Comprehensive Applied Sport Psychology

Jim Taylor, Jim Taylor

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429994630
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Psicología
• Thema: Psicología del deporte

The aim of Comprehensive Applied Sport Psychology (CASP) is to challenge our field to look beyond its current status and propel applied sport psychology and mental training forward and outward with a broad and multi-layered examination of everything psychological, emotionally, and socially that the athletic community contends with in pursuit of athletic success and that sport psychologists and mental trainers do in their professional capacities.

Comprehensive Applied Sport Psychology is the first professional book aimed at offering a truly expansive and deep exploration of just about everything that applied sport psychologists, consultants and mental trainers do in their work.

CASP plumbs the depths of the athletic mind including attitudes, psychological and emotional obstacles, mental "muscles" and mental "tools, " quality of sport training, the health and well-being of athletes, and other areas that are essential to athletic success. This new volume examines not only the many ways that consultants impact athletes, but also explores their work with coaches, teams, parents, and interdisciplinary groups such as sports medicine team and sports management.

The book is grounded in both the latest theory and research, thus making it a valuable part of graduate training in applied sport psychology, as well as a practical resource for consultants who work directly with athletes, coaches, teams, and parents. The goal of CASP, in collaboration with dozens of the leading minds in the field, is to create the definitive guide to what applied sport psychology and mental training are and do.

PART I

Mental Training

1

ATTITUDES

Introduction

Jim Taylor

Attitudes play a foundational role in sports performance because they establish how athletes perceive, think about, interpret, and evaluate their sports experiences. Attitudes also influence the emotions athletes feel, their behavior in training and competitive situations, and, ultimately, the quality of their competitive performances. Additionally, although attitudes normally carry a positive connotation, they can be either positive or negative and have a beneficial or harmful impact on athletes. The attitudes that will be discussed in this chapter demonstrate the power that positive attitudes have on athletes.

What makes attitudes so complex is they can arise from either conscious or unconscious sources. Conscious attitudes are ones in which athletes are aware of how they developed, athletes can easily access them, and they are easy to modify if they prove themselves to be unhelpful. Conversely, attitudes that are embedded in athletes’ unconscious minds are difficult to recognize, identify their origins, gain access to, and alter. Attitudes typically develop in athletes from life and sports experiences and through modeling during childhood. Because of this early entrenchment in the psyches of athletes, they rarely make a conscious choice about which attitudes to adopt, but rather accept those attitudes that are most present in their lives, for good or for ill. Thus, they are not able to make deliberate choices about their attitudes until much later in their lives and, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, some attitudes can have an unhealthy influence not only on athletes’ sports efforts, but also on the quality of their lives in general.

Though the “attitude is everything” axiom is used frequently in the sports community, there has been little in-depth discussion or explanation about what specific attitudes impact sports performance, why they are important, why some attitudes can be positive and others negative, or how athletes can foster attitudes that support their sports lives and jettison those that don’t.

Chapter 1 focuses on attitudes that are essential for athletic success. The six attitudes that will be explored are:

• Ownership

• Growth Mindset

• Challenge

• Risk-taking

• Process

• Long Term

Consultants have several goals in helping athletes to develop healthy attitudes. First, they can assess the attitudes athletes possess. Second, consultants can evaluate the degree to which those attitudes help or hurt athletes. Third, they can show athletes how to strengthen the positive attitudes that they hold.

OWNERSHIP

Tim Herzog and Jim Taylor

A fundamental building block of athletic success is for athletes to take ownership of their training and performance in appropriately increasing increments over the course of their development. Macmillan Dictionary (n.d.) defines ownership as: “An attitude of accepting responsibility for something and taking control of how it develops.” When athletes feel a sense of ownership over their sports lives, they believe that they are capable of influencing all of its aspects and effecting change when necessary. This sense that athletes possess control over their own sport training, development, and performance contributes to a positive environment, an overall feeling that their sport is enjoyable, and is motivating in its own right.

Cultivating a sense of ownership does not have to happen all at once. As Dawes and Larson (2011) put it, “Encouragement from parents, incentives, and the desire to affiliate with peers may be valuable means to get some youth in the door; but these extrinsic incentives do not preclude youth from developing deeper, more sustained engagement in program activities” (p. 266). Ultimately, a shift is most likely to occur if: (1) participation connects in some way to young athletes’ earnest and serious side; (2) participation becomes an increasingly integral component of identity and/or of some bigger purpose; and (3) there is some kind of “hook” that connects with personal values or goals (Dawes & Larson, 2011). Thus, ownership over sport participation appears to be closely related to athletes’ engagement, which evolves as their involvement in their sports lives deepen rather than all at once.

On a practical level, consultants can facilitate cultivation of athlete ownership over their sports participation by asking them several questions:

• Do you take responsibility for everything that impacts your sports performances?

• Do you give your fullest effort regularly in training and competitions?

• Do you hold yourself accountable for your efforts?

• Do you make excuses or blame others when you perform poorly?

• Do you ease up or quit readily when struggling in training or competition?

If athletes respond “yes” to the first three questions and “no” to the last two, they are taking significant ownership of their sports lives. If athletes are ready to hear it, consultants can convey that, if their aspirations in their sport are high and they want to give themselves the opportunity to experience success, ownership of their sport is essential (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992). In line with a motivational interviewing approach, if athletes express any ambivalence regarding their investment, helping them to explore both sides of their thinking (without imposing bias) can help athletes to arrive at decisions that they truly “own” (Markland, Ryan, Tobin, & Rollnick, 2005).

Theory and Research

Ownership is a vital part of athlete development and fundamental to helping athletes achieve their sports goals. However, ownership is not something that athletes can just assume (particularly younger athletes) because, often, there are many stakeholders who want to gain or maintain ownership as well. As a result, athletes can experience a tug of war for ownership, potentially defaulting to stakeholders’ desires or rebelling against those desires in an effort to experience autonomy.

