Mental Coaching in Team Sports
Team sports are not only about individuals coordinating their actions and following the coach's instructions. In every team, a complex mental information network is operating at the same time. Its members continuously anticipate their own performance, the actions of others, the coach's expectations, the rhythm of the situation, the movements of opponents or other factors affecting the competitive situation, and what is likely to happen next.
This is why team performance does not arise only from physical skill, tactics or training volume. It also emerges from how well the members of the team are able to share the situation, read one another and adjust their actions according to the whole. From the perspective of the predictive mind, a team is a living prediction network: each member is constantly forming assumptions about what others will do, what the situation requires and what their own next action should be.
Feedback Is Never Received in Exactly the Same Way by Everyone
This becomes very concrete, for example, when a coach gives feedback after training, a competition or a match. The coach may think that they are speaking to the whole team about the same thing, but every listener fits the feedback into their own internal interpretation.
For one athlete, the same feedback may feel encouraging. For another, it may feel like criticism. A third may hear it as a tactical instruction. A fourth may start wondering whether the coach still trusts them as much as before. Interpretations are never exactly the same, because every team member has their own history of experience, role, relationship with the coach and way of processing success, uncertainty and pressure.
This is why skilled coaching is not only about saying what was technically right or wrong. The coach also regulates how large a conflict the feedback creates between the athlete's own experience and the coach's view. If the feedback produces too large a prediction error, the athlete may begin to defend themselves, withdraw, become irritated, feel ashamed or keep replaying a failed moment in their mind.
In that case, the purpose of the feedback may have been to correct performance, but the effect can be the opposite. The error begins to receive more attention and may become stronger in the internal model. This is something that can easily go unnoticed in coaching.
The Athlete Is Practising Mentally Anyway
From the perspective of mental coaching, an important starting point is that athletes practise mentally in any case. Especially high-level athletes often return, even unintentionally, to performances, competitive situations, decisions, mistakes, successes and future events in their minds. In other words, they are doing imagery training even when they do not call it that.
The same continues in free time. Athletes watch competitions, matches and performances on screens, observe the decisions of others and compare them with their own experiences. Many also play video games, where perception, anticipation, reaction, identification and rapid updating of the situation are constantly active. This too can function as a form of mental practice.
For this reason, mental coaching does not need to be presented to athletes as something completely new or strange. A better starting point is to say: you are already doing this. The question is whether the mind also practises mistakes and uncertainty at random, or whether the same natural mechanism can be used more deliberately.
The task of mental coaching is therefore not to focus on problems. On the contrary, focusing too much on problems may strengthen precisely the patterns one is trying to move away from. The aim is to build mental exercises that help the athlete see the situation more broadly, regulate their own reaction and find new options for action.
A Card System Makes Mental Training Concrete
One practical way to give mental coaching a clear structure is to use training cards. This was also the core of the mental training method developed in the early 1980s with the Finnish national volleyball team.
The method was developed in collaboration with Jukka Kutila, the coach of Raision Loimu and the Finnish national volleyball team, and Lauri Tiikasalo, who had studied suggestion and various mental training techniques. The idea was to build a method in which the athlete would not only go through their own performances mentally, but would also learn to examine sport-specific situations from the perspective of other team members.
The training cards gave the method structure. Athletes are usually accustomed to completing tasks assigned by the coach, so the cards made mental training part of the overall training process rather than a separate discussion about the importance of the mind.
The idea behind the cards was simple: they described concrete sport-specific situations and at the same time gave the athlete a role from which to practise the situation mentally. In volleyball, this could mean, for example, a blocking situation at the net, defending from the floor or another moment essential to the game. What mattered was that the athlete did not practise the situation only from their own perspective, but could be given the task of entering the role of another team member in their mind.
Dissociation as a Tool for a New Perspective
The method was based on a dissociation technique. In this context, dissociation meant the ability to move, in imagination, momentarily away from one's usual sense of self and examine the situation as if from someone else's position.
At first, the athletes practised shifting bodily awareness and perspective. The purpose was not to lose one's own identity, but to learn to flexibly change the position from which the situation is observed. Once this skill began to become automatic, it could be used to explore sport-specific situations.
This is essential in mental coaching. If an athlete returns mentally only to their own mistake, they may strengthen the same feeling, the same tension and the same narrow way of perceiving that were present in the original situation. But when they examine the same moment from the perspective of the coach, a teammate, an opponent, a referee or another role, the situation begins to be constructed again.
They have to ask themselves: what did the other person see? What did the other person expect? What was the other person preparing for? What was happening in the whole situation that I did not notice from my own perspective?
This kind of shift in perspective can reduce fixation on the mistake and increase understanding of the situation.
Example: 12 Situations and 12 Roles
In the training of the Finnish national volleyball team, the cards could include, for example, 12 different game situations and 12 different roles. Each athlete was given a mental exercise as homework in which they were to identify with a specific situation and examine it from the position of another team member.
The card therefore did not contain only a tactical instruction. It also contained a perspective. During the exercise, the athlete was to move mentally into the role of another player and experience how that position changed their observations, decisions and readiness to act.
This made the exercise very different from simply reviewing one's own performance. The athlete did not only ask: what did I do wrong? They could ask: what did the other player expect from me? How did they see the situation? What kind of action would have supported the whole more effectively?
