Coaching practices for Alan Richardson Mental Practice

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Alan Richardson Mental Practice, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When I practice I’m just kind of doing it again and hoping it’s better, because I don’t actually have a clear picture in my head of what great is supposed to look like
• There’s a high-stakes thing coming
• My mental rehearsal is a silent little movie
• I’ve dabbled with this on and off, a session here and there whenever I remember, and it never really took
• The second something gets hard I find a reason to back off, and I’m tired of being that soft with myself

Practices that may help

1. Mental Rehearsal and Imagery, Made Practical
   Mental rehearsal — systematically imagining yourself performing a skill — produces measurable performance improvements across athletic and other domains. Meta-analyses find moderate effect sizes, strongest when imagery is vivid, process-focused (rather than outcome-focused), and combined with physical practice. Alan Richardson’s early basketball research helped establish the empirical basis; the effect is well replicated.
2. Tony Robbins’ Core Practices
   Tony Robbins’ method centers on deliberately managing your internal state — through priming, physiology, language, and focus — so that better decisions and actions follow. The practices range from well-supported (gratitude, slow breathing, mental rehearsal) to mechanistically plausible but thinly studied (incantations).
3. Build sharper mental representations
   Develop a detailed internal model of what excellent performance looks like.
   Deliberate Practice, Not Just Practice
4. Mental rehearsal of outcomes
   Vividly rehearse the result and the process, with emotion, before you act.
   Tony Robbins’ Core Practices
5. Add sensory channels beyond vision
   Build auditory, tactile, and proprioceptive detail into your imagery — not just what you see.
   Mental Rehearsal and Imagery, Made Practical
6. Build a twice-daily practice schedule (Jacobson’s original dose)
   Jacobson prescribed twice-daily sessions for weeks — the depth of skill his method requires exceeds what a once-a-week session delivers.
   Edmund Jacobson’s Progressive Relaxation, Made Practical
7. Callus your mind through voluntary hard things
   Deliberately doing difficult things — beyond your current comfort — builds the mental callus that hard moments require.
   The Accountability Mirror: David Goggins’s Radical Honesty Practice
8. Work at progressively subtler tension levels
   Once you can feel the contrast at full tension, practice with 50%, then 25%, then the subtlest flicker — the real target.
   Edmund Jacobson’s Progressive Relaxation, Made Practical
9. Stress Inoculation: Pre-Exposure to Prepare for Future Stress
   Deliberately practice under conditions that simulate the stress of future high-stakes performance.
   Deliberate Discomfort: Using Voluntary Challenge to Build Resilience
10. Train imagery vividness and controllability as skills
    Develop the ability to generate clear, stable, manipulable images — these are learnable, not fixed traits.
    Mental Rehearsal and Imagery, Made Practical

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