Breaking Through Mental Barriers: How a Soccer Mentor Can Unlock Your Full Potential

The life of a high-level athlete is rife with adversity, both on and off the field. Overcoming this constant barrage of challenges requires an elite mindset, a mandatory component for success in sports.

However, high-level athletes are still human beings, and just like any other person, they are often bound by self-limiting beliefs. When you’re just a teenager, you don’t know where these beliefs are coming from, or how to overcome them and reach your full potential.

Thankfully, that’s what a mentor is for.

A mentor identifies the mental struggles that are holding athletes back from building the same winning mindsets as their favorite soccer stars. By changing their perspective towards adversity and re-examining the origins of self-limiting beliefs, mentorship helps athletes stay confident and focused when things go wrong time and time again.

Mentorship Teaches Athletes to Accept Mistakes

High-level athletes have very high standards for themselves, and they don’t like to fail. When you want to be great, it’s common to view mistakes as signs of weakness or ineptitude. This causes players to get flustered and lose focus when they make mistakes during play.

But mistakes are inevitable in soccer. Players are making decisions at lighting speed, and it’s just not possible to make the right decision every time. A mentor teaches players to view mistakes as natural parts of the game, as opposed to ugly things that deserve to be feared and punished.

According to an elite mindset, a player who makes mistakes here and there isn’t having a “bad game.” They’re simply playing soccer. This allows players to control their emotions after making mistakes, which is arguably the most important skill an athlete can possess.

Mentorship Teaches Players to Build Their Own Journey

When you have big goals, it’s natural to envision a specific path towards achieving them. For instance, you might envision yourself playing for a certain club before getting recruited to a certain college, after which you’ll go pro and eventually make your U.S. national team debut.

The problem with envisioning a specific path to success is that anything that deviates from this path automatically feels wrong. This mentality has derailed the trajectories of countless athletes. Once they get injured, cut from the club, or passed over by their dream school, they feel like their long-term goal is no longer within reach.

Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are still myriad paths towards their goal, the athlete just isn’t aware of them. That’s where a mentor comes into play. Citing their own experience as evidence, a mentor helps their mentees understand that every athlete’s journey is unique.

As former pros, we can tell you that our careers took all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. We didn’t know anyone else who was on the exact same journey as us, but that didn’t make our journeys “wrong.” They were just different from anything we could have ever expected.

Mentorship Helps Players Deal with Overwhelming Emotions

Another reason athletes tend to react so negatively to setbacks is because they bring such heavy emotions. When we think of our favorite athletes, we don’t imagine them feeling angry or sad. We think of them as happy and confident, right?

A mentor debunks the misconception that great athletes are supposed to feel happy and confident all the time, because it suggests that experiencing powerful emotions is “wrong” and not conducive to success.

In reality, every athlete faces adversity, and boy, do they feel it. When players find themselves in a funk after a setback, a mentor reminds them that there’s nothing wrong with what they’re feeling, and though they might not see it on TV or social media, all of their favorite athletes have experienced these same emotions as well. Removing the negative association with heavy emotions helps athletes accept them as natural, inevitable parts of their lives. If so many other athletes can deal with such heavy emotions on a constant basis, so can they.

Mentorship Debunks the Logic of Self-Limiting Beliefs 

At Beyond Goals Mentoring, we know that self-limiting beliefs often stem from outdated misconceptions about success in sports. That’s why we’re dedicated to helping young athletes develop new perspectives towards adversity so they can embrace the unique twists and turns of their journeys and recover from setbacks at a faster rate. As long as your athlete remains committed to their personal development, nothing can deter their progress.

So, if self-limiting beliefs seem to be inhibiting your athlete’s mindset, let’s set up a mentoring session today.