Self-talk is one of the most powerful predictors of an athlete’s behavior and performance under pressure. How you speak to yourself matters. Self-talk impacts your emotions, behavior, and relationships. Developing awareness and control over your self-talk in pressure situations is an absolutely vital step on your path to optimal performance.
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Understand How Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Relationships
Attachment Theory
History
Attachment theory was first coined by a British psychologist and psychoanalyst named John Bowlby in the 1950s. Bowlby studied the emotional, developmental, and cognitive impact of separation between infants and their primary caregivers. According to Bowlby’s theory, children look to their primary caregivers when they are in need and how the caregiver response impacts their child’s emotional development. In 1969 John Bowbly introduced attachment theory as a psychological framework to understand the emotional bonds formed in close relationships, originally rooted in the interaction behavior between an infant and their primary caregiver (Davis & Jowett, 2010; Felton & Jowett, 2015). Nearly a decade later Mary Ainsworth, a colleague of Bowlby’s, provided empirical research to support attachment theory, resulting in the categorization of different attachment styles (Felton & Jowett, 2015). Attachment theory was expanded on by countless other researchers, most notably Mary Ainsworth. Ainsworth created an observational technique called “the Strange Situation” in 1969, in which childhood behavior was closely observed specifically when a child was reunited with their primary caregiver after being separated for a short time.
Attachment Types
The four types of attachment styles are: secure, avoidant, anxious-ambivalent, and disorganized. Each of these types of attachment styles are rooted in an individual’s childhood relationships to their primary caregivers, have been found to greatly impact the structure and behavioral patterns of an individual’s close relationships into adulthood. Here’s a summary of the different attachment styles.
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The Power of Gratitude in Sport
What is Gratitude?
The impact of gratitude in sport is often overlooked by players and coaches. Gratitude is both a powerful positive emotion (temporary) and a character trait (consistent) that can be developed with intentionality over the course of a season (Gabana et al., 2019).
The term gratitude comes from the Latin word “gratia” which means thankfulness or gratefulness (Oppland, 2017). “The gratitude muscle is like any other muscle, in that it must be flexed periodically to remain strong” (Oppland, 2017). The key takeaway here is that you can cultivate gratitude and become a more grateful person, athlete, and teammate by treating gratitude like a skill you train in your sport. In other words, the more you practice gratitude, the more naturally and consistently it will come to you.
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The difference between superstition, rituals, and routines
Athletes, coaches and sport fans often mistake the difference between superstition, rituals and routines. If you’ve ever watched Rafael Nadal serve, you’ve probably noticed his methodical repertoire of hand gestures and movements. From touching the back and front of his shorts, then his shoulders, nose, ears, and eventually his thighs. In his autobiography, Nadal writes, “Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” In sports it is critical for athletes and coaches to understand and distinguish the difference between superstitions, rituals, and routines.
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Spotlight on Athlete Vulnerability
Athlete vulnerability is not a topic that we hear much about as athletes, coaches and sport performance consultants. Athletes are typically encouraged to be “mentally tough”, to “push through the pain”, and gratefully make personal sacrifices for the “good of the team”. But at what cost? Where is the line? Where are the guard rails protecting the athletes in a competitive culture that prioritizes winning over mental health and gives coaches the authority to torture athletes in pursuit of victory?
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The Confidence Continuum
How do you build your confidence in sports? Athletes often come seek out sport psychologists because their confidence is too low. Many athletes, especially female identifying athletes, express concern that they will be perceived as ‘arrogant’ or ‘not a team player’ if their confidence is too high? The gender confidence gap is real, and it impacts many female athletes and women’s sports teams today.
One of the biggest misconceptions about confidence in sports is that most athletes and coaches think confidence is simply the belief in one’s ability to win or succeed. The problem with this definition of confidence is that it’s too narrow and often leads to a simplified “yes or no”, “you either have it or you don’t” type of thinking, when in fact confidence is much more complex.
Confidence is an accumulation of one’s unique achievements across many different tasks and situations, coupled with preparation for the upcoming event, which enables one to develop specific expectations of achieving.
Burton & Raedeke, 2008
Most athletes experience a spectrum of confidence levels that fluctuate throughout the season based on any number of both internal and external factors. Therefore, when teaching about confidence to athletes and coaches, I encourage them to consider this broader concept of confidence. It is much more helpful and accurate to think of confidence as a continuum centered by optimal confidence, with underconfidence on one end and overconfidence on the other.
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