«We're not perfect»: Sylla, her psychologist and the science behind mental imagery

After the rest period agreed with head coach Julio Velasco at the end of the preliminary phase of the 2026 Volleyball Nations League, Myriam Sylla has returned to the national team ahead of the final phase in Macao and, above all, the August-September European Championship — the competition that awards the first qualification spot for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. It's a good moment to focus on an aspect of her relationship with mental preparation that rarely finds space in sports coverage but that, from a sport psychology perspective, deserves serious attention: the work with a sport psychologist who, by her own admission, has accompanied her even through the most delicate moments of her career, and the imagery technique — mental visualization — that this work plausibly includes.

Author Fabio Zarra

01 — THE FACTS

Declared psychological work, not a hypothesis

Sylla has never hidden her relationship with psychological support. In an interview given to Rivista Undici after winning the 2025 World Championship in Bangkok (Italy-Turkey 3-2 in the final), she said her sport psychologist had been present throughout the tournament: «Even during the World Championship my psychologist was there, and I have to thank her because she was impeccable». On the same occasion she described that title as the closing of an emotional burden carried for eight years — a reference to the 2018 World Championship final lost to Serbia. In a later interview on Gianluca Gazzoli's podcast The BSMT, she added that in summer 2025 she had started a specific path with her psychologist to work on her ability to give herself credit for the results she'd achieved, instead of always chasing the next goal.

It is within this context of declared, ongoing psychological work — though the athlete has never publicly described the specific techniques used in detail — that the use of imagery can reasonably be placed as a possible component of her pre-match preparation. Since this specific practice isn't documented by direct sources from the athlete, we treat it here as a working premise to illustrate what scientific research says about this technique and how it might plausibly fit into her mental preparation.

02 — WHAT IMAGERY REALLY IS, FROM A SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW

Not simply visualization

Imagery — often loosely translated as "simple visualization" — is defined in the literature as the creation or re-creation of an experience in the mind starting from information stored in memory, capable of involving not just sight but also hearing, kinesthetic sensations and even the emotions associated with the sporting action. The reference theoretical model remains Paivio's (1985), who proposed a fundamental distinction that still underlies almost all subsequent research: imagery can serve a cognitive function (mentally rehearsing technical skills or game strategies) or a motivational function (building emotional states, goals or a sense of control), and each of these two functions can operate at a general or specific level.

This framework was expanded by Hall, Mack, Paivio and Hausenblas (1998), who developed the Sport Imagery Questionnaire identifying five distinct functions used by athletes: specific cognitive imagery (mentally rehearsing a precise technical action, such as a serve or an attack), general cognitive imagery (tactical patterns and strategies), specific motivational imagery (performance goals, such as winning a point or a match), general motivational imagery related to arousal (managing pre-competition anxiety and arousal), and general motivational imagery related to mastery — the so-called MG-M, that is, the ability to picture oneself calm, self-assured and fully in control of the competitive situation.

03 — WHY "HOW" YOU DO IMAGERY MATTERS AS MUCH AS "WHETHER" YOU DO IT

Holmes and Collins' PETTLEP model

A significant part of the more recent literature has focused not so much on whether imagery works, but on how to make it truly effective. The most influential contribution on this front is Holmes and Collins' PETTLEP model (2001) — one of the most cited articles in the journal's history — according to which motor imagery produces benefits that are all the more concrete the more faithfully it replicates the real conditions of performance. The acronym indicates seven elements to attend to in an effective imagery intervention: physical (adopting the same posture you'd have on the court, not staying relaxed in a chair), environment (imagining the same physical context of the match), task (reproducing the same specific action), timing (in real time, not slow motion), learning (updating the mental image as technical skill evolves), emotion (including the same emotional arousal as the real match, while avoiding dysfunctional anxiety states) and perspective (imagining from inside your own body or from outside, as a camera would).

Applied to a hitter like Sylla, this theoretical framework suggests that effective imagery before an international match isn't simply about "thinking positive", but about mentally reconstructing, with the greatest possible sensory fidelity, the specific sequence of her attacking action, in the same environmental context and with the same level of physiological arousal she will genuinely experience on the court.

