Improve your Attitude

• Set Performance-oriented Goals
• Focus on goals that you can attain. Haberl suggests, for example, marking improvements in your performance from month to month. Strive for a little more each time. Then when you enter competition, focus on your performance rather than your finish.
• Find triggers or cues that help you stay focused on your performance during your competition. Then rehearse that plan in practice. Do what Olympic athletes do and visualize yourself going through the competition, focused on your triggers.
• Avoid Mixing Your Self-worth With Your Performance. This is a danger many Olympians encounter, and Haberl often works with them to separate self-worth from their performance. "Putting the two together places tremendous weight on their shoulders and makes it difficult to compete," he says.
• Relive Your Best Performance
• Write down what you felt and thought. That's your blueprint for how you should capture that performance again, Haberl says. Refer back to it often so that you relive the experience rather than the outcome. (This is very effective).
• Dump Your Ego (important when listening to your coach)
• If not, you won't allow yourself to do things that make you look bad, and in the end, that avoidance will keep you from getting better. Tennis players, for example, who have a weak backhand might try to avoid hitting a backhand shot and run around the ball to hit a forehand because they don't want to look bad or lose. Do this and that backhand will never improve.
• Accept Temporary Letdowns as Normal (don't dwell on them, but learn from them).
• Nobody's perfect. Know that you will have errors and mistakes.
  Laugh Often (laugh at yourself).
• When the going gets tough, the tough laugh, right? Take the negative out of the situation and find something to laugh about.

Taken from http://www.tufts-nemc.org/apps/HealthGate/Article.aspx?chunkiid=13811