The goal of the MSD Program is to be the most valuable source for understanding and developing an athlete's mental skills – on and off the field.
Among the critical factors in sports, work and life is developing one’s self-management of the mental skills needed for success. We help make this happen. We evaluate and coach athletes on a set of ten mental skills for self-management that predict success in important situations on and off the field. Athletes, coaches, parents and psychologists use the Mental Skills Assessment (MSA) and Mental Skills Development (MSD) program to develop the self-management skills required for athletes to succeed.
AS&K Sports regularly adds information about the MSA, sports psychology features, interactivity with sports psychologists, mental skills instructional materials, and other enhancements to this website.
10 MENTAL SKILLS
- EFFORT
- LEADERSHIP
- OPEN TO FEEDBACK
- GOAL SETTING
- GOAL IMPLEMENTATION
- PERSONAL CONTROL
- MASTERY APPROACH
- SATISFACTION
- TASK CONFIDENCE
- SELF-WORTH
TOOLS
ROLE
Self
management is good medicine. If the huge benefits of these few
habits were put into a pill, it would be declared a scientific milestone
in the field of medicine.
Albert Bandura, 2005
HOW THE MSA & MSD WORK TOGETHER
The MENTAL SKILLS ASSESSMENT (MSA) is an assessment of ten mental skills in six important, applied situations that athletes’ commonly face. The Mental Skills Development (MSD) website is the place to go to learn how to enhance the ten mental skills that enable effective self-management. Soon, our web-based Mental Skills Development (MSD) program will contain instructional material, resources, information and instruction about the mental habits, access to coaching services and more. Ultimately, this website is designed to assist athletes, parents, coaches and sport psychologists improve an athlete's mental skills in applied situations.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL SKILLS
Too many of the assessments and development programs of the mental part of the game that are available today are based upon older thinking about the nature of personality. For example, older thinking argues that motivation is a fixed trait in a person and isn’t affected much by situational differences or training. Today’s leading thinkers disagree and provide proof that motivation, and other important mental skills, are not fixed, but are self-management skills that can be improved with training. Further, the training must include instruction of the same mental skill in the different applied situations that an athlete commonly faces.
The older beliefs have two negative consequences:
they discourage a person from making attempts to
build, modify, or change his or her own mental skills,
and;-
they provide little guidance for coaches or parents to assist in developing better mental skills in their athlete.
Considering the scientific evidence, AS&K Sports believes that the older assumptions are wrong. AS&K Sports created an integrated assessment (MSA) and mental skills development program (MSD) based upon the scientific evidence to build athletes’ self-management skills for success in sports and in life.
THE TEN MENTAL SKILLS IN SIX SPORTS SITUATIONS
The following ten mental skills are those that we've identified to be critical to peak performance - this is after compiling
the results of thousands of scientific studies. See a short list of supporting studies
Mental skills are interrelated – improvements in one or more of them can improve the others and together they improve self-management and performance on and off the field.
Read about the six sports situations>>