04 — THE MOST DELICATE CONNECTION: IMAGERY, CONFIDENCE AND OLD WOUNDS

What research says about the MG-M function

The most interesting point, for Sylla's specific case, concerns precisely the general motivational-mastery function (MG-M) described above. An experimental study by Callow, Hardy and Hall (2001), conducted on four high-level young badminton players through a multiple-baseline design, tested an MG-M imagery intervention aimed at increasing the athletes' sport confidence ahead of international and national competitions. The results, in all honesty, weren't uniformly positive: two of the four athletes showed a significant increase in sport confidence attributable to the intervention, one actually showed a decrease, and the fourth a delayed and less clear-cut effect. The study, while remaining a fundamental reference for the MG-M function of imagery, is a reminder that this technique's effectiveness isn't automatic or the same for every athlete: it depends on the quality of implementation, the vividness of the mental image built and, probably, on individual characteristics that research hasn't yet fully isolated.

For an athlete who, by her own admission, carried the psychological weight of a not-fully-processed defeat for eight years, mastery-oriented imagery work — picturing herself calm, effective, in control in moments of pressure — represents a tool consistent with the stated goal of building greater stability in self-confidence: not so much erasing the memory of a painful episode, but repeatedly and vividly building a mental alternative in which that same kind of moment is handled with assurance.

05 — WHAT PRACTITIONERS WORKING WITH ELITE ATHLETES CAN TAKE INTO THE GYM

Four concrete directions for practice

For sport psychologists and mental coaches working with athletes recovering from a heavy defeat or grappling with long-term goals, this literature suggests some concrete directions:

• Build the image with the same sensory fidelity as the real match: posture, ambient sound, physiological arousal — not a relaxed armchair visualization.
• Regularly update the imagery script as the athlete's technique evolves, instead of always repeating the same mental image.
• Monitor the individual effect of the MG-M intervention instead of taking it for granted: as Callow and colleagues' study shows, the same technique can work very differently from one athlete to another.
• Use mastery imagery as the construction of a mental alternative to a painful episode, not as erasure of the memory: the goal is managing the critical moment in the future, not removing the past.

06 — THE BOTTOM LINE

A reading, not a clinical protocol

An important methodological limit of this article must be restated: we don't have a direct, public source in which Sylla describes her imagery practice in detail, which type of function (cognitive or motivational) she favours, or the structure of her pre-match routine. What we do have — her declared work with a sport psychologist, the explicit account of a psychological weight processed over time, the choice to speak about it publicly and naturally — is consistent with the hypothesis that imagery techniques, in some form, are part of her mental preparation toolkit, as is now the case for most international-level athletes supported by a structured psychological staff. But the exact correspondence between her specific practice and the theoretical models presented here remains, for the more attentive reader's benefit, a plausible inference and not a verified fact.

What sport psychology can offer with certainty, instead, is the scientific framework for understanding why mentally "seeing" a good attack, before even physically executing it, isn't a locker-room superstition but a technique backed by forty years of research — useful, if well built, precisely in the moments when the stakes, as at the upcoming European Championship, get higher.

SCIENTIFIC REFERENCES

1. Paivio, A. (1985). Cognitive and motivational functions of imagery in human performance. Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, 10(4), 22S–28S.
2. Hall, C. R., Mack, D. E., Paivio, A., & Hausenblas, H. A. (1998). Imagery use by athletes: Development of the Sport Imagery Questionnaire. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 29, 73–89.
3. Holmes, P. S., & Collins, D. J. (2001). The PETTLEP approach to motor imagery: A functional equivalence model for sport psychologists. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 13(1), 60–83. DOI: 10.1080/10413200109339004
4. Callow, N., Hardy, L., & Hall, C. (2001). The effect of a motivational general-mastery imagery intervention on the sport confidence of four high-level junior badminton players. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 72(4), 389–400. DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2001.10608975

Journalistic sources: Rivista Undici (16 October 2025), "Il Mondiale era un conto in sospeso e l'ho vinto con la squadra più forte di sempre", interview with Myriam Sylla; LeccoToday (21 October 2025), "Myriam Sylla si racconta: il Mondiale, la vittoria più bella, chiuso un cerchio"; PalermoToday (21 October 2025), interview on Gianluca Gazzoli's podcast The BSMT; OA Sport (25 June 2026), "Egonu, Orro e Sylla tornano dalle vacanze: rientro in gruppo con l'Italia".