Santé is a co-subsponsor of Team Continu:the skating team led by Marianne Timmer. Today Marianne tells us how mental coaching can help you improve your sports performance.
Marianne: 'Mental coaching involves training mental skills. Mental skills include:concentration, motivation, dealing with injuries, self-talk, self-confidence and self-direction. Sport can be a great way to boost your self-esteem, but if you're not careful, sport can also be destructive.
The degree of self-confidence plays an important role in this:if you have too little of it, you do not dare to take risks that are necessary to get more out of yourself, to perform better. You need those risks to be groundbreaking. If you have enough self-confidence, you will manage to take risks. Even if things go wrong at first, then self-confidence allows you to keep going and make sure you'll make it in the end. If you have too much (false) self-confidence – that is also possible – then you will not really try, with the result that you will not develop further in your sports performance.
Until the late 1980s, mental training in the Netherlands was often regarded as intended for athletes who were said to be mentally unstable. Nothing is less true. It could equally well be argued that technical training is only intended for those who are technically unstable, but this has never been discussed. For a top performance, all necessary skills must be well trained, both technical, tactical and mental. The mental skills can therefore be trained and can be exercised in a practical sports situation. National top teams and individual top athletes are already making extensive use of the possibilities of mental training.'
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