Whether it is to become an Olympian or be an amateur rider, what does it take to keep on going?
There are 3 characteristics that every athlete requires: patience, discipline and courage. However, before these are taken into consideration, athletes have to grapple with the notion of WHY? Why is it training or competing important? A lot of the time people will have ambitions, but without understanding the purpose behind it, ambition can empty pretty quickly. The reality is that all of these events take a long time both in themselves and to build up to. You need to be committed to them. And the way to do that is to understand THE PURPOSE behind it is in the first place. In other words, it is vital that alongside training, there is some psychological training too. That the mind and one’s outlook is trained. This can be related to an investment in the process of training for and completing a course or a show, rather than the outcome – how fast you go in a jump-off or what position you finished in.
WANT TO GIVE IT A GO?
TIPS TO KEEP IN MIND
UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONAL DRIVERS & HAVE COURAGE
To be able to push through when your body and brain are telling you to stop. You can’t rely on your brain, you have to trust your heart.
HAVE PATIENCE
I encourage riders to build from one training block to another and think about the aggregation of all of their training sessions, rather than getting hung up about one.
YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH A PROCESS
TO REACH YOU GOAL.
CHECK YOUR FUEL
You need to think about what intake of food & water you’ll have during a training session or competition and how you’re going to manage that. Feed you body, specially your brain!
BE PREPARED
People usually wish you “good luck” with the event. But I say it’s not to do with luck entirely, right? If you haven’t trained or prepared properly, the chances are things won’t go your way. Pre-competition preparation is essential: from the clothes you’ll be wearing, setting your objective, thinking of the obstacles, plan A & B, working on your inner positive dialogue & key words, letting go “the trash” off your mind, etc.
BE METHODICAL
Trialling different strategies and knowing what works for you is a really important part of the preparation.
BELIEVE IN YOURSELF
Self-esteem is the biggest one and everything falls off that. When people reflect on what they’ve done and realise that they pushed themselves and worked hard, they then also realise that they’re able to do other stuff that might be difficult.
BUILD RESILIENCE
Maybe this is one of my favorite words. So powerful... If there’s something that sets us athletes apart from the rest of it’s that most of our pressure is self-imposed.
ATHLETES ARE ROLE MODELS FOR OVERCOMING.
At the same time, many have no other choice but to self-manage themselves. However, this pressure grants us the maturity which allows in sports to develop and strengthen our resilience. Thus, we become people who are committed, have a great deal of determination and, above all, have the faith that comes from having experienced many storms and witnessed how, over time, the clouds retreated.
Consider this – athletes suffer injuries, performance issues, and illnesses that can render them incapable of carrying out their job. Nevertheless, despite this fact, they recover from setbacks very easily. The mental strength athletes have lets them remain afloat when others sink. This is the product of their experience, but it is also an exercise of faith and hope.
“Resilience is the ability to face life’s adversities, transform pain into a driving force in order to overcome and become strengthened by them. A resilient person understands that they are the architect of their own joy and their own destiny.”
-Anonymous-
SELF-WORTH
Athletes are especially vulnerable to this problem of attaching self-esteem to one's performances because you are judged by how well you perform. However, society sends subtle signals that you must achieve in your sport to feel worthy as a person and that is the trap that many athletes fall into. Also, if you are a perfectionist, it does not help your self-esteem because you have such high expectations and are always so critical and hard on yourself. If you fall into this trap, your emotions and how you feel about yourself, are heavily influenced by the perceptions of your performance, which can naturally vary from day to day. Thus, one day you have self-esteem and the next day it erodes due to what you think is poor performance or practice. One athlete in my seminar stated: "Even if I felt I had a flawless performance if I did not get a good reaction or the reaction I was looking for, I feel like a failure." This statement highlights how out of control one can feel about his or her success or failure, and thus make negative judgements about one's performance.
What is self-esteem?
Self-esteem is the regard you hold for yourself. All of you have a concept of your person (self-concept). If you like your self-concept (who you think you are), then you have self-esteem.
Self-confidence is different. Self-confidence is the belief in your ability to perform a task - it is not a judgment. You can have self-confidence, but not self-esteem, and viceversa. Optimally, you want both high self-confidence in your abilities and self-esteem.
Self-esteem should be based on who you are as a person instead of how well you can perform in your sport or how high you go in a sporting career. Think about this: if you take away the part of you who is an athlete, how would you describe yourself? What are your personal characteristics that describe you? This is what self-esteem should be based on.
COMMITTMENT
If you commit your mind to something, you have an inner belief, and an inner I-CAN-DO-THIS attitude, the anything is possible.
Sport commitment is a central motivational construct because it goes right to the heart of athletes’ persistent pursuit of their sport. Simply put, it is a psychological state explaining why athletes do what they do.
There are two types of sport commitment: enthusiastic and constrained.
Enthusiastic commitment (EC) is the psychological construct representing the desire and resolve to persist in a sport over time.
