In last week’s column, I touched on a player’s preparation for a match and how both the physical and the mental aspects need to be nurtured together in order to produce and optimal performance.

Nutrition, fitness and rest are the drivers in relation to putting a performer into a peak physical state however I’m a firm believer that without adding the correct mental approach, you would be as well standing at the side of the pitch watching with me. How did I come to this conclusion? Well… As a young player all the way through my teens until around my mid 20s, I knew that I had ability and I knew that I could make things happen on the pitch. My big problem was that at different times, my self confidence would evade me and I would believe that this player or that player was much better than me. I knew that I had the ability, speed and fitness, however the mental block that I had developed held me back. I had essentially created an inferiority complex and it stunted my development a great deal.

Now people might look at my career and see that I graduated from boys' club football to Pro-Youth and eventually into a full time professional contract for a couple of years and think that I had a reasonably successful progression. Although I don’t look back on it with regret in any way, I do see it as a great opportunity missed. I know now that if my mindset had been more imposing as opposed to being happy to stand in the shadows and let others take the reins, then my football path would have been markedly different. Why do I believe this?

Around the time of my first full season back at Auchinleck in 2004-2005, I was starting to find my form again after being out of the Junior game for a few seasons. However, I was still struggling to find my confidence at times and it was frustrating me. In some games, I would be on the ball and forcing the play and in other games, I would struggle on the ball and not make enough of an impact. I spoke to the Talbot manager Tommy Sloan about my lack of consistency, even making the point that it might be better if I was dropped. His response was that I couldn’t see all of the basic things that I was doing correctly for the team and that when I wasn’t feeling very confident then I should worry less on the technical side of the game and just focus on matching my opponent and getting the better of him.

Now I’m not going to say that in the next game I had a “Road to Damascus” type epiphany, however I did slowly start to realise that when I focused on nullifying my opponent, my confidence would build and I would go on and play well. Where I had been standing back before feeling sorry for myself when I wasn’t doing well, I was now on the front foot doing something about it.

Due to this success of adjusting my mental approach, I started to read up a little on sports psychology and I found more and more evidence that supported the theory of focusing on what you can control, which resulted in greater levels of performance.

I also discovered techniques like visualisation where you run through specific scenarios in your head, over and over again, and see yourself executing successfully each time. For example, a university study in the USA took a group of college basketball players and asked them to make shots from the free throw line. The group was then split into two. One of the groups was asked to take hundreds more practice shots from the free throw line. The other group was asked to sit in a room and visualise being on the court and making successful shots from the free throw line over and over again in their heads. They then brought them all together again to measure the progression and the group who had sat in the room visualising the successful shots showed a marked increase in their success rate versus the group who had physically practised the shots.

Now that example is not by any means the definitive word on the way ahead, however it gives us a clear indication of the potential power of honing your mental approach to sport. I’ve had small successes in relation to visualisation and so I’m not exactly well educated in the process. But I have had enough success in football over the years to confidently say that if you know your target and you’re willing to persevere enough then you will achieve your desired outcome. I suppose that’s what me and Arnie mean when we talk about “desire”.

Another example of different mental approaches is before a match. Some players like a lot of noise or loud music when they are getting ready whereas some others like peace and quiet before they become part of a team.

When I got to the later stages of my career, I liked to withdraw from the team environment for the 15 minutes it took me to get changed. I would put my earphones in and listen to some music so that I could run through my performance in my mind without the distraction of someone else’s rubbish music or the constant verbal diarrhoea from Talbot’s left midfielder Bryan Young. After that, I would come together with team for the warm-up and make the usual shouty noises like most other dressing rooms do.

Although we operate in a team environment, external influences impact on each individual in a different manner and so it’s important that we allow the players some freedom in terms of mental preparation before a game and be sure not restrict them to a one-size-fits-all approach.

It’s therefore down to each player to work on his mental approach to a match until he or she finds out what suits them best. I’ve experienced that the mental aspect of sport can be even more crucial than the physical and therefore we can’t just leave it all to chance.

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” - Benjamin Franklin