Assess Your Players’ Beliefs and Mental Skills

Provided by: National Fastpitch Coaches Association

Testing facilitates learning. This brief questionnaire is written for players. It is designed to increase their awareness and motivate them to take action based on that awareness.

Pick the best answer. On true/false, the entire statement must always be true for the answer to be true.

1. True or False. Mistakes are inevitable, but ultimately, life is supposed to be fair.

2. True or False. Confidence comes from good experiences. Therefore, to be confident, an athlete must experience the good thing first.

3. True or False. Attitude is a choice; it is something everyone can control.

4. True or False. Playing the game one pitch at a time means that a bad performance on a previous play (or even a good performance) will not affect your focus on the next pitch.

5. True or False. Humans are creatures of habit. Therefore, it's a good idea to work on building good habits today.

6. Without awareness, no _________________ is possible. This makes sense, because if an athlete doesn't realize that they are doing something wrong, then they would feel no need to fix it.

7. True or False. You earn your keep and show your value by how well you play in each game.

8. Physical balance is often a good indicator of what mental skills?

a. Aggressiveness and awareness

b. Quality practice and self-control

c. Imagery and respect for the game

9. True or False. To be skilled at something, you must not only have the ability to execute it most of the time on your terms during practice, but you must also be able to execute it most of the time in challenging game situations.

10. True or False. Characteristics of effective self-talk during competition include that it is positive and it leads to an appropriate focus on the task at hand.

11. An athlete's ability level comes from both genetics and preparation (hard and smart work). How much of it do you think is genetics?

12. What percentage of the time do you honestly think your best effort is good enough?

Discussion Questions

Why do you play the game?

What is (are) the most important trait(s) of a leader?

List one or two of your biggest strengths and weaknesses as an athlete.

Answer each question before looking at the opinions provided below. Guessing is fine. This is an awareness exercise; taking a shortcut would reduce its value and in my opinion, your best effort is always good enough.

Weintraub's opinions and details:

1. False (just my opinion). True is an extremely valid opinion for the long run, but certainly not about any single situation.

2. False. Very false. Confidence is an attitude and attitudes come from thoughts.

3. Attitude is always potentially controllable for humans with adult-like brain power. It is not controllable much at all for babies and toddlers. People vary in their rate of maturation, but in my opinion, by age 10 or so, attitude is potentially controllable all the time for the vast majority of people.

4. True.

5. True.

6. Adjustment/growth.

7. False. Many athletes have a link between today's stats and their feelings of self-worth. This is wrong and will inhibit performance. A team embraces strengths and weaknesses when it hands out uniforms. Your self-worth is immeasurable and untouchable - a gift from God. Your self-esteem must be earned through quality preparation, kindness, respect, discipline, love, and other traits that make you a good person.

8. Selection B. Balance and self-control are practically synonyms.

9. True. Being skilled is about execution when it matters most.

10. True. One of my most impactful little pieces of work is my list of "curse" words. Editor's note: Weintraub's list is available on his blog at this link: http://smilenowcoach.com/topics/self-talk.

11. Research indicates that the lower your answer on this question, the faster your rate of learning will be. It also indicates that in most pursuits, a lower answer is more accurate than an even split.

12. Whatever is honest is correct. 100 is the healthiest answer for performance, though it's an unlikely answer for those reared in America's competitive culture.

Discussion answers:

1. It's a great exercise to take the answer and ask, "Why do you want that?" repeating this process until core motivations are identified. It is common for young athletes to lose sight of things intrinsic in the game that provide joy like hitting a round ball with a round bat squarely or making a diving catch.

2. There are lots of valid answers. I like to put "leading by example" here.

3. Super if you can identify a couple of each. The ultimate questions of performance (and life, perhaps) are:

a. Where are you?

b. Where do you want to go?

c. How do you get there?

If you can honestly answer A and B, which takes a ton of courage, you can guess at how to get there, and testing out that guess will generate fantastic progress regardless of whether your guess is correct or incorrect.

For more information and materials about this questionnaire, including Elite Athlete Audios, visit www.SoftballMentalMaster.com.