Moms who have daughters who are experiencing a mental block know how this feels. Your daughter has this skill. She's said it before, but now she's stuck. She's holding back, she's freezing. Maybe she's shutting down, and if you've ever thought, just do it, or she used to be able to do this with no problem. What's going on? Then this episode is for you. We're gonna be breaking down what a mental block is, how to know if your daughter is actually going through one, including some research around it, and then how to help them with three powerful tools that you can use to help your athlete. So let's get into it if I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I am the host of the Raising Elite Competitors podcast and the co-creator of the Elite Mental Game, and this podcast is for you. Whether you are a sports mom who is just getting going on this whole sports journey, or you have a lot of seasons under your belt, we are here for you to help you raise a confident. Mentally strong girl athlete and mental blocks are part of it. Okay. Mental blocks. I'm also gonna talk about athletes who are going through a slump because that can also be closely related to a mental block and what to do and how to support your athlete if they are going through one. I do wanna give a shout out to a mom in our community. Her name is Lauren. And speaking of mental blocks, this is what she. Texted us recently. She is inside the Elite Mental Game, which is our signature mental training program for girl athletes. So her daughter is doing our mental training program. There's also a part of the program for parents. So how to know how to support your best or how to best support your athlete daughter, Lauren said this, she goes, I feel like a cloud is lifting. And watching it happen. She's like Lila from before the mental block. She's making huge strides in the block physically, but it's her attitude that's changing. She's enjoying herself again. She isn't getting caught up in the noise. She's in such a better control of her emotions. So much mental progress. To be honest, I'm seeing it feed into the physical progress too. She's improving on her block, but slowly and intentionally this time in prior comebacks, it's been immediate and out of nowhere this time. It's small and gradual progression, not just the crazy ups and downs I don't know if it'll stick this time, but it does look very different, so I am hopeful. So this is amazing, and I actually know the end of the story. Lauren's daughter, Lila, actually did get through her mental block. They joined the program specifically because her daughter's a gymnast and was struggling with one. And so the tools that she was learning inside EMG. Really helped her with that. And I'm gonna hit on some of those tools in today's episode. Let's get into it. One quick thing though, if you haven't already, please subscribe and follow the podcast. Leave us a review, give us a rating. If this has been at all helpful for your sports journey and share this episode, or any others that have been impactful for you with another sports parent, we would greatly appreciate that. Okay. What are mental blocks, first of all? A mental block is when your athlete can physically do a skill, but mentally something is stopping them. Okay. So a gymnast who suddenly can't go backwards on a beam, it's kind of like the common thing that we see, especially in these higher risk sports like gymnastics. Cheerleading, where they're diving, where there's like a threat to their physical safety, but also, a soccer player kind of hesitating to shoot or to pass a volleyball player pulling back, on her serve and or like. Tipping instead of hitting, or just an overall fear or hesitation when it matters. Like these can also be classified as mental blocks. Now, according to sports psychology research, mental blocks are often the result of a perceived threat. So the brain is trying to protect her, not from actual danger, although in those high risk sports, that can be actual danger, but from also embarrassment, failure, judgment or letting someone down. Okay, so Dr. Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist and author of Choke, found that performance anxiety disrupts the brain's ability to access previously learned skills. So, in other words, she knows what to do, but under pressure, her brain essentially locks the door to that skill. So if you're kind of getting the picture of this. And there is some sort of perceived threat that could be a threat to her physical safety because maybe she like fell on beam and now her brain is like, whoa, this isn't safe for us, so we're going to kind of put a block on this skill. Or it could be her psychological safety that is being impacted because she doesn't want to, you know, look dumb or embarrass herself or let people down. So that can also cause her brain to kind of go into this mode of like, we're gonna go into protection mode here and not let you get into that situation where we feel like there might be a threat. So tool number one is for you as. a parent, and that is to normalize the block. Don't shame it. We can sometimes get into this because we have the best of intentions and it seems like a good thing to do. This bribery situation, I mean like