Episode Summary

When a gymnast faces a mental block, we assume it's a physical fear of getting hurt. But more often than not, the root cause is completely external: a deep-seated fear of disappointing her coach, her teammates, or you.

In this episode, Coach Stacie Roman and Coach Ali Havel pull back the curtain on the fear of external judgment. They dive into the evolutionary biology behind why kids are hardwired to view parental and coach disapproval as a literal life-or-death situation. Ali shares an honest look from her perspective as a former club coach, revealing how a coach's outward frustration is almost always about their own feelings of incompetence—not a dislike of the gymnast. They also tackle the heavy burden of "financial and time guilt" that many gymnasts carry silently. Tune in to learn how to change your post-practice conversations, remove the invisible pressure, and teach your daughter the lifelong skill of separating her self-worth from other people's expectations.

• The Biological Caveman Brain: Humans are biologically wired to fear exclusion from the "tribe." For your gymnast, her tribe consists of authority figures like coaches and parents, making disappointing them feel like a threat to survival.
• Coaches Are Human Too: When a coach shows frustration during a mental block, it's rarely about the athlete. It stems from the coach feeling incompetent or lacking the time and tools to address the mindset side of training.
• The Danger of Silent Shutdowns: When a supportive parent asks "How was practice?" and the gymnast says "Fine" while looking away, she isn't shutting you out—she is engaging a safety mechanism to shield you from disappointment.
• The Money & Time Burden: Gymnasts frequently carry intense, unspoken guilt over the financial and time sacrifices their parents make, creating a paralyzing pressure that "it has to be worth it."
• Rewiring People-Pleasing Tendencies: Left unaddressed, the "gymnast brain" defaults to chronic people-pleasing. Teaching them how to handle disappointed authority figures prevents major identity crises later in adulthood.

• 00:00 – Introduction: Identifying the three main sources of mental blocks (Physical, Internal, and External).
• 00:54 – The evolutionary biology of why kids obsess over what authority figures think.
• 01:59 – The breakdown of coach frustration: Why it’s actually about them, not the gymnast.
• 03:45 – Coach Ali’s confession: Feeling incompetent on the floor when athletes get stuck.
• 05:28 – The Walmart Tantrum Analogy: How coaches, parents, and athletes all internalize circumstances differently.
• 06:55 – Submarine Sonar: How our primitive brain constantly measures us against everyone else for survival.
• 08:50 – Gym floor constraints: Why standard gymnastics practices don't leave room for mindset work.
• 11:50 – Clarifying the boundary between normal coach frustration and abusive coaching environments.
• 12:52 – Grown-up emotions: Teaching your gymnast that coaches and parents are fully capable of handling disappointment.
• 14:55 – Reading the signs: Why your gymnast shuts down and hides her tears after practice.
• 16:08 – Shifting the narrative: Better questions to ask instead of "Did you get your skill today?"
• 17:50 – Normalizing disappointment as a natural byproduct of going after huge, audacious goals.
• 20:15 – The Money Talk: The heavy emotional weight gymnasts carry regarding family financial sacrifices.
• 22:20 – Season-start triggers: Why external mental blocks suddenly flare up right before evaluations and major meets.
• 24:37 – Training the brain: Why you can't expect a normal human brain to do gymnastics without targeted mental conditioning.

Resources:

• Mental Block Roadmap: Get our free guide to understanding the root causes of her fear.

• The Next Level Membership: Proactive mental training for the competitive season.
• Strategy Sessions: Apply for a call to see if 1-on-1 mindset coaching is the right fit for your gymnast.

This is the final episode of our year long Conversations with Coaches Weekly Mindset Workout series.

All month we’ve been talking about how to help your gymnast change their belief to something that will help serve them. The thought ladder is the best tool we’ve got, and we know that with practice it will be the best tool in your gymnasts tool belt as well!

In this episode, Ali and Stacie discuss how to put the thought ladder into practice to help your athlete benefit from it. Just like learning a new skill on beam, developing the ability to use the thought ladder is a process. Each progression up the ladder takes time and dedication both in and out of the gym.

We know believing something new is a skill that needs to be well conditioned. Writing out your gymnasts thought ladder and checking in with where they’re at intermittently will certainly help them develop stronger, more positive beliefs about themselves and their gymnastics.

This podcast series is not meant to be something you listen to once. Rather that you use it throughout the year to get just the help you and your gymnasts need. So go back to January 1 and keep on going next year!

We would also be so grateful if you pass our podcast on to other coaches! Or simply leave a review so other coaches can get in on the mindset magic and we can help change the culture of our sport to be a place where gymnasts are healthy, happy and know how to win.

We have courses and coaching programs for individual gymnasts and gymnastics teams that are based on proven behavioral science. And results that speak for themselves. Invest in the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your gym or your gymnasts success. Their mind.

Check us out at⁠ gymnasticsmindestacademy.com⁠

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking about your gymnast’s current belief and also the belief she wants to have. You know, the one that’s going to actually help her to achieve her goals!? We know your gymnasts can’t just flip a switch and believe something different. Their brains need evidence that their belief can be true before they will start trusting it. In this episode, our mindset coaches talk about the most powerful tool we teach, THE THOUGHT LADDER.

The thought ladder is a strategic tool that helps your gymnasts make their way from their current belief to the new one they hope to believe. Tune in to learn all about this incredible thought strategy and how it can help your gymnast compete with confidence.

We would also be so grateful if you pass our podcast on to other coaches! Or simply leave a review so other coaches can get in on the mindset magic and we can help change the culture of our sport to be a place where gymnasts are healthy, happy and know how to win.

