How To Build Mental Toughness - Basketball Confidence

It's often said that basketball is 25% physical and 75% mental. While that might seem ridiculous, it's not. The mental part of the game is critically important to becoming the best player you can be. If you don't have self belief, you cannot be as good as you want to be. It's impossible. I've coached and played with a lot of players who played far worse in games than they should have based on their actual abilities simply because they didn't have enough self belief and confidence. Maybe that's you. Guess what? That was me at one point. It took a long time for me to figure out how to overcome my lack of self belief on the court. If you have a math test coming up and you study for hours and hours and take a bunch of practice tests, when you finally take the real test, you're going to be confident in your ability to do well on it. Basketball is the same exact way physically. If you know that you've worked harder on your game than anybody else on the court, you'll be confident during the games. Setting a goal in practice and workouts of being the hardest worker you can possibly be will not only help you to develop your skills faster than everybody else, but it will also exponentially increase your confidence as well. So step one, outwork everyone else. That's a good and very much necessary first step. But let's get into the just as important step two. Have you ever heard of the stories of mothers who who lift cars to save their children in car crashes? That's a prime example of mind over matter in basketball. Mind over matter is a real thing too. Players who are mentally prepared will oftentimes beat players who might be slightly better physically, but aren't as mentally prepared. Like I said, It's 25% physical and 75% mental. Meaning if you aren't consistently developing the mental side of your game, you you are leaving a lot of potential on the table. You aren't the player that you could be. So let's talk about how you develop self belief, confidence and the mental edge to dominate in the game of basketball. Much like we would do a basketball workout to develop our skills, we could do a mental workout to become stronger mentally. We do this through visualization. Visualization is one of the most powerful tools we have. It's been proven that your brain can't tell the difference between imagined events and real events. So by using our mind to visualize events, we train ourselves to be ready during the real event. Translating that to basketball, if we visualize being in game situations and playing confidently, having self belief and being successful, we'll be more likely to be able to repeat that in real games. To do this workout, we will visualize eight different scenarios. The first four being past successes and the second four being four future successes. For the past four successes, think of times on the court that you've been successful. Specific moments. For example, maybe you had a really nice crossover step back one time. Maybe you had a game winning three pointer. That's two moments right there. You'll pick four total past moments and replay them in your mind in first person. Feel the environment around you. Hear the crowd. Feel what it felt like when you made that great play. Try to imagine it as detailed as you can. Go through each a couple of times. For the last four, you'll imagine your very next game or performance. So if you have a game or practice or scrimmage or pick up game tonight, you'd imagine that event. You want to pick four examples of you performing well and playing to your highest potential. Maybe you visualize hitting some three pointers. Maybe you visualize bringing the ball up the court against pressure. Maybe it's getting to the basket and finishing against contact. Pick four things that cater to your playing style. Do the same thing as you did for the first four. Put yourself in your shoes making those plays. Feel the emotions you get when you make that play. Make it as real as possible. Do this mental workout before every game of practice. This is a skill and just like any other skill, the more you do it, the better you'll get at it and the more it'll pay off. If you commit to doing this, you'll see your confidence and self belief skyrocket and you'll start to feel more comfortable making plays on the court. If you want to learn more about developing the mental side of your game, check out 10 Minute Toughness by Jason Selk. It lays out all of this in more detail and gives a more detailed mental workout as well. It helps me a lot as a player and is one of the most important books I've ever read, so I highly suggest you read it too. The link to it is in my description if you want to check it out. If you guys found this helpful, please leave a like and subscribe as well. Click that little black button on your screen for me to make it easy. I really appreciate it guys. Drop a comment down below. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. Also, let me know what your eight scenarios are. Thanks for watching guys. Peace.