Every sport has its own unique set of stakeholders including parents, coaches, and team administrators. At the highest level of sport, the list of stakeholders grows to include agents, sponsors, media, and assorted hangers-on. Every stakeholder has a vested interest in athletes’ careers, there is a risk that athletes could either never gain or lose their sense of ownership as other stakeholders assert themselves into their lives within and outside of their sport. Particularly in youth sports where young athletes are often not yet capable of assuming full ownership of their sports participation, stakeholders must be sensitive to what they should and shouldn’t appropriately take responsibility for. For example, parents’ ownership of their young athlete’s participation might include paying relevant fees, providing necessary equipment, knowing the practice and competition schedules, and ensuring that their children arrive on time for team activities. Conversely, overstepping those parental responsibilities could involve coaching their children (when not a coach), setting outcome goals, and carrying their kids’ gear to games. As a foundation of preparing athletes for ownership, adult stakeholders can communicate effectively and with transparency, facilitate harmony, and cultivate an optimal development experience for youth athletes to prevent this co-opting from occurring. Identifying what is in one’s control, what is influenceable, and what must be accepted, is an empowering process for athletes that can encourage ownership (Herzog, Zavilla, Dupee, & Stephenson, 2018). Specifically in the context of navigating dynamics with other stakeholders, athletes can be mentored at any age to hone effective communication skills, asking for what they want and need, and developing awareness of when and how to effectively set boundaries.

Four Obstacles to Ownership

In addition to knowing what aspects of athletes’ lives should be owned by whom and helping athletes to gain age-appropriate ownership, it behooves consultants and athletes to identify potential obstacles to athletes’ ownership. There are four primary obstacles: (1) Ill-advised agendas; (2) overinvolved parents; (3) extrinsic motivation; and (4) triangulation.

Ill-advised Agendas

While primary stakeholders in athletes’ lives, most notably their parents, are often well-intentioned, those good intentions are sometimes not realized with good action. For instance, parents could be unknowingly living vicariously through their children, while also weighing whether the family is getting return on their financial investment. In turn, athletes can feel immense pressure to succeed. Relatedly, a coach could fear losing status and power if parents or other stakeholders intervene in their athletes’ development. Thus, each stakeholder’s best intentions can get inverted by complicated relationship dynamics and their own unconscious needs.

Over-involved Parents

The current era of sport parenting is characterized by over-involvement. Known by many names, including helicopter parents, Little League parents, and stage parents, these parents control their children’s sports lives (and lives in general), “swoop in” to rescue their children, even adult children, rather than letting them have autonomy thereby learning how to handle adversity on their own (Shiffrin etal., 2014; Padilla-Walker & Nelson, 2012). “Tiger parenting” is the stereotype that Asian-Americans manage their children’s lives to ensure their success in academics and other performance domains via strict regimens with little ownership or leeway to make choices. Tiger parenting styles are not confined to Asian-Americans; it is a parenting trend among many families and incorporates demanding, pushing, pulling, threatening, cajoling, directing, bribing, instructing, scheduling, and monitoring of children in a well-intentioned but misguided effort to drive them to succeed. Hudson and Rapee (2002) demonstrated that over-involvement often backfires because as athletes lose ownership over their sport, they become more susceptible to anxiety, feel an increased perception of “threat,” lose self-efficacy in their coping, and, ultimately, quit their sport because it has become so aversive.

Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic rewards meted out to athletes, whether tangible (e.g., money, gifts) or intangible (e.g., attention, praise), can initially act as motivators for athletes to work hard and find success. At the same time, using rewards has the potential to undermine intrinsic motivation, weaken athletes’ motivation and ownership over the long run (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999). Essentially, athletes who already love their sport and then receive extrinsic reinforcers to participate or perform can experience a shift from participating for internal reasons (e.g., love of the sport) to external reasons (e.g., to please their parents). If the rewards are big enough (e.g., love of a parent, a full college scholarship, admiration of fans), athletes may believe that they only engage in their sport for those rewards. Moreover, with a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation, athletes may lose their sense of ownership of sports involvement.

Triangulation

A concept from family systems, known as “triangulation,” can be useful in understanding relationships in sport and its impact on athlete ownership. When triangulation occurs, two people (a “dyad”) use a third party to mediate rather than communicating directly (Turman, 2007). Triangulation often occurs in an attempt to exert more control over the other member of the dyad. This negative pattern can also be seen with coaches and other stakeholders in athletes’ lives who may inadvertently undermine the healthy involvement of athletes to satisfy their own needs and goals. It prevents direct communication aimed at sorting through tensions (Herzog, 2014). Moreover, when different stakeholders’ agendas conflict, a battle for control may ensue in which the ultimate loser is the athlete, who may experience a lost (or non-existent) sense of control over domains that should be under their control. With this loss of ownership, athletes can feel confused about what they value, feel out of touch with what truly motivates them, and lose track of the process goals that could be focal points under their control (Herzog, 2014).

Practical Implications

Consultants can play a valuable role in athletes’ development of a strong sense of ownership. Moreover, this impact doesn’t just come from working with athletes. Equally important, consultants provide insights and perspectives to other stakeholders about how to maintain a healthy investment (and partial ownership) of their athletes’ lives while progressively ceding ownership to the athletes themselves over time.

Parents and Other Stakeholders

Ownership isn’t something that young athletes can just take for themselves. The reality is that they aren’t ready to gain ownership early in their sports careers. Instead, ownership is progressively given to them by their parents, coaches and others as they demonstrate both commitment and responsibility in their sports efforts.

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