Happiness is something that is strived for, but often the pressure to perform and focus on the result impacts enjoyment and overall experience. Repeatedly athletes and coaches base success and often enjoyment on the results of our performance (e.g., wins and losses).  The competitive nature of sport often leads many to focus more on the negative aspects (i.e., what is not achieved). This is something that has been engrained in our society, and often unrealistically impacts how we measure success and contentment.

Emotional regulation is a key component to managing individual performance. It is not uncommon for an athlete to go through highs and lows throughout their performance. Understanding how to manage adversity and successfully regulate emotions can aide in a better performance (McCarthy, 2011). Some common disruptive negative emotions are competitive anxiety, frustration, and stress. These emotions can cause changes such as rapid heart rate, sweating, and an altered breathing rate. Many of these physical states interfere with optimal athletic performance. Creating a friendly competitive environment that encourages competition as well as creates realistic performance pressures can help make negative emotions and their subsequent physical changes more manageable in actual performance. It creates a sense of familiar understanding for athletes that can then be carried over to actual performance. How you react and push each athlete may be different, but understanding how the athlete’s receive the information and its impact is important. Some may need a more supporting role so developing a support system within the team is crucial early on. Having performance partners (i.e., share goals and experiences) within the team that they feel safe discussing their experience with can make for a better overall experience and create unity.

Contrarily, positive emotions are linked to “subcomponents of performance such as motivation, self-efficacy, and perceived control” (McCarthy, 2011, p.50). How can we inspire athletes to perform at a high level, but also enjoy what they are doing and stay motivated? First, what must change is individual thinking and judgment in what makes an athlete successful. Being able to move past mistakes, slumps, plateaus, and adversity is a valuable skill. Altering a mindset can take work and personal awareness. John Wooden was known for pushing his athletes while never focusing on the result. He developed a unique coaching style that focused on improvement without regard to wins and losses. This kept performance in its raw form. This allows athletes to focus on continuing to build on individual strengths and the significance of work ethic. It is easy to become consumed by records and ignore development and success. Each athlete is unique and may have a different balanced ratio of negative and positive takeaways from their performance that allow them to feel successful and stay motivated. It is important to find, even in the worst performance, a positive that can be taken away. How coaches communicate to their athletes is a strong influencer into how they respond. Both verbal (e.g. word selection, tone, melody, and prosody) and nonverbal communication (e.g. facial expression, body language and posture) can influence how the message is received (Lambrecht, 2014). Failure to understand cues can lead to irritation, poor social interaction, aggression, and feeling misunderstood (Lambrecht, 2014). Coaches with flexibility and awareness of different personalities and learning styles within their athletes are more positively received.

Overall, coaching style, support systems, and emotional regulation can contribute to how athletes feel about themselves and their performance. Forcing ourselves to find one positive in a mistake or performance can help build awareness and focus on positive elements. Taking it back to the basics as to why we do what we do can rekindle our desire to perform. Keeping performance aspects raw and in the present tense and not becoming caught up in the result to rank our performance is fundamental.

References:

Lambrecht, L. (2014). Gender differences in emotion recognition: Impact of sensory modality and emotional category. Cognition & Emotion, 28(3), 452-469.

McCarthy, P. J. (2011). Positive emotion in sport performance: Current status and future directions. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 4(1), 50-69.