We have courses and coaching programs for individual gymnasts and gymnastics teams that are based on proven behavioral science. And results that speak for themselves. Invest in the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your gym or your gymnasts success. Their mind.

Check us out at gymnasticsmindestacademy.com

Let’s get back to neutral. When your gymnast is spiraling with negative thoughts or beliefs about themselves, it’s so important to get them back to neutral first. They can’t see the positive side of things until they’ve been able to recognize the facts of the matter.

In this episode, Ali and Stacie teach you how to help your gymnast identify what things are facts and what are her thoughts.

Thoughts are powerful things, and when gymnasts start to believe that their THOUGHTS are FACTS, they limit themselves to believing they can’t move past the thing they're stuck on.

This week, we’ll help you identify your gymnasts current beliefs and how to redirect them to positively impact your gymnasts’ lives.

We would also be so grateful if you pass our podcast on to other coaches! Or simply leave a review so other coaches can get in on the mindset magic and we can help change the culture of our sport to be a place where gymnasts are healthy, happy and know how to win.

We have courses and coaching programs for individual gymnasts and gymnastics teams that are based on proven behavioral science. And results that speak for themselves. Invest in the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your gym or your gymnasts success. Their mind.

Check us out at gymnasticsmindestacademy.com

This week, we’re gearing up for competition by helping you instill some strong identity-level beliefs in your gymnasts that will set them up for success this season.

We all have certain beliefs about ourselves and who we are. It’s really easy for athletes to believe their worth is contingent on their performance. They want to believe “they’ve got it”… but what will really help them is the belief that they can handle it, even when they don’t have it.

All this month, Stacie and Ali are talking about our most utilized resource, the Thought Ladder, and how it can help your gymnast go from hoping she’s got it, to believing she is capable of handling anything thrown her way. That is the true meaning of “I’ve got this.”

We would also be so grateful if you pass our podcast on to other coaches! Or simply leave a review so other coaches can get in on the mindset magic and we can help change the culture of our sport to be a place where gymnasts are healthy, happy and know how to win.

We have courses and coaching programs for individual gymnasts and gymnastics teams that are based on proven behavioral science. And results that speak for themselves. Invest in the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your gym or your gymnasts success. Their mind.

Check us out at gymnasticsmindestacademy.com

Practicing the choreography is what makes your gymnasts routine run smoothly. The more they break it down, drill it and run through it, the more comfortable they become with it. Mental choreography is just as important. Practicing the thought patterns, cue words, deep breaths and other great focus points into a routine of its own will help your gymnast become more successful in competition.

This can start from the warm-up. Each gymnast is different, so it will be up to you as the coach to figure out when each mental routine needs to start. Bars might need to start as someone is gripping up. What sort of affirmations do they focus on as they’re getting chalk? What do they tell themselves before they step onto the mat? After they salute, do they breathe, or think something in their mind? It really helps to have a cue word for each skill, transition, etc. This way, your gymnast will know exactly what to focus on to be successful, instead of wondering what will happen, or fearing making a mistake.

We would also be so grateful if you pass our podcast on to other coaches! Or simply leave a review so other coaches can get in on the mindset magic and we can help change the culture of our sport to be a place where gymnasts are healthy, happy and know how to win.

We have courses and coaching programs for individual gymnasts and gymnastics teams that are based on proven behavioral science. And results that speak for themselves. Invest in the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your gym or your gymnasts success. Their mind.

Check us out at gymnasticsmindestacademy.com

Do you want your gymnasts to be focused at a meet? Well, focused on their gymnastics and their technique? Then they need to use cue words that work.

Gymnasts tell us all the time that they need to just not think when they compete. But the reality is that their brain will be thinking. And left unchecked, it will usually be thinking about everything that could go wrong.

Instead we want to help prepare the brain to think specific things on purpose that will help them focus on the technique of their gymnastics. Things that will give their body exact instructions on what to do.

So for each skill, we are going to create cue words. Tune in to hear our approach to finding cue words that actually work and help your gymnast focus in a meet.

We would also be so grateful if you pass our podcast on to other coaches! Or simply leave a review so other coaches can get in on the mindset magic and we can help change the culture of our sport to be a place where gymnasts are healthy, happy and know how to win.

We have courses and coaching programs for individual gymnasts and gymnastics teams that are based on proven behavioral science. And results that speak for themselves. Invest in the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your gym or your gymnasts success. Their mind.

Check us out at gymnasticsmindestacademy.com

When we don’t actually believe “I’ve got this,” saying “I’ve got this” won’t actually help. If your brain doesn’t believe that you’ve, in fact, GOT THIS, it’s going to put up a fight and start throwing lots of icks your way, trying to convince you that there’s no way “you’ve got this.”

Affirmations are only helpful when the “I AM” statement is something the gymnast can actually get behind.

So how do you find the right affirmations for your gymnasts? Great question! In this episode, our master mindset coaches, dig in to how to help your gymnast find the right combination of affirmations and tie them to how they want to feel on each specific event. Sometimes, it’s not as simple as just believing you can.

You’ve gotta take a smaller step and believe that you’re capable, or believe that you’re learning how… it all leads to the same place eventually. AWESOMENESS.

We would also be so grateful if you pass our podcast on to other coaches! Or simply leave a review so other coaches can get in on the mindset magic and we can help change the culture of our sport to be a place where gymnasts are healthy, happy and know how to win.

We have courses and coaching programs for individual gymnasts and gymnastics teams that are based on proven behavioral science. And results that speak for themselves. Invest in the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your gym or your gymnasts success. Their mind.

Check us out at gymnasticsmindestacademy.com