Performance coach Travis Thomas walks through a five-step pre-game mental routine: grounded breathing, positive identity statements to counter self-doubt, visualizing specific game responses, choosing a one-word anchor, and naming two or three action priorities for your position. Do it as close to competition as possible.
Hello everyone, Travis Thomas here, performance coach, creator of Live Yes And. I work with youth college and professional sports teams as well as companies. And I'm currently the leadership and team dynamics coach for the United States Men's National Soccer Team. So this video is a description of what the next video is, which is a mental activation process, a pregame mental activation process to get yourself grounded, focused, and then centered, right? And knowing Pregame, either I would recommend either doing this, you know, on the field a few minutes before the game, if you have that ability to have that alone time, or doing it in a locker room, if you have that ability to have that alone time. Or for so many of us in youth sports and things like that, where maybe it's in your car or on the way to the field or the gym or whatever it is, where you have that alone time. Or it's waking up in the morning and you're going to do this in the morning. I like doing it as close to the competition as possible just to Just to really get yourself in alignment and activated. So we're going to go through a couple of things. The first thing that we're going to do in that video is going to be breathing, right? It's just going to be some deep inhales and some deep exhales, breathing in and out through your nose, right? I'm a big proponent of nose breathing. So we'll be breathing in and out through our nose while we'll be sitting with our feet firmly planted on the ground. Shoulders relaxed, spine straight, and just taking deep, slow breaths in our nose and deep exhale out through our— excuse me— out through our nose. Next thing that we're going to do are the I am statements. The I am statements is your way to start to tell yourself, and I say remind yourself, of who you are at your best. The I am statements are a way to offset the 80% of negative thinking that our thoughts have, right? So we're going to offset that negativity by reminding ourselves who we are at our best. It might not be how you're feeling in that moment, but it's going to be who you are at your best. And so as you're doing these I am statements, you're going to start to feel your— literally your physical body language kind of shift because you're going to start to be like, yeah, I am. I am all these things. I am strong. I am courageous. I am fit, right? So we're going to do all these I am statements, which we are reminding ourselves who we are at our best. Then we're gonna move into just a little bit of what I would call behavior visualization, not outcome visualization. I'm gonna call this behavior visualization, which is thinking through the game, thinking through the activity, and really preparing ourselves for how we are going to respond. You know, how you are going to respond to moments. If the officiating is bad, I'm going to adjust like this. If we go down a goal, if we're losing, if, if, if, this is how I'm going to respond. If we're winning, if I score a goal, this is how I'm going to respond. So we're starting to think ourselves through the behavior, the desired behavior that we're going to have during the competition, not focused on the outcome, but focused on our behavior. So in the video, I will demonstrate that a little bit as well. And then the last thing I'm a firm believer in is giving yourself a one-word or a couple-of-word mantra to take that out onto the field, into the gym, onto the court. A mantra like, I am unstoppable, right? I am a beast, right? Or maybe it's just a one word: resilience, peace, gratitude. Whatever it is, it's going to be your anchor word that you kind of came— you come back to. It's your anchor word that brings you back into the present moment. And then whatever the sport, whatever the athlete, Absolutely. Whoever I'm working with, I always— last thing they do before I go out there, I just say, hey, what are the 2 or 3 things that you need to focus on in order to be successful? And I mean physical actions for that position. If I'm talking to a midfielder, what 3 things do you need to focus on? They might be winning balls, distributing, keeping my shape, whatever it is. What are the 2 or 3 things? And then that becomes the things that we are going to focus on from an action standpoint. So I need to go out. Make sure I'm winning balls, make sure I'm distributing, make sure I'm keeping my shape. So we're getting— the first part is really trying to activate the unconscious to give ourselves that unconscious thoughts, and then we're shifting into, okay, now what are we actually going to be thinking and focusing on while we're out there? And so that's what it— that's the basis of what we're doing, and the next video will be the actual— I will sort of kind of a guided session through all those different components.