I have young kids and can fall into this trap in many other areas, but sometimes we're like, you know what? If you get this, get over this skill by this date, I'm going to buy you this or you'll be able to earn this. That honestly just adds more pressure because if they could do it, they would be, it's not for lack of will or wanting to do it, or trying. It's that like their brain is causing them to shut down in this situation. So adding on a little, like, I'll buy you this, I'll get you this. If you can get over your block and by this date isn't actually helping. In fact, it could. Be making it worse so we're not shaming it. We're gonna normalize what she's experiencing to let her know like, Hey, lots of gymnasts go through mental blocks. I mean, we saw. Simone Biles go through like the ultimate mental block, you know, within her comeback as well. And that came through a lot of intentionality, like working with a sports psychologist as well as like breaking down the skill. We'll get into some of those, strategies as we go. But, it's pretty cool actually that she went through that because if you do have a gymnast now, this is all. Normalized, like the best of the best, went through a mental block. And so normalize it. But it's also part of just her sport experience that slumps are a part of it. Blocks are a part of it. It is something that she's going to get through, like kind of hold out that hope for her and see that hope for her. I know it can be hard as a mom because we're like, you've done this before. Just do it. Okay. But mental blocks are not logical. They're emotional and pushing actually makes it worse. So we have to kind of set aside our. Whatever, like emotions that we're adding to it and our own ego and all of that. To just be patient with it and let her know. Lots of athletes go through this. It doesn't mean something is wrong with you, it doesn't mean that you're weak. So when an athlete feels seen instead of pressured, her nervous system can calm down a little bit more, and the brain is a calm brain, is a more coachable brain. Okay? So she's gonna be able to not have this, she already has the pressure of the block or the slump or whatever it is. She's already identified that like this is a problem. And so without you adding more to it, now she can work through it in a more productive way. She can use the tools that are available to her, and I'll talk about some those tools could be. Okay? So that's the first thing is like, let's normalize it. We're not gonna shame it. We're not gonna pressure her into getting it by a certain time. We're not gonna make her feel bad that like, you used to do this. Why can't you do it now? Like, we actually want her to understand what's going on in her brain and why this is happening. As frustrating as it is, okay. All right. Tool number two, build a bridge, not a leap. Okay. Mental blocks often feel huge because they try and go from zero to a hundred. All right? So instead of demanding full execution, we wanna try and build a bridge back through progression and through wins. All right, so this is kind of the most basic tool to help them with mental blocks. So, you know, doing drills or having somebody spot instead of doing full skills. So we saw this, if you watch Simone Biles documentary, you saw her doing a lot of like little like, lead up drills. Before she ever went back into the full skill. So a lot of times athletes are just kinda like pounding their head against the wall because they just try the skill over and over and over again. They can't do it, they can't do it, they can't do it. So like, let's bring it down. Let's bring the support up. So that athletes can do the minimum version of the skill or just parts of the skill so that we can build it together. Visualization is also really powerful in this. There's a lot of research around. Visualization when it comes to mental blocks and performance in general. But seeing her do the skill can also be helpful. Seeing her, not seeing her, but drawing out the skill and the shape, so if it she's a gymnast, like drawing the shapes, can be another way to help kind of get some of that into the subconscious. But overall, just like slowing down the reps and focusing on small pieces is really important. So again, this could look like a gymnast doing drills where she's being spotted or like bringing up more of the support, a soccer player visualizing the move before trying it. Slowing down the reps, focusing on those small pieces. Okay. The brain doesn't trust big leaps. That's like, too, it's too scary. Okay. It trusts steps that they can build on. So. Break it up, make it small, make it doable so that she can rebuild that belief in herself. And every bit of tiny success tells her brain, this is safe. This is safe. Okay. Another piece of it though, so that really applies to like the physical safety piece of it, but if you feel like your daughter is having a mental block because, or more of a slump or hesitating in her skills because she's afraid of letting people down or like this kind of fear failure, that's something that needs to be addressed on a little bit of a, a deeper level. So. It might not be, so much as breaking the skills down in that situation. This is like what are the