Importance of Good Mindset

People believe soccer is more of a physical game and not a mental game, but after reading few pages of this book I have learned how important having a good and positive mindset is. Mindset is as important as your skills and it doesn’t matter how good you are as long as your mindset is bad you will not play to your full potential. I knew being mentally prepared is important but I ignored this since I have started playing soccer and after reading this book I started to concentrate on being more mentally prepared. Dan Abrahams said that soccer is a game of mindset and it will break you down by combing the design of the brain and the difficulty of the game (3 Abrahams). What this quote means is that you have to be confident in yourself and I am most of the time not confident in myself before the game which I think is affecting the way I am playing and I am basically causing myself to make more mistakes. “Every soccer player has a soccer image-an image housed in their mind related to how they see themselves as players. Is your mental movie one of possibility, progress and achievement or does your inner screen just display other footballers as bigger, better and stronger? This is a simple but important exercise to do every few weeks because it gives you an idea of your soccer image” (16,17). What this quote is saying is that you need to know your weakness and strengths and this helped me know both my weakness and strengths and also being more mentally prepared. In the picture below what I am doing is writing down what I think my soccer image is and trying to find things that I can improve in.

Do you agree with Dan Abrahams that having a good mindset is as importat as having good skills?

Abrahams, Dan. Soccer Tough: Simple Football Psychology Techniques to Improve Your Game. Birmingham, UK: Bennion Kearny, 2012. Print.