Tips for Improving Your Mental Game – Part 1

While working on my Anger Management article, I was naturally thinking of other mental game concepts. Given that so much of the mental game is connected by foundational skills, and how much of it is applicable regardless of your level of competition, I thought I’d follow that article with my top five tips for improving your mental game.

Having worked with athletes of all different levels, the concepts in this article are ones I’ve introduced everywhere from youth clinics to national team training camps. They are concepts that beginners can both understand and apply immediately, but can also be developed, refined, and mastered all the way up to the professional level. The first tip, and where every bowler should start, is properly evaluating your mental game, followed in no particular order by:

• building routines into your game;
• developing visualization skills;
• building resilience, and;
• knowing your focus.

Anger management, coming through in the clutch, and other valuable mental game components can all be traced back to one or more of these core concepts. Like any goal, the first step in figuring out what work you have to do is to assess where you are currently.

Evaluate your mental game

This one can be tough, but it is imperative if you want to improve. Compared to the physical game, it’s not as easy to objectively evaluate your mental game. With your physical game, you can take a video, look at it, compare various elements to where they should be, and get to work. Even the tactical game is fairly easy to evaluate: if you make an adjustment and don’t strike, you were wrong and you’ve learned something. You ...