“From Fear to Readiness — Mental Training for Early-Career Athletes” (Part 1)

Core Idea of this article

Early athletes often experience anxiety due to unfamiliar contexts. By combining real experience with imagery-based cognitive scripts, they can train emotional and physiological readiness faster and more safely.
→ This article is ideal for youth athletes, coaches, and sport psychologists.

#1: Introduction – Everyone Starts with Nervousness

When I was in primary school, I remember standing on the start line of our annual distance running event with my heart racing and my hands shaking. I had no idea or skill to calm the feeling. I was just nervous, holding anxiety and fear.
This means the invisible and unknown fear was getting bigger in my mind. It affected my body functions, such as shaking and sweaty hands, or feeling a bit choked and breathing shallowly.

Back then, I thought this feeling meant I wasn’t confident enough. But now I realise it was simply the absence of mental skills gained through practice and experience.
With years of racing experience, I’ve built my own sequence and routine and encountered a variety of situations before, during, and after stressful contexts. My body now knows how to respond; my mind knows where to focus. The same view at the start line that once triggered anxiety has become a space of calm readiness.

All of us experience these processes. So we advise children, youth, or early-career athletes, “Just accumulate experiences and get used to it,” when they want to overcome overthinking and anxiety. This is a good way to help the mind adapt to pressured situations. However, it is a long process and sometimes challenging to adjust to different types of situations in a career.

Today, I will introduce cognitive script training as an individual mental training method combined with real experiences for youth and early-career athletes. If you are a parent or coach, this might help you support their unsteady mental condition in specific contexts.

#2: Understanding Fear and Arousal

We experience strong nervousness, anxiety, and fear when facing stressful or pressured tasks. Especially when we are kids, these situations often happen. We want to avoid them to relieve the uncomfortable feelings. However, these emotions are not only negative for our body and mind. They actually raise our brain and body functions to respond and fight the task. They biologically increase our arousal and prepare us to perform at our best.

We have an ideal zone called optimal arousal for performance. This means feeling a bit nervous but not too nervous, or a bit relaxed but not too relaxed. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves are in perfect balance. Cortisol, endorphins, and dopamine are released and ready to support performance—but not excessively.

So, “fear,” “anxiety,” and “being scared” are not negative feelings for performance. They are switches that turn on our functions. However, if those feelings become overwhelming and unbalance our mind, we lose control of cognition, consciousness, or automatic behaviour, leading to a negative performance zone.

Especially for kids, it’s easy to lose control because their imagery often overcontrols the mind. As a result, they may perform poorly or avoid pressured situations. This indicates that cognitive script training is required to improve mental control, helping us manage fear, anxiety, and nervousness at an optimal level through appropriate processes.

#3: The Role of Experience and Conditioning

One common solution is accumulating experience. Real-life experiences provide strong stimuli for our minds and many opportunities to get used to different contexts. However, exposing ourselves to real stress also carries negative risks:

• It can be too stressful to adapt, leading to avoidance behaviour after overly stressful situations.
• Failure without acceptance from others can cause a loss of self-efficacy and confidence.
• Overstepping tasks can blind us to our current mental capacity.

Real-life experience is a powerful tool to improve mental toughness, but adaptation may come slowly, and overexposure can delay growth in self-efficacy and resilience.

Part 2 is about the actual practice. Please click the link below to read.

 From Fear to Readiness — Mental Training for Early-Career Athletes (Part 2)