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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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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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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Deconstructing Perfectionism in Athletes (and Coaches)
Perfectionism is characterized by unrealistically high expectations of self and a tendency to be over critical of one’s performance (Madigan et al., 2016). Within the last decade, the number of research studies conducted on perfectionism in sports has increased significantly (Vicent, Sanmartín, Vásconez-Rubio, and García-Fernández, 2020). In 2005, Flett and Hewitt coined the term “perfectionism paradox” to describe how the environment of competitive sports encourages perfectionism in athletes (Flett & Hewitt, 2005). Since the emergence of Covid-19, researchers Flett and Hewitt are now referring to the phenomenon of widespread rates of perfectionism among athletes as a “perfectionism pandemic”.
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How to Control Your Energy Level in Competition
Got players that are feeling anxious and stressed? There’s certainly no shortage of things to be stressed out about in today’s world, but sports should be a stress outlet rather than a stress trigger – especially for young players. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. Now more than ever before, we are seeing a rise in rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and self-harm among teenagers. The New York Times has coined the term “the inner pandemic” to describe today’s mental health crisis among youth and adolescents.
Athletes and coaches alike experience a fight-or-flight response when their sympathetic nervous system is activated. Physical symptoms of stress can include increased heart rate, stomach nausea, shortness of breath, muscle tension, and unwanted arousal. There are evidence-based muscle-to-mind techniques that you can use to help athletes reduce their levels of performance anxiety and stress.
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Interview with Beth Launiere on Preparing for NCAA Playoffs and Avoiding Player Burnout
2019 was a landmark year for Beth Launiere. Not only did it mark her 30th season as the Head Volleyball Coach at the University of Utah, but Launiere was named the Pac-12 Coach of the Year and led her team to the program’s fourth Sweet 16 performance. The team’s match up against BYU in the second round of the NCAA playoffs has gone down in Ute volleyball history.
In the 2019 NCAA tournament your team beat BYU 3-0 at BYU. How did you prepare your team for that big match-up?
There were a number of factors. We had very high goals for the season and expectations for ourselves. We were ready for the NCAA tournament. We finished 3rd in the PAC-12. We were ready to make a nice run (in the playoffs) and we felt really confident. We really thought that we had a shot at hosting, and found out that we were going to BYU for the 3rd time in 4 years. I couldn’t have been more proud of my team for the way they handled that. I had very strong leadership. Right from the start they were like, it’s a bummer but it doesn’t matter. I’ve been doing this long enough now to know that if you start getting too worried about where you’re sent and what your seed might be, then you’re probably starting from behind right off the bat. So we just had a really great mindset going into the tournament right away. We took the mentality of wherever, whoever and whatever it takes.
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