In this way, mental training was not directed only at individual performance, but at the internal understanding of the team.
The Training Did Not Remain Only Imagery
The method was not intended to remain only as imagery exercises done at home. The training cards could also be used in connection with practices and competitive situations. In this way, athletes had the opportunity to apply the practised perspectives in action.
After practices and matches, there could be shared discussions about what kinds of observations the shift in perspective had produced. An athlete might notice that they understood a teammate's decision, the coach's feedback or the reason why some part of the team's cooperation was not yet functioning more clearly.
This shared reflection was important, because learning in a team does not happen only inside the individual's mind. When observations and insights are shared, the team's shared prediction network also becomes more precise. Athletes do not only know more about their own role; they also begin to understand the roles of others more deeply.
Playful Exercises Can Also Deepen the Skill
The method also used humorous and more everyday tasks. Athletes could be asked to imagine how another team member would behave in a completely different environment, for example during an evening out.
The purpose of this kind of exercise was not merely entertainment, but to move the shift in perspective outside the direct sport context. When an athlete begins to imagine another person's behaviour in a freer environment, the mind uses the internal models it has already formed of that person. The athlete does not necessarily construct everything consciously; the imagery may begin to organise itself almost on its own.
This is the same principle that actors and writers use all the time. An actor does not merely repeat external gestures, but searches for the inner logic of the role. A writer, in turn, may internalise their characters so strongly that the characters' dialogue begins to feel as if it is emerging by itself. In team training, the same capacity can be used more practically: the athlete learns to reach the way another team member perceives, reacts and prepares.
There is no need to mystify this. It is a matter of the human capacity to build internal models of other people and use those models as an aid to anticipation.
Connection with Sociodrama and Theatre Techniques
Changing perspective also resembles sociodrama and theatre techniques. When a person steps for a moment into another position, they do not examine the situation only as external information. They have to organise their perception, bodily readiness and action impulses from a new direction.
This can have a powerful effect. The nervous system seeks to adapt to new information and find a functional posture toward it. When the athlete does not repeat the same mistake in their mind from the same perspective, but moves into another position, their internal model of the situation has to update.
This is especially valuable in team sports, where one's own performance constantly depends on the decisions of others. A player, skater, rower, dancer or any member of a team must understand not only their own task, but also how their actions affect the whole.
Wider Application Across Team Sports
Although the example comes from volleyball, the principle is not limited to ball games. All team sports require shared timing, anticipation of others, understanding of roles and perception of the whole.
In synchronized skating, for example, the athlete does not "play a match" in the same sense as in a ball game, but they continuously anticipate the position, rhythm, movement, distance and shared formation of others. In rowing, the individual performance is tied to rhythm, timing of force and the movement of others. In a relay race, the decisive factor may be the timing of the exchange and trust that the other athlete will act exactly as expected. In dance-based or aesthetic team sports, shared perception, rhythm and anticipation are just as essential as in ball games.
This is why, in the theoretical section, it is better to speak only partly about players and matches. More broadly, one can speak of team members, athletes, performance situations, competitive situations, sport-specific situations, roles, timing and shared anticipation. In this way, the same model applies to games, combat sports, aesthetic team sports and other group performances.
The Mental Coach's Place in the Team
The position of the mental coach in a team is delicate. Every team has its own social structure and hierarchy. The coach's position must remain clear, because the team needs one primary direction it can trust.
The task of the mental coach is not to become a competing authority alongside this structure. The mental coach must first build trust with the coach and the club or organisation leadership. Only after that can they build rapport with individual athletes and the group as a whole in a way that supports the functioning of the team.
This is especially important because some athletes may approach mental coaching with caution. If mental coaching is presented as the correction of problems, resistance may increase. If, instead, it is presented as training that develops situational reading, shared anticipation, understanding of roles and the processing of performance situations, it connects naturally with the everyday life of the athlete.
What Can the Mental Coach Say to Athletes?
Mental coaching can be introduced to athletes in a very simple way:
You are practising mentally in any case. You return in your mind to successes and mistakes, anticipate future situations and constantly build an understanding of how others act. The purpose of mental training is not to make this more complicated, but to make it more useful.
If an athlete goes through a mistake again and again only from the perspective of their own disappointment, they may strengthen the internal trace of the mistake. But if they learn to examine the same situation also from another role, from the perspective of the coach, a teammate or the whole, their mind has to build a new model of the situation.
This can develop performance without additional physical strain. It can also help the athlete understand what other team members need, expect and anticipate. This is exactly where better collective performance begins.
Mental Coaching in Team Sports
The core of mental coaching in team sports is not to give the athlete more to think about during performance. The aim is the opposite: that the essential elements begin to appear more quickly, unnecessary misinterpretations decrease and team members learn to anticipate one another more effectively.
The card system developed with the Finnish national volleyball team shows in practical terms how this can be done. The athlete does not remain trapped inside their own performance, but learns to shift perspective, refine perception and internalise the roles of others. In this way, mental training is not a separate addition to physical training, but part of the way a team learns to function as a more unified whole.
At its best, this kind of training strengthens not only the individual's situational reading and decision-making, but also the shared understanding of the entire team. The team begins to function better because its members do not merely perform their own part; they begin to anticipate one another's actions at the right time and from the right direction.