Can mental skills actually be taught, or are some athletes just born with it?

Athletes do arrive with different natural tendencies; in the same way they arrive with different physical attributes. What they are not born with is a fixed ceiling. The capacity to notice an emotional state, interrupt an unhelpful pattern and deliberately shift into a more useful one is a learnable skill, and the neuroscience on this is settled. The brain adapts to what it repeatedly practises.

The athletes who appear to be naturally composed are usually running a strategy they have stumbled into and cannot articulate. When you ask them what they do before they perform, they often cannot explain it. Our work makes those strategies explicit and teachable, so that every athlete in the group has access to them rather than only the ones who found them by accident.

The condition is the same as any other skill in sport. It has to be rehearsed. An athlete who practises a mental tool once and expects it to hold up in a final is in the same position as one who bats in the nets once and expects a century. Repetition is what turns a technique into an instinct.