Mental Skills Training Program - Essay Example

Based on a recent performance profile, it is found that I lack two mental skills. Imagery and confidence are mental skills currently lacked. The two lacked mental skills are important for everyday life. Imagery helps the mind focus on seeing things that have happened in the past, things that are happening now and events that may happen in the future. Portraying these images in a positive or negative way is a mental imagery skill. Confidence as a mental skill controls how actions are made, decisions in life and the way someone feels.

Each one of these mental skills contributes to decisions that are made in everyday life. These mental skills also affect an athlete’s performance. What does imagery as a mental skill do? Imagery as a mental skill is basically the ability to go over an event and imagine what the outcome will be. This goes hand in hand with confidence. Having strong confidence will help the imagery skill imagine a more positive outcome. A positive outcome and better confidence will lead to higher performance.

Setting up a plan to improve these skills will help improve confidence and the mental ability to imagine better outcomes. Improving each one of these skills can help an individual go further in live and outperform others. In an article from the Journal of Education for Business, a study has shown that the use of negotiation classes can help build an individual’s confidence which will help the individual become more successful. Becoming better at negotiating will improve performance by a huge amount.

Improved performance will lead to better confidence. I plan on using negotiation as a way to improve my confidence mental skill. Duration and repetition will aid in creating a mental skills training program that works on my weaker areas. To obtain better negotiating skills and better confidence I plan on using negotiating and becoming more comfortable negotiating with others. I will practice becoming comfortable negotiating for a month. Twice a week for the first month I will try to negotiate events that I would otherwise ignore.

These events will be smaller things like household activities and small individual confrontations. After the first month, I can then begin using real world scenarios for negotiating. These negotiating skills may need to be modified to a class like session. If practicing negotiating on my own terms proves to be unsuccessful, the training can be modified to include negotiating classes. Another great way that was found to assist in improving mental skills was discovered by a research study conducted by International Education Studies.

The research study was performed on college level soccer players. The soccer players were given different techniques to try and improve different mental skills like imagery, attention and motivation. The study showed that relaxation was the best improver. Relaxation was able to help the players relax by reducing muscle tension and improving focus. Becoming more relaxed before and after games, improved performance. Since relaxation has shown to have great imagery affects, relaxation will be part of the program used to improve weaker mental skills.

In order to use relaxation to improve imagery,