This podcast episode (Mike Hartman Show) features Sarah Johnston — former Division 1 college tennis player, USPTA-certified tennis pro and ICF/NLP mindset coach — discussing athlete mental strength, self-sabotage, and practical strategies to close the gap between practice performance and competition. Johnston describes her own struggles with performance under pressure, outlines her coaching tools (notably a “Circle of Power” and step-by-step playing strategies), gives a client example (her daughter Nadia) showing measurable behavioral change, and closes with a call-to-action to book a complimentary call and access a mini training on her website.
Welcome to the Mike Hartman Show. Mike is a performance coach and former Stanley Cup Champion with the New York Rangers. Topics on this show are focused around stories, mindset and champions. Mike will also go into details about helping you with your pain points and struggles and finding motivational solutions on how to have the mindset of a champion. Now, here's your host, Mike Hartman. Hartman.
Welcome to another episode. Today we are on the Topic Think tank and I'm bringing on more subject matter professionals to really help us. We're going to listen to Sarah today as she is a former Division 1 college tennis player and she's also a performance coach and helps people all over the country with their game of tennis, with their mindset taking their game to the next level. She has experienced it, she has been there and I always share this with people that if someone hasn't been there, how do they know how to adapt to certain things? Well, Sarah has been there. Listen to Sarah and enjoy the rest of the show.
Hello friends, I'm Sarah Johnston. I'm so excited to be here today on the Mike Hartman Show. We are from the same neck of the woods in Michigan so I'm very thankful to him for having me. I came to share today because so many of our athletes are lacking confidence and self sabotaging. I want to be here for the athletes experiencing inconsistency between their performance and practice and game time. As an ICF Certified Mindset Coach for Athletes and NLP Coach and practitioner, I give athletes the key needed to unlock their full potential and the ability to reproduce that success. So why are we seeing such a large gap between our athletes potential and their actual performance mental strength. I know what it is to perform under pressure. I've been a USPTA certified tennis pro for 18 years. I grew up as a three sport athlete in Michigan playing tennis, volleyball and softball. I moved on to play four years of college tennis at Ferris State University and when I played college tennis I mentally bailed under pressure all the time. My former college coach Dave Ramos had a full time job trying to get my mind to stay in my body under pressure. Even though I had great sports parents and coaches telling me to be confident, I still had negative thoughts and self doubt and what I now call my circle of power. I didn't have the self awareness to understand what was happening when things would go wrong and I didn't have a solution for the problem. So during competition I would just feel stuck or checked out. I went through my whole athletic career feeling stuck and it carried over into working and raising a Family too. After playing college tennis, I coached Division 3 college tennis at Kalamazoo Kalamazoo College in Michigan, raised my family and became a full time tennis pro where I coached my twin daughters. I started to see the same cycle happening with them too. And I'm telling them the same thing as their coach and their mom. All these different ways to just be confident and it's still not working now. I was determined to get answers. I wanted to go deeper. Why do so many of our athletes leave their sport before the age of 15? Why do our athletes sabotage themselves? Why do athletes not perform to their full potential? Why are so many athletes lacking confidence? It's simple. They lack mental strength. We spend so much time, money and energy on physically getting better. But there are still many athletes who aren't reaching their full potential. If you ask an athlete how important mental strength is, they will almost always say up to 90%. But what are they doing to practice these skills regularly? People are moving towards more mental toughness skills and coping strategies, but any limiting belief lingering will trump the affirmation every time. So to dive deeper, we need to be focusing on what is going on mentally or unconsciously. If we aren't doing this, then we are only putting pressure on the athlete to figure it out for themselves. My clients are seeing results because we get to the root issue and discover their unique recipe for success. So for my daughter Nadia, during a coaching session, she wanted to focus on the issue of not serving to her potential in a match the way she did at practice. She would mentally bail out during her serve if it was not the way she thought it should go in her head. What happened then? She got stuck. During our sessions, I taught Nadia the playing strategy, step by step strategy and circle of power. What these strategies have done for Nadia is give her options to manage her situations better and help her keep her mind and body connected while she is playing. The result for Nadia is the ability to practice the strategies, be in the moment and be her best one match at a time. Now she is calm and focused while serving and shows great control and placement. When my twin daughters mastered circle of power, they not only used it for tennis matches, but they used it to manage coaches, teammates and middle school friendships. It was a game changer. My coaching is about giving athletes tools and strategies to help them use their minds to support their bodies better. It's about helping athletes get to the root cause of their limiting beliefs, old decisions and negative emotions that are in their way so they can be more congruent in their performance. It's a solution to a mental block, a mental disconnect or a lack mentality. If we're not shifting mentally, we are not giving our athletes the ability to maximize their potential. I want our athletes to enjoy themselves. I want our athletes to want to be out there competing and own their ability. I want them to be accountable and meet us halfway. My mission at Sarah Jane Mindset Coaching is to teach simple but effective strategies. With these simple strategies and tools, athletes, even at a very young age, can be accountable, take ownership, and have a strategy to use to be successful. Over time, it puts the athlete in the driver's seat of their ability, capability and destiny. It provides them the ability to have a voice as they practice strategies. Over time, they maximize their potential. I want all athletes and parents of athletes listening to know that it is possible to perform to your full potential, play freely and succeed in your sport. As a certified Mindset Life Coach, I connect athletes with strategies for success through mental strength coaching. You can learn more. Book a complimentary call with me to discuss your unique situation and watch our mini training intro to mastering your circle of power for free. This is all on our website@sarahjeanmindsetcoaching.com that's Sarah Jane J A N E mindsetcoaching.com and so if you are ready to level up your game, please get in touch with me. Thanks for listening and love you guys.
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