As a new season approaches, athletes usually know exactly what they’ve done to prepare physically. They’ve trained, practiced, and worked on strength, conditioning, speed, technique, and sport-specific skills.

But there’s another question worth asking: What have you done to prepare your mind for the season ahead?

The competitive season will bring pressure, mistakes, expectations, uncertainty, fatigue, changing roles, tough opponents, and moments when confidence gets tested. You can’t predict exactly when those moments will arrive – but you can prepare for how you want to respond to them. That’s the purpose of pre-season mental preparation.

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Mental Performance Is Something You Train

Mental performance shouldn’t be something you reach for only when confidence disappears or anxiety becomes overwhelming. Like physical skills, psychological skills become more useful when they’re learned, practiced, and refined before you need them.

Research supports this: psychological skills training such as self-talk, imagery, attentional control, relaxation, goal setting has been linked to improvements in sport performance. The preseason is the window to build and refine these skills.

So instead of asking “Am I physically ready?” ask: “Am I mentally prepared for what this season might demand from me?”

Here are six areas to consider.​

1. Get Clear on What You Want to Build

Goals matter, but alone aren’t enough. Athletes often enter a season focused entirely on outcomes – make the team, score 20 goals, win a championship, earn a scholarship, get more playing time. There’s nothing wrong with outcome goals; the problem is that most of them aren’t fully in your control.

A better approach is to connect outcomes to standards and behaviours:

• Outcome: What would I like to accomplish?
• Performance: How do I need to perform?
• Process: What actions can I repeatedly control?

For example – Outcome: become a top-six forward. Performance: create more offensive opportunities. Process: compete for loose pucks, communicate, attack the middle, recover quickly after mistakes, and prepare consistently.

Your outcome gives you direction. Your daily behaviours give you something to execute.

Preseason action: Write down one major goal for your season, then identify three controllable behaviours that increase your odds of reaching it.

2. Build Your Confidence Before You Need It

A common misconception is that athletes need to feel confident before they can perform confidently. In reality, confidence is trainable – shaped by preparation, past accomplishments, coaching, social support, and how you interpret your own experiences.

Instead of waiting for confidence to show up, start collecting evidence of things you have accomplished. At the end of training, ask: What did I do today that makes me more prepared for my season?

Your answers might include completing a hard conditioning session, staying composed when frustrated, asking your coach for feedback, or finishing training when tired.

Confidence grows when you repeatedly recognize: I’ve prepared for this, I’ve put in the time, and I have done everything I need to do to get ready.

3. Train Your Self-Talk

Every athlete carries on an internal conversation – after mistakes, before competition, when tired, when nervous, when things go sideways. The goal isn’t to eliminate negative thoughts or force positivity. It’s to make your thinking useful.

A meta-analysis found a moderate positive effect of self-talk interventions on sport performance, with different types of self-talk suited to different tasks. Three forms are worth building:

• Coach — instructional cues that tell you what to do (“eyes up,” “quick feet,” “follow through”)
• Compete — motivational cues that generate effort and intensity (“let’s go,” “attack,” “next one”)
• Confidence — statements that remind you of your capability (“I’m ready,” “trust it,” “I’ve done this before”)

Preseason action: Develop three to five short phrases you can use throughout the season – and practice them in training, not just competition.

4. Rehearse Performance Before It Happens

Visualization or Imagery – or mental rehearsal – lets you work through movements, decisions, emotional responses, and challenging situations before they happen. Importantly, imagery isn’t just picturing yourself winning; some of the most useful imagery is rehearsing how you want to respond when things don’t go perfectly.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 86 studies and over 3,500 athletes found imagery practice enhanced multiple dimensions of performance, and worked especially well combined with other psychological skills.

Try visualizing: executing your skills successfully, your pre-performance routine, competing confidently, staying composed under pressure, recovering after a mistake, responding to a bad call, or performing late in competition while tired. You’re not predicting what will happen – you’re rehearsing how you want to respond.

Preseason action: Spend 5–10 minutes, three times a week, mentally rehearsing upcoming practices and competitions. Make the imagery vivid and specific to your sport.​

5. Develop Your Reset Before You Need One

At some point this season, something will go wrong. The best athletes aren’t the ones who never get frustrated, distracted, or disappointed – they’re the ones who get better at returning their attention to what matters next. That’s why preseason is the time to build a reset routine.

