Gaining an Edge: Becoming Your Own Best Inner Coach

Welcome to the final edition of Gaining an Edge from Expand Your Game! This series empowers Socceristas to own their growth and maximize their potential by expanding mental performance skills, reframing limiting beliefs, and uncovering authentic drive.

In the previous edition, we dove into the trap of external validation and limiting beliefs and how they negatively impact your confidence and performance. This time, to wrap up the series, we’re going to talk about how playing with confidence and consistency results from using your mental skills training to be your best inner coach.

Your mental skills job

If you want to be great at soccer, you have a mental skills’ job’ to do for yourself on and off the field. That job is to be your own best inner coach, and how you do that is by working hard to train the mental piece of your game and then going out onto the field and trying the things you’ve learned.

Becoming your best inner coach will help you self-regulate your focus and maintain composure no matter the distractions in the environment. This is ultimately what will help you become a more consistent soccer player. When you have more consistency, your ‘bad days’ are still good. You never stray too far from your baseline. You stay strong and confident even when things on the field don’t go your way. While every day won’t be an awesome day, your play will fluctuate less because you are composed and responding to your environment.

When you learn to talk TO YOURSELF instead of listening to yourself – you’ve effectively silenced the inner critic and become your best inner coach. 

Why is this important?

Coaches, mentors, parents, and teammates can all support you, but as helpful and as caring as they might be, they will never be out there on the field with you. They will never be inside your head with you (which is a good thing, we promise). While it is important to identify what people you can lean on in hard moments, it is just as important, perhaps more, to be able to LEAN ON YOURSELF in ALL moments.

To be an elite performer, you need to be able to regulate your actions and focus in any situation, no matter what is happening around you. Circumstances can change quickly on the soccer field – you go up a goal, down a goal, gain control and get momentum, get disorganized and start to break down, etc.

To execute an elite-level performance, you need to stay in your optimal mental performance zone as these changes occur so that you can play your best soccer and help your team do what needs to be done. 

And the way to do this is by COACHING YOURSELF through the moment and providing yourself the support and the guidance that YOU need right now. For example, when you become stressed and start overthinking the situation or replaying mistakes in your mind, you become your worst enemy. You’ll impede your focus and concentration.

Players, when this happens, it knocks you OUT of your optimal performance zone, which takes you AWAY from consistency and confidence. It puts you into an elevated state where things start to unravel, and you cannot stay fully focused on what is right in front of you. This is EXACTLY why it is so important for soccer players to strengthen their mental game and develop a strong inner coach.

Gaining an Edge recap

Throughout the course of our time together, we have covered A LOT of mental skills topics:

Week 1 – Training the Mental Side of your Game

Week 2 – Tackling Performance Pressure

Week 3 – Focusing on the Process and Setting Goals

Week 4 – Are you your Own Worst Enemy on the Soccer Field?

Week 5 – Positive Self-talk Toolkit

Week 6 – Maintaining Focus & Composure in ANY Situation

Week 7 – Mental Preparation and Routine for Game Day Success

Week 8 – Accepting Obstacles and Practicing Resiliency

Week 9 – Letting go of External Validation and Choosing to Believe

By working on these pieces of your game, you begin to set a foundation for self-awareness and growth-mindedness. A foundation that leads you toward growing your mental toughness and gaining an edge over your competition through confident and consistent gameplay.

Change IS POSSIBLE through mental skills training and development. Through reflecting on and reframing limiting beliefs. Through exposing yourself to this world of mental fitness, a world where you can LEARN to think differently, change how you view things, and strengthen your mental game.

The biggest takeaway here: you don’t always have to be your own worst enemy on the soccer field. YOU CAN CHOOSE to change things and grow your inner coach by investing in your development as a soccer player and deciding that the time is NOW. You can CHOOSE to be your own most motivating, dedicated, determined, resilient, kind, supportive, helpful, and constructive self. 

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