🧠 Awareness: The Foundation of Mental Performance Why developing self-awareness is the first step to training your mind like your body.

We all talk about the importance of the mental side of performance.

We know it matters.

We know it can be trained, practiced, and developed just like our physical and technical skills.

But the biggest question athletes often ask is, “Where do I start?”

The Challenge

Compared to coaching, strength and conditioning, and nutrition, the mental side of performance is still finding its feet.

There is a growing amount of research and information out there, but for many athletes, it can be overwhelming.

When you look into sport psychology, you will see words like resilience, focus, confidence, flow, toughness, mindfulness, and motivation.

All of them matter, but where do you begin?

The truth is, the first step in developing the mental side of performance is not jumping straight into techniques or tools.

It is developing self-awareness.

Awareness as the Foundation

Self-awareness is the ability to notice what is happening inside and around you, your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours in the many different situations you face both in sport and in life.

It is about learning the content of your mind: the beliefs, assumptions, images, and stories that show up for you, and how those internal experiences influence what you do.

When you develop awareness, you create space between what happens and how you respond.

That space is where growth begins.

Research in sport psychology consistently shows that awareness is the foundation for developing mental skills.

• Weinberg and Gould (2019) describe awareness as the first phase of Psychological Skills Training, the stage where athletes learn about their own mental processes.

• White et al. (2021) highlight awareness as a key part of psychological flexibility, the ability to stay effective under pressure while staying connected to your goals and values.

Without awareness, it is almost impossible to know which parts of your mindset or behaviours need attention.

Why Awareness Matters

Once you start paying attention to what is going on inside your mind, you can begin to identify the patterns that help or hinder your performance.

You might notice that your confidence dips just before competition, that you focus too much on what others think, or that frustration builds quickly when things go wrong.

Awareness turns automatic reactions into conscious choices.

It also helps you connect your inner world to your outer performance.

Research on Olympic champions found that self-awareness and reflection were consistent characteristics across all of them (Gould et al., 2002).

They did not just train harder; they trained smarter because they understood how their minds worked under pressure.

Similarly, the Gold Medal Profile for Sport Psychology (Durand-Bush et al., 2022) lists self-awareness as one of the 11 core competencies that underpin mental performance and resilience.

How to Develop Self-Awareness

Awareness is like a muscle. The more you train it, the stronger it becomes.

Here are a few practical ways to start building it.

1. Reflection

After training or competition, take a few minutes to ask yourself:

• What went well?

• What did not?

• What did I learn about myself today?

Reflection builds awareness and helps you recognise the factors that influence your performance.

It is a habit used by many elite performers.

As Latinjak (2025) writes, structured reflection helps athletes recognise the thoughts and emotions that arise in different performance contexts, allowing them to self-regulate more effectively.

2. Mindfulness

Mindfulness helps you notice thoughts and emotions without judgment.

It builds the capacity to observe rather than react.

The Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE) program has shown consistent improvements in focus, emotion regulation, and performance (Kaufman et al., 2018; Hussey et al., 2020).

Practices like mindful breathing or body scans are simple ways to start becoming more aware of what is happening internally.

3. Feedback and Conversations

Awareness is not just an internal process.

Coaches, teammates, and even family members can be valuable mirrors for how you respond to stress, setbacks, and success.

Ask trusted people for feedback about how you react or communicate under pressure.

4. Working with a Sport Psychologist

Working with a sport psychologist can help you explore these patterns in more depth.

Through approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), you can develop a clearer understanding of how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours interact and learn strategies to respond more effectively.

Awareness in Action

Some athletes I have worked with realised that their self-talk before competition was full of “what if” thoughts.

Once they became aware of this, they could pause, breathe, and redirect their attention to what they could control.

Another athlete discovered that their low motivation was not about effort but about fatigue and poor balance outside of sport.

Once they improved their recovery, their mindset and consistency improved too.

Awareness is not just mental reflection; it is practical performance intelligence.

Final Thought

Every athlete wants to get better, but real improvement starts with understanding yourself.

Self-awareness is the foundation of mental performance because it gives you clarity about where you are and what needs to change.

Once you develop that awareness, you can build the other skills, focus, confidence, resilience, and composure, on top of it.

The goal is to become a self-expert.

Because when you understand yourself, you can train your mind like you train your body.

🧩

Research-Informed Note

Self-awareness underpins nearly every major sport psychology framework.

It is the starting point of Psychological Skills Training (Weinberg and Gould, 2019), one of the 11 competencies in the Gold Medal Profile for Sport Psychology (Durand-Bush et al., 2022), and a core process in psychological flexibility (White et al., 2021).

Awareness does not just enhance performance. It supports wellbeing, growth, and resilience, both in sport and beyond it.