Constrained commitment (CC) is the psychological construct representing perceptions of obligation to persist in a sport over time.
Knowledge of the sources of both types of commitment is critical to understanding the commitment process.
Sources of Commitment:
Sport Enjoyment: the positive emotional response to a sport experience that reflects generalised feelings of joy.
Valuable Opportunities: important opportunities that are only present through continued involvement in a sport, such as traveling to competitions or jumping in a future World Cup.
Personal Investments-Loss: personal resources put into a sport that cannot be recovered if participation is discontinued. Example investments include time and effort expended.
Personal Investments-Quantity: the amount of personal resources put into a sport.
Emotional Social Support: the encouragement, caring, and empathy received from significant people to the athlete such as parents, coaches, and teammates.
Informational Social Support: the provision of useful information, guidance, or advice received from significant people.
Desire to Excel–Mastery Achievement: striving to improve and achieve mastery in a sport.
Desire to Excel–Social Achievement: striving to win and establish superiority over opponents in a sport.
Other Priorities: attractive or pressing alternatives that conflict with continued sport participation such as work, educational pursuits, and family.
Social Constraints: social expectations or norms that create perceptions of obligation for the athlete to remain in a sport; for example, anticipating the disappointment of parents or coaches if the athlete dropped out of the sport.
CONFIDENCE
Confidence is best considered a belief a person has about their ability to execute a specific task successfully in order to obtain a certain outcome (e.g., clear round, self-satisfaction or coach recognition). Years of sport psychology research tells us that confidence is the key differentiating psychological factor between successful and unsuccessful performance in a variety of sporting settings.
Confidence however is dynamic, unstable and susceptible to change based on a range of factors. This can leave athletes feeling like they have no control over their confidence and more ready to accept that the peaks and troughs they experience over a class, a show, or season are inevitable. This doesn’t have to be true. Athletes can take ownership over their confidence; they can have more control.
1) Some athletes focus on ‘feeling’ confident. They talk about it all the time; “I don’t feel confident about this competition” or “I’m sure I can beat this opponent; I feel confident about it”. This is inaccurate.
Confidence is not an emotion, we can’t feel it.
Confidence is a belief; this makes it a thought.
Tip 1: Stop trying to feel confident and start thinking confident.
2) Some athletes leave confidence to chance. You wouldn’t leave your physical preparation or nutritional intake to chance so why take the risk with your confidence. One of the main reasons for this is that athletes do not know what to do exactly to enhance their confidence. There are no magic potions, no quick fixes, but there are things that can be done.
Tip 2: Take ownership of your confidence and devise strategies that make confidence on competition day an expectation rather than a hope.
3) Some athletes think of their confidence as a singular entity. Confidence is multidimensional. This means that there are many different types of confidence which can be more or less important to overall confidence in any given situation. For example, as a footballer about to take an important penalty, I may be confident about my technical ability to make good contact with the ball as well as my ability for accurate placement. I may however not be confident about my ability to beat the goalkeeper or my capacity for handling the huge pressure I am under. The differing degrees to which I am confident in these different types of confidence will impact my overall confidence for the penalty kick.
Tip 3: There are many different types of confidence that underpin your overall confidence. Understand and develop these types of confidence and overall confidence will take care of itself.
4) Some athletes fail to fully understand the sources of their confidence. Confidence has to come from somewhere. I am often surprised by the way in which athletes talk about their confidence.
“I am really confident about this upcoming performance”.
OK, great. Where does that confidence come from?
“I just don’t think that I can do it. My confidence has gone.”
OK, where has it gone?
Confidence does not simply emerge or disappear from thin air at unpredictable moments; it has to come from somewhere. Identifying where confidence comes from is vital in ensuring any degree of consistent, robust confidence for sports performance. The places from which confidence comes from are best considered your sources of confidence.
Tip 4: Understand where your confidence comes from. Once your sources of confidence are understood, then you can begin to take more ownership over your overall confidence.
5) Some athletes try and build confidence from the top down. Confidence is best built ‘bottom up’. A common error that some athletes make is that that focus on trying to develop overall confidence. This is a challenging process and is likely to fail. It is best to build confidence like you would a Lego house. Create solid foundations that are built on a wide range of difference sources of confidence. These sources will serve to underpin specific types of confidence, which in turn will develop overall confidence. Figure 1 may make this point a little clearer.
Tip 5: Whenever seeking to build overall confidence it is best to start at the bottom and work up. This is achieved by targeting sources of confidence rather than overall confidence.
If a rider wants to build his/her confidence for an upcoming show (confidence in his/her technical ability), they now have some places to go to seek this confidence. This may be a well-rehearsed pre-performance routine, a self-talk strategy, a deliberate imagined experienced of the up coming Class, a moment taken to review the technical requirements of the course, or seeking the positive words from a coach.
Find your catapult &
enjoy the ride!
© Copyright
Comments