Coaches don't ask 'how does it feel.'

3 Key Takeaways 

• The harshest voice in an athlete’s head often started as a coach’s voice. What we criticize, they internalize.
• Performance isn’t only about adding ability — it’s about subtracting the mental interference that blocks the ability already there.
• The smallest coaching shift — from telling a kid what’s wrong to asking what they noticed — can unlock a player stuck in their own head.

When I was a kid playing hockey, I started shooting wrist shots. 

One of my coaches was not happy.

Growing up the slap shot was king — the big wind-up, the crack off the boards, the powerful, sexy shot everybody wanted on the highlight reel. The wrist shot was considered soft. A lesser choice. I shot it anyway. Because I’d watched how Wayne Gretzky played, and something about the quick, deceptive release made sense to me. It felt right in my hands. 

My coach was old school. And every time I picked the wrist shot, he got on my case. He criticized my form. He criticized my decision. The message was clear: that’s the wrong choice, made the wrong way. What he never once did was ask me how it felt. He never looked at where the puck actually went. He just knew what a shot was supposed to look like — and mine didn’t. 

Years later, of course, the wrist shot took over hockey. The quick release became the most dangerous shot in the game. But here’s what stuck with me, long after the hockey stopped: it wasn’t the criticism of the shot that lingered. It was what the criticism did to the voice in my head. 

The voice in your head usually had a teacher 

There’s a book a lot of coaches know — The Inner Game of Tennis, written by a coach named Tim Gallwey in 1974. Its central idea has never left me. Gallwey said every athlete is really two players at once. 

There’s Self 1 — the talker. The voice in your head that judges, instructs, and criticizes. Wrong choice. Bad form. Everyone saw that. 
And there’s Self 2 — the doer. The body and all the skill it’s quietly built through thousands of reps. The part that already knows what to do, if you’ll let it.

The problem, Gallwey said, is that Self 1 won’t trust Self 2. It hovers. It nags. It grabs the wheel. And the body, getting micromanaged, tightens up and stops flowing. 

My coach thought he was fixing my shot. What he was actually doing was teaching me to doubt the thing that felt right. 

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until I was much older: a lot of Self 1 gets installed from the outside. Every time a coach tells a kid “that’s wrong, that’s bad, why do you always,” they’re not just correcting a shot. They’re handing the kid a new voice — one that will keep nagging long after the coach is gone. 

What the inner game actually says 

Gallwey boiled it down to a formula simple enough to write on your hand: 

Performance = Potential − Interference

Your performance isn’t just how good you are. It’s how good you are minus how much your own head gets in the way. That changes the whole job. We tend to think athletes improve by adding — more instruction, more cues, more “try harder.” But a huge amount of the time, they improve by subtracting. By quieting the interference so the skill that’s already there can come out. 

This is why “just bear down and try harder” so often backfires under pressure. Trying harder usually means thinking harder — which makes Self 1 louder. And a loud Self 1 is the interference. 

My wrist shot didn’t need more instruction. It needed a coach who’d get out of the way long enough to see where the puck went. 

The takeaway: ask before you tell 

Here’s the shift I wish my coach had made, and the one I’d offer any coach now. The one I try and practice. When a player does something you want to correct, your instinct is to tell them what’s wrong. But every time you do, you install another nagging voice. Instead, try asking what they noticed. 

“Where was your elbow that time?” “How did that one feel compared to the last?” “What did you see before you made that pass?” 

When the awareness comes from inside the athlete, it sharpens Self 2 — the doer. When it comes as criticism from outside, it just feeds Self 1 — the nagger. Same information. Completely different effect on the kid. 

Direct instruction still matters, especially when someone’s first learning a skill. But when a player is tight, pressing, stuck in their own head — that’s exactly the moment to stop telling and start asking. 

What to do next

If you coach, pick one player this week who’s overthinking — and instead of correcting them, ask them what they felt and what they saw. Watch what happens when they discover it themselves. 

And if you’re the athlete: the next time the voice in your head starts grading every move, remember it’s only Self 1 talking. Your job isn’t to win the argument with it. It’s to give it something quiet to do — watch the puck, feel the release, see the target — so the part of you that already knows how to play gets to play. 

My coach was sure he knew what a shot should look like. The game eventually proved him wrong. But the real lesson was never about the wrist shot. 

It was about who gets to hold the wheel. 

Mental performance shouldn’t be left to chance. 

Train it. Track it. Improve it. 

#gamereadymindset

Scott K. Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset (TM), a mental-readiness company for high school and collegiate athletic programs. He writes and coaches on training the mental side of sport. Reach him at [email protected] or check out grmsports.com