A simple framework: Recognize → Refocus → React.

• Recognize that your attention or emotional state has shifted.
• Refocus using a breath, physical action, or cue word.
• React by reconnecting with the next controllable action.

This can take five seconds – that’s the point. You’re not trying to eliminate emotion; you’re training yourself to regain control of your attention. Research on psychological skills and mindfulness training suggests both can improve attentional control and emotional management during competition.

Preseason action: Create one reset routine and practice it deliberately after mistakes in training – don’t save it for competition.

6. Create Your Performance Routine

Routines reduce unnecessary decision-making and direct attention toward useful cues. Think of a routine as the bridge between preparation and execution – and preseason is the time to experiment and find what actually works for you.

• Before competition: nutrition → warm-up → music → breathing → imagery → performance cues
• Immediately before performance: breath → focal point → cue word → execute
• After mistakes: recognize → breath → reset cue → next play
• After competition: recover → reflect → learn → detach

Research on reducing choking under pressure found benefits across pre-performance routines, mindfulness, self-talk, and attentional strategies, though effectiveness varies by sport and task demands. The key is that routines shouldn’t debut on opening night – practice them now.

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Don’t Just Prepare for Your Best Day

There’s one part of preseason preparation athletes often overlook: we tend to prepare for everything going right. But seasons rarely work that way. You may lose playing time, make mistakes, hit a slump, clash with a teammate, get difficult feedback, or lose an important game.

The question isn’t whether adversity will show up – it’s whether you’ve prepared to respond when it does. Mental preparation isn’t about believing everything will go perfectly. It’s building the psychological skills to perform effectively even when it doesn’t.

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Your Preseason Mental Performance Checklist

1. Goals — What am I working toward, and what daily behaviours will get me there?
2. Confidence — What evidence tells me I’m prepared?
3. Self-talk — What do I need to say to myself when things get difficult?
4. Imagery — Have I rehearsed both success and adversity?
5. Reset — What will I do immediately after a mistake?
6. Routine — What helps me become physically and mentally ready to compete?

You don’t need dozens of mental skills. You need a few reliable ones you’ve practiced enough to trust.

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The Performance Challenge

Before your next practice, choose one mental skill from this article. Don’t just read about it — train it. Spend five minutes visualizing. Write your three controllables. Create your reset cue. Practice your pre-performance routine. Then use that skill deliberately in practice.

Mental performance training becomes valuable when it moves from something you know to something you can do under pressure.

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Key Takeaways

• Mental preparation should begin before competition does. Psychological skills are trainable and grow more dependable through repeated practice.
• Focus on controllables. Outcomes provide direction, but behaviours, routines, and standards give you something to execute today.
• Prepare for adversity, not just success. Visualization, self-talk, emotional regulation, and reset routines help athletes respond when competition gets uncomfortable.
• Confidence comes from evidence. Preparation, repetition, and effective responses to adversity all give athletes reasons to trust themselves.
• Mental skills need reps. Preseason is the window to practice psychological skills before competitive pressure increases.

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Self-Reflective Moment

If I knew this season was going to test my confidence, focus, composure, and resilience at some point — what mental skills would I want to have trained before that moment arrives?

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Prepare Your Mind Like You Prepare Your Body

You wouldn’t expect your body to be ready for the season without training it. Your mind is no different. The goal of preseason mental preparation isn’t to guarantee confidence, eliminate nerves, or make sure everything goes according to plan. It’s to build the skills that help you respond effectively when competition gets difficult.

The season will test you. There will be pressure, mistakes, uncertainty, frustration, and moments when you don’t feel your best. You can’t control when those moments arrive, but you can prepare for who you want to be when they do.

Train your mind now, so you can trust it when the season asks more of you.​

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References

Brown, D. J., & Fletcher, D. (2017). Effects of psychological and psychosocial interventions on sport performance: A meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 47, 77–99.

Hatzigeorgiadis, A., Zourbanos, N., Galanis, E., & Theodorakis, Y. (2011). Self-talk and sports performance: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(4), 348–356.

Reinebo, G., Alfonsson, S., Jansson-Fröjmark, M., Rozental, A., & Lundgren, T. (2024). Effects of psychological interventions to enhance athletic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine.