“Dreaming means ‘rehearsing’ what you see, playing it over and over in your mind until it becomes as real to you like your life right now.” Emmitt Smith

Have you ever thought about why your football dreams are not manifesting into reality?

You know you have great football skills but are the efforts you’ re putting in practice in harmony with the desired outcome.

If the above question resonates with you at any level, you are going to find this post helpful.

What is Mental Rehearsal?

Mental Rehearsal is an excellent mental skills technique that allows you to visualize your success in a certain way.

According to sports psychology for football, “Mental Rehearsal is the cognitive process of purposefully generating visual mental imagery with open or closed eyes, to maintain, inspect, and transform those images with an intent to experience physiological and psychological benefits.”

In simple words, it is the act of recreating all the thoughts, images, sounds, and feelings in your mind to visualize a particular activity and spreading vibrations into the Universe to make it come true.

How to Apply Mental Rehearsal Techniques?

The concept of mental rehearsal follows no hard and fast rule; you can use mental rehearsal to focus on your goals and improve your performance like never before.

Different people apply different football mental game techniques. It’s more like trial and error; you might have to try doing it in a way that benefits you the most.

When you engage yourself in the process of mental rehearsal, follow the below steps.

1. Relax – Find an uninterrupted place with no external noises and distractions. Sit comfortably, close your eyes slowly, and start taking deep breaths. Be mindful of the situation you decide to practice mental rehearsal.

2. Imagine – Start imagining whatever you wish to achieve in a competitive game. If you want to improve a specific skill, think about how you would look doing drills. Visualize every little detail. Imagine you step in the field, the feelings, and people showering you with claps and let the magic begin.

3. Picture the scene as someone else – You can amplify the impact if you picture the scene as a third person. Remember how watching a scene in a movie gives you a fresh perspective. Likewise visualizing your goal as someone else would leave you with some insightful information and realization.

4. Consistency – The whole purpose of doing this technique is to be mindful, gather football confidence, and put them into implementation to elevate your level of self-awareness and growth. To make it work for you, consistently put the effort in place.

5. Wrapping up – As important it is to start a process right, wrapping up holds equal significance as well. After you have visualized your goals, smoothly make the transit to the real competition. Practice beforehand and prepare your mind as an accumulated force to be utilized in the best manner in the game.

How Mental Rehearsal Improves Performance?

The mind is made up of two parts — conscious and subconscious.

Your subconscious mind is like clay; it cannot think of its own. You can mold it into whatever you want; it doesn’t know good or bad, win or loss, courage or fear. It will take things the way you perceive them to be.

On the other side, whatever you’re feeding to your subconscious mind, the conscious mind starts taking the thoughts seriously and sets about bringing it into existence.

The neurons in our brains perceive mental imagery as a real-life action. Upon mental rehearsal, the brain generates an impulse, which makes the neuron act. This neural activity directs the mind to act in accordance with your desired outcome.

Therefore, the most elite and professional athletes note that using mental rehearsal is an integral part of their training routine. In fact, mental rehearsal is NFL star Richard Sherman’s secret to success.

“It’s kind of a meditation technique,” says Sherman. “Before every game, I take a few moments to get into a clear mindset and think about what I would like to accomplish on the field. Specifically, I think about past success,” he further adds.

What are you waiting for?

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