along with this, obviously the learning has to take place somewhere, somewhere, whether that's reading excerpt from the book, whether that's you're already signed up for the academy, whether that's you just tell them about it. They need to understand what a reset is and why it's important. And then the second step there, we want to help them connect. We want them to figure out when has this shown up in the past where, oh, it would have been really beneficial if I had a reset there. This gets a little bit more complicated when we're working with younger athletes and maybe they don't have that experience. Well, let's help them connect this with when could I potentially need this in the future? This is one where, you know, in a team setting, you can just have them hold up uh, you know, on up to 10 fingers. Where are we at with this? You can get a just a quick survey, just a quick scan of the room. You know, do I have lots of lots of ones, twos, threes? Do I have lots of fives, sixes, and sevens? Do I have lots of nines and tens? Where are we at? Is this something that maybe we need to we need to incorporate this into our entire culture or the defensive side of the ball or the offensive side of the ball? And then on the back, it basically walks them through filling out their routine, coming up with their routine, and then gives them a tracker where throughout the week they can say, yeah, here's here's when I did this. Here's the impact that it had. Again, what we don't want to get to the game and all of a sudden they've never used this, they've never tried this before. We need to put them in high pressure situations and in practice. And then that's a great time to pull out the hey, let's go right now. We've had a terrible practice, or we just gave up, you know, this, this, this happened. Here's a great time. Let's practice our reset. You know, everybody, everybody do your thing. Or let's, you know, let's use the team reset tool right here. And then the final brick in this section is recovery. And I'm gonna be honest, the the younger athletes, I probably don't even really get into this. I probably don't even really teach this because if I'm being honest, you know, at a at a certain age, they don't even really need to recover that much. Uh, they're not exerting that much energy during a 10U baseball game most of the time. Now that's not to say that the rest and the recovery and the hydration and the nutrition isn't important. It is, but I I think that this becomes a bigger and bigger and bigger deal the older you get. One of my Division I golfers, who's now transitioning over to professional golfer, has really started noticing like, if I don't take care of my body, all of a sudden I start feeling kind of tight the next day, or I start having some pain in these places that it's never been before. You know, kind of jokingly I said, Well, welcome to being old. But there's some truth to that. Like, there's a reason that LeBron James spends whatever millions of dollars on recovery every year to take care of his body. The higher level you get to, the smaller that those gaps become, where you know, you can just find little incremental improvements here and there. All of that being said, I would make a huge deal with my play. If I was if I was coaching high school sports, I would make a huge deal out of put your phone away and go to bed. Turn off the video game and go to bed. Because I think we've got a lot of people in this generation of athletes who they think, well, I'm not running, I'm not lifting, I'm not working out, I'm not practicing, I'm not training, I'm just sitting and scrolling on my phone. I am recovering. You're not. Your body is not resting. We talked about this uh a few episodes back in the the sleep episode, but there's a book called Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker. And one of the one of the athletes I worked with at Ohio State called me up one day and said, Coach Carnes, I'm so excited. You have to read this book. And he was like, I I've had people my entire life telling me that sleep is important and rest is important, and it just went in one ear and out the other. But, you know, this book is talking about how it impacts how you learn, it impacts how you recover, it impacts how you add muscle, it impacts all of these things. And I really feel like if I if I can be better about my sleep, it's gonna give me a competitive advantage over my opponents. It's like, well, yeah, uh, absolutely 100%. And, you know, whether whether that's true or whether that's placebo effect, you know, whether I I don't know, maybe all of his opponents already are doing all of that and he's just catching up. I don't know. I have no idea. What I can tell you with 100% certainty is that after he had been intentional about his rest, his recovery, his sleep, not just sleep quantity, but also sleep quality, he was more confident and he believed deep down inside, I have put in the time and I have put in the work to take care of my body so that I can perform at my best. And that's powerful. That's what we're after. That's the brick we're trying to stack here. And so then in the worksheet for recovery, you know, obviously the learning has to happen somewhere, whether that's listen to the podcast, read the book, you're already subscribed to the academy, you just tell them as the coach, you show them a video, somehow they need to realize, oh, recovery is actually important because I can guarantee you most of them don't think it matters. And then connect. If they've never done this before in the past and they don't think it's a big deal, I really love to on this one especially get them to connect into the future. What if our entire team actually went to bed at 10 p.m., whatever p.m., instead of staying up till 1 a.m. scrolling on TikTok or playing NBA 2K? What would that look like if we were mentally sharper, physically more prepared? And then for the action on the back, it takes them through the physical, uh, you know, sleep, stretch, nutrition, hydration, mental recovery, whether that's journaling, whether that's visualization, you know, emotional recovery, whether that's relationships, hobbies, a break from screen time, what's what's my full recovery plan? You know, after a game, how do I handle all that emotion and then prepare for the next day? At the end of just a normal day, how do I start to slow my mind down, start to slow my body down so that I can get the best recovery sleep possible? I had a conversation with one of my professional golfers who just got back from a qualifying tournament. And she said, you know, it's it's funny now because in college, like, you know, I kind of cared and, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to like get sleep and rest and and stuff like that. But now, once my clock hits a certain time, like my phone's done, I'm getting ready for bed, I've got my book ready to go. And it's funny because now that I'm taking it more seriously, I actually feel like, man, I really wish I would have started doing this before, or I wish I would have started doing this in college. And I mean, this is a Division I athlete who competed in a national championship. So I can promise you that if you're a high school coach listening to this, you've got a whole team full of athletes that don't think recovery is a big deal. Maybe you don't. Think recovery is a big deal. If that's the case, would highly recommend that Why We Sleep book by Matthew Walker. So that kind of that kind of wraps up that section. We've got one more episode that'll come to you guys here in the next couple weeks. Hopefully, you're enjoying kind of this journey through the confidence book. If you have not purchased the book uh and you want to get a copy of that, it is available on Amazon. The link is in the show notes. It comes with a free workbook download so that you can start using this either individually or you can start using this with your team. If you've got questions, if if there's something that you would love for us to dive into deeper on the show, send those my way. Head over to mental trainingplan.com. There's a contact us button down at the bottom. If you're interested in using this with your entire team, if you want to know, hey, how can we kind of build this from the ground up this offseason with my program? Again, reach out to us on the website, fill out one of those contact us pages, or shoot me an email, Ben at Mentaltrainingplan.com. If you have enjoyed this show, if you've gotten anything out of these episodes, it would mean the world to us if you would take the time to like, to follow, to comment, to leave a review. If there's someone right now on your mind that you think would benefit from listening to this, would love for you to share this episode. We just passed 75,000 downloads, uh, which is awesome. I I can't tell you from the bottom of my heart, I cannot express how grateful I am that you guys continue to listen, continue to just keep coming back. I hope that you're enjoying the show. I hope that it's worth your time. If there's anything we could do to make this show better, please don't hesitate to reach out. I read every single one of those contact us forms that get sent in through the website. And yes, we have listeners who listen to us on every single continent around the world except Antarctica. We have located one person with one friend from Australia who knows someone who works at, I believe she said a research center down there. So still we're still waiting for that, uh, we're still waiting for that final continent to say that we've our show has been downloaded all around the world. But in all seriousness, thank you guys so much for being here. And until next time, make your plan, put it to work.