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Two Steps Your Players Absolutely
Must Take To Maximize Their Improvement!
-By Dave Cross
Every year I conduct goal meetings for my club players. After they
write up their goals as we describe
in "Volleyball Cybernetics", we have a meeting where I go over them and make
sure they are on target.
Usually the goals are fine, but they need a little guidance in writing up
their plan on how to achieve them.
When we finish going over their goals and their "new and improved plan",
we get to the most important
part of the meeting. You see, setting goals with
a specific plan for how they are going to be achieved is
an excellent step toward self-improvement, but it's not the end-not if they
want to improve as much as
they can!
I'm gonna let you in on a little secret here: I probably read
about 25 ezines a month on mental training,
motivation and goal setting. Each one of these professionals has their
own specific program for teaching
people how to achieve self-improvement, and they do a very good job of teaching
their methods. But
even though every program varies slightly in approach and/or technique-there are two key points that
are consistent across the board-no matter what:
a.) Whatever you tell yourself-you will believe.
Of course, we've known this for a long time, but there is
an ever growing body of scientific research backing this concept up-and also
more and more programs
out there teaching people how to use self-affirmations correctly.
b.) Whatever you believe you can do-you really can
do. (Within the Laws of Physics, of course!) Check
out any mental training expert's program and they will tell you the first
step to self-improvement is
changing how you think about whatever it is you want to get better at.
Now, I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know here, so
what's my point? Just this:
Get your players to add the following two steps to their training program
and they will not just increase
their level of improvement-they will multiply it!
**Have them develop a set of self-affirmations to go along with their goals.
These affirmations should
be short, to the point and stated as if the goal has already been achieved.
For example, if a setter has
a goal to improve her ability to get to any ball and put up an attackable
set at a "level seven", she might
use "I get to every ball and set it right to target".
(If you have a player you are unsure of in her ability
to figure out what to say, have her write down what she comes up with
and bring them in to you to review
- you can then "troubleshoot" her affirmations and make any changes you see
fit.) Then tell them to
repeat their affirmations every day as often as they can. Give them some examples of when they can
do this: On the way to and from practice, during a water break, during a
break at a tournament, or any
other time they don't have anything else they really need to think about
at the time. Also, make sure
they understand that they should say the affirmations to themselves in a
positive, upbeat voice.
**Have them do visualizations of themselves playing
at the level they will be at when they achieve their
goal. If their goal is to "hit down the line at a level eight",
then they need to see themselves doing this-
in a game situation. It takes a maximum of three seconds to do one
visualization of a skill performance-
many can even do it quicker once they get good at it. But let's just
take that number as a good working
example: This means twenty visualizations can be done per minute-that makes
one hundred in five
minutes! Most of us usually take a good fifteen to thirty minutes to
fall asleep on an average night.
We just lay there going back over the events of the day-or thinking about
what might happen tomorrow-
both things we can't do anything about at the time! Well, now at least part
of this time can be put to good
use-to help them get better at something they want to improve at. I
ask my players to decide how much
time they are going to devote to this each night, "I can't tell you how
much time, because I don't know
how good you really want to be". Then I tell them to take
the amount of time they choose and divide it
by the number of goals they have, then I give them this example: fifteen
minutes divided by five goals
is three minutes per goal, that is 60 visualizations of that goal being achieved
each night.) Finally, I tell
them they should do these visualizations every night.
Finally, here's the key selling point in getting your players to use these
two steps:
It doesn't take even one more minute in the gym, not one more drop of sweat
or muscle soreness. They
can do them when they are going to bed, or anytime they are simply bored.
And these methods will help
them improve much more quickly-meaning they will get
dramatically better results from the time they
are in the gym-what a deal!!
-Dave Cross
National Director
Yes I Can Volleyball
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