underlying thoughts and beliefs that are holding her back? We talk a lot about belief work and thought work when it comes to athlete's mental game. So if you've been to our free training, we talk about the thought wheel and the smoothie analogy, where like we want athletes to be cleaning out their smoothie glass every day. I mean, that's also a life skill. Like, yes. But what that means is, in a quick, short version, when you make a smoothie, and I make a smoothie every day, so I get reminded of this metaphor every single day, when you make a smoothie and you drink it, there's a smoothie stuff on the inside of the glass. When I go to clean that out, right away, it comes out clean and it's clear. We move on with our day. It's like literally no impact to my day, but. When I leave that smoothie glass sitting around, or I come across it in my car after it's been sitting there for a while and it's been a hot day, I'm like, shoot. The smoothie stuff is like hardened on the inside of the glass. This chia seed is like concrete. It's really hard to get off. I gotta soak it. I gotta, let it sit in the sink. I have to scrape it off, like it's a bigger impact, right? That's the same analogy we give to athletes when they have thoughts that are limiting. Okay, so thoughts pop into your athlete's head multiple times a day? We think over 50,000 thoughts a day. Now she thinks a thought of like I don't wanna mess up, or I'm letting people down, or I'm the worst one. And she's able to shift that, recognize that's not productive, and shift it right away. It's like she's cleaning out her smoothie glass and moving on with the day. Because what we know is that thoughts lead to feelings. Feelings lead to actions. Actions give us a results, and results put us back in the situation. So, if she's thinking that, it's like, I'm not good enough, I suck. I'm always letting people down. That thought is going to give her the results that she is getting. Okay. And it's not serving her. And if she lets that thought continue to go around and around, we call it the thought wheel, like around that cycle, it then becomes no longer a thought. It becomes a belief. And a belief lives in her subconscious. And that's like the smooth analogy that now is like a hardened smoothie on the inside of the glass. It's harder to change. Beliefs are a lot harder to change. They are poss it's possible to change them. We do it all the time, but it's a lot easier to capture that thought when it comes into her brain before it turns into a belief because beliefs, like I said, live in her subconscious mind and her subconscious mind controls 90% of what she does. Her subconscious mind is what's causing her to be in the block in the first place. Okay, because it's sensing some sort of threat. It's sensing some sort of like, psychological safety threat or physical safety if that's your daughter's case. But that's why it's so important that you know, if your daughter is dealing with some sort of slump or hesitation in her skills, if it's not like a physical safety thing, a lot of times it is a psychological thing. It's a belief thing. It's a thought that she's let turned into a belief and then that is what's holding her back. It's so important that she has the skill to shift those thoughts before they become beliefs and also recognize if they. Our belief, if she's holding around a belief about herself that she's not good enough, she's never gonna get over this, she's the worst one on her team. Coach doesn't like her. Like some of those things are really holding her back and probably contributing to the mental block, or to the slump, or to the thing that she doesn't wanna be doing. So. If you want more on this, I just scratched the surface a little bit, but go to train her game.com. That is the link to our free training for sports parents. And I break this down even further. So I teach some skills on how she can shift her thoughts, shift her thinking around this before it becomes a belief that really holds her back and then impacts her sport. Okay, so that is number two. All right. Number one was normalize the block, don't shame it. Number two, build a bridge, not a leap. So kind of like. Can we lower the stakes a little bit? What is the minimum thing that she can do and be successful? And then we'll build from there. And then of course, like we're kinda talking about two different things here, because there's like the mental block that comes from a threat to her physical safety. And then there's a mental block that comes from a threat to her psychological safety. And if it's psychological, that typically is linked to a limiting belief that she has. So a thought that she has let turn into a belief that's now controlling her, subconscious and how she's showing up in her sport every day. Okay. Tool number three, train the mind, not just the body. I already kind of hit on this a little bit, but a lot of times with blocks, we focus a lot on physical training, especially in this like gymnastics competitive cheer world where it's like, okay, we're going to break it down and we're going to do the block. Or do the skill at lower stakes, higher support, but also we've got to look at the mental side of this, which I've already scratched the surface on. But