Your goal as a coach is to have as great a positive impact as you can on your athletes. This influence starts with your specific coaching of them to make them better athletes and to help them achieve their competitive goals. To that end, you motivate them, build their confidence, try to relieve any pressure they might feel, help them focus, and get them in the right mindset before a competition. All of your efforts on the mental side of their sport is to give them the best opportunity to perform their best when they compete and to experience individual and team success.

Your influence on your athletes goes well beyond their being athletes. As educators, mentors, and friends of the kids you coach, you also have a far greater impact on them as people. Because few if any of the athletes you coach will ever reach a truly high level in their sport, your real interest, I’m guessing, is to build strong, competent, and respectful (among many other positive qualities) people by instilling in them healthy values, attitudes, and goals that extend well beyond their sports lives. Though I’m sure you feel great satisfaction when your athletes find success on the hill, I’m also guessing that you get even more “warm fuzzies” when your athletes get into the college of their choice, find meaningful careers, and even return to their home club married and with children of their own who love sports.

There are many different ways you can have this powerfully positive impact on your athletes. Certainly, you act as an important role model for how they develop as both athletes and people. How you behave sends influential messages to the athletes you coach. But equally important are the words you use; what you say to them.

Regardless of how you communicate to your athletes, I hold a fundamental belief that, as I wrote in my third parenting book titled, Your Children are Listening, “children become the messages they get the most.” Young people will adopt the values, attitudes, and beliefs that are most present in their lives. Because you spend so much time with your athletes, you are among the most influential people in their lives, along with parents and teachers.

Though role modeling is one big way you send messages to your athletes, as a passionate writer and wordsmith, I believe that the words you use with them are powerful influences on the way they think, feel, behave, and perform. You use words to inspire, instruct, and guide your athletes. The words you use shape their attitudes about themselves, their team, and their sport. At a very basic level, athletes become the messages they get the most from you. If the messages they get from you are positive, supportive, and encouraging, they will embrace a similar vocabulary in their views of themselves as athletes. In turn, if your messages are negative, angry, and discouraging, those are the messages they will adopt.

The words you use with your athletes also reflect the team culture that you and they create, as I discussed in a recent post. Your words tell them what you believe is important in your team culture and shape how they come to view it as well. As a result, why not use words as tools to consciously and actively shape your athletes’ attitudes and the team culture of which they are a part.

A useful way to help your athletes accept the team culture and the healthy messages you want to communicate to them is to create a team vocabulary that is an expression of your team’s values, attitudes, and goals. Examples of positive words and phrases that send healthy messages to your athletes include: purposeful, intensity, focus, quality, consistency, believe, risk, patience, process, “money in the bank,” prime, “Bring it!,” “Accept the challenge,” and “Own it!.”

I encourage you to collaborate with your athletes to create a team vocabulary that encompasses the messages you want them to get. Constant exposure to this vocabulary will subtly reinforce these messages in your athletes increasing their likelihood of making the messages their own. A team vocabulary can become woven into the fabric of your team’s activities. Here are a few ways:

• Use words relevant to training (e.g., effort, dig deep, finish strong) on a regular basis.
• Print out and post important words around your locker room or clubhouse, providing your athletes with constant visual reminders of what you believe is
• At each training session, have an athlete choose a word or phrase that will be the theme for the day (e.g., fight, persevere, don’t quit).
• Use certain words to cue your athletes into their preparations on the day of a competition (e.g., ready, charge, drive).
• Finally, you can have your athletes write words on their equipment that are meaningful to them. When they see those words in training or competition, they remind athletes of what they need to do to perform their best.

To learn more about mental preparation for sports, download your complimentary copy of my Prime Sport: Psychology of Champion Athletes e-book. If you’re interested in a more comprehensive, structured, and consistent approach to mental training, please consider my new 4-week Prime Sport Coaching 404: Get the Most Out of Your Athletes online course designed specifically for sport coaches and my 6-week Prime Sport 101: Train Your Mind like a Champion online mental training course designed for athletes and coaches.