when she learns to train her mind and she builds some skills around, you know, breathing and regulating. Her nervous system when anxiety hits because there's a lot of anxiety around mental blocks and skills that she feels like she had before and doesn't have again. So using some breath work, recognizing what it feels like to breathe properly. And what I mean by that is a lot of athletes have no awareness of their breath and their body, so they're breathing pretty shallow, which increases a lot of anxiety, which doesn't allow them to relax, to be able to do the skill that they are trying to do. So. Teaching them some simple breath work techniques around what it feels like to fill their belly and lungs with a full breath. To regulate their nervous system, to engage their parasympathetic nervous system really helps managing negative thoughts and self-doubt. So, you know, we have athletes in our program do a quick journaling exercise every day. And so they write down, their affirmations that they have. And these affirmations are not just like, I am smart, I am strong. They're very connected to what they want as an athlete. They're done and found through a workshop, you know, it's very intentional. And so they're focusing and they're setting their mind to what they want to have happen. And so they're filling their mind with thoughts like that, and they're very aware of when negative thoughts come in and how they're not productive. So they have the skill to be able to shift them and get back to some of these mantras and these affirmations that are serving them. Okay. And then self-doubt. Like we can't stop negative thoughts, we can't stop thoughts of self-doubt that come into your daughter's brain, like they're just gonna happen. But the skill to recognize it and shift it, that's the actual mental skill that they need to develop. Okay. Mental rehearsal and visualization, I already said is very useful and this as well. So, as part of the daily mindset Routine that we do inside EMG that I was just talking about. So there's a little bit of journaling in there, but there's also a visualization that they do every single day. It's like three minutes long, it's called brave. It's combination of breath works and visualization. And so rehearsing what they wanna have happen, seeing them do that actually puts their brain and body. Into the moment before they're there, and so their brain and body can feel safe when they're visualizing and then feel safe as they're doing it as well. Some pre-performance routines are also really good, especially for those that are dealing with some of these psychological, mental blocks. I mean, it's all psychological, but like, because it's linked to some fear failure and things like that. So pre-performance routines to kind of help regulate themselves. Get into like a routine where they can perform well is really good as well. Okay. A lot of athletes inside our program. I say things like, now when I get nervous, I know exactly what to do. I know how to manage nerves. I see nerves as excitement. I don't panic anymore. You know, all of that can help them be able to do the skill when their body and their brain feels safe. Okay? So that's kind of the key is that we're getting them to safety, physical safety, psychological safety, so that they're free to do the thing that they wanna do without their brain thinking, oh, we're in a, a dangerous situation. Okay. I'm gonna recap what I've gone over so far about this whole. I do have, um, not idea, but, you know, mental blocks, like they're a tough thing. They're a tough thing for athletes to go through, but they're also a tough thing for parents to go through. So, first of all, normalize the block. Let her know she's not alone and it's not permanent. She's gonna get through this. And you've gotta, as a parent, be patient. Let her go through the process, but also give her skills. You can't just like wait it out without giving her any skills to help her with this. And if you want a good way to start that, to know what to do, go to train her game.com. That is our free training for sports parents where you can learn simple mental training skills that you can give her, and also learn about our program, the Elite Mental Game. There's also a discount for you if you go to that training on the Elite Mental game, but that is literally the program that. Thousands of athletes have used and many athletes who are specifically struggling with mental blocks have used to help them get over their block. Okay. Number two though, is build a bridge, create small steps instead of big leaps. Okay, so, lower the expectation for, you know, just doing the big skill, but do parts of it and then train the mind. You gotta give her tools to manage pressure from the inside out. She doesn't inherently know how to do that. Okay? So again, train her game.com is where you can learn how to do that. Alright, moms, I hope that this was helpful. If your daughter is going through a mental block, I feel you. I see you because it is. Tough. It's tough as a parent to navigate, but hopefully this will give you a good place to start. Go to train her game.com for more on how to do this, and I will see you in the next episode of the Raising Elite Competitors podcast.