Choose Your Words Carefully When Motivating Your Young Athletes | Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental: Choose Your Words Carefully When Motivating Your Young Athletes:

On the day before a big game or competition, both the parent and the athlete were each given a survey to capture their goals for that event and their level of nervousness. They were each asked if they wanted to (or wanted their child to) “outperform their best performance to date”, “perform no worse than they had in the past”, “outperform their opponent”, or “perform no worse than their opponent.”

Anxiety levels of the athletes were measured along three scales; worry, amount of concentration disruption and physical symptoms (tense, nausea, headache, etc.) Phrasing the performance goal questions this way reflected the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, known for her Achievement Goal Theory.  She has defined two styles of learning, Mastery and Performance. A child with a Mastery focus is more concerned and motivated by their own achievement compared to their individual growth, not that of others.  A young athlete with a Performance mindset always uses their peers as measuring sticks for their own progress.

By asking the kids and their parents if they want to beat or at least do as well as their personal best, Dr. Kaye was looking for a Mastery mindset.  If the focus was more on how they compared to their opponents, then they were using a Performance mindset.  
Here’s where it gets interesting. A parent’s performance expectations, and especially how they were communicated, predicted their child’s level of anxiety. When a parent set a goal to outperform (known as performance-approach) or avoid doing worse than an opponent (performance-avoidance), the level of worry increased for their young athlete. However, the parents who set a goal for their kids to beat their personal best (mastery-performance) or at least achieve their previous best form (mastery-avoidance) did not cause any increase in their kids’ anxiety levels. 

A subtle change in pre-game conversation from “you need to beat those guys” to “you need to beat your personal best” can make all the difference in maintaining your child’s confidence.

"You might think that's a really positive thing for the child [to encourage them to win], but that's creating a lot of worry [for the kid] as well,” said Dr. Kaye. “I don't think parents are necessarily thinking about that kind of thing."

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Watch What you Say - The Subliminal Power of Positive Cheering

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

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The Subliminal Power Of Positive Cheering Posted: 03 Feb 2015 07:19 PM PST Young athletes often hear phrases of encouragement like, "dig a little deeper" or "you have to want it more than they do" or, ideally, "be mentally tough."  For most kids, these words from a coach, a parent or a teammate go in one ear and out the other.  But, what if there was actually some scientific substance to the words?  Could the smiling, confident face of a coach delivering a pep talk actually have a subliminal effect on performance?  While the conscious brain may dismiss this positive talk, the subconscious mind may actually be putting it to work, according to new research from sports scientists at the University of Kent in England. Besides skill level, one of the most limiting factors of top sporting performance is fatigue. Pushing through the last mile or the fourth quarter without total exhaustion will often determine a winner. Fatigue has long been tied to purely physiological causes like lactic acid build-up or lack of glycogen energy. Then, researchers pointed to a "central governor" theory that claimed that our brains protect us from complete physical collapse by hiding a secret small reserve of energy while signalling to our muscles to quit before the reserve is needed. Imagine a car's "low fuel" warning indicator but with no gauge with a needle showing how much is left in the tank.  As athletes, we trust that when the warning light of fatigue comes on, we need to stop even though a few more gallons of energy may be left in the tank. However, Professor Samuele Marcora, Director of Research at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Kent, has a different theory, which he calls the psychobiological model. "According to this effort-based decision-making model, any factor that influences perception of effort and/or potential motivation influences endurance performance, even when the physiological capacity to perform endurance exercise is unchanged," writes Marcora. He proposes that, "the point at which people stop endurance exercise (i.e., exhaustion) is determined by perception of effort and potential motivation." In his latest study, Marcora wondered if subliminal messages shown to athletes could help block some of the fatigue signaling by communicating with the brain at a subconscious level.  He and his team gathered 13 healthy adults to undergo a wonderful sounding athletic test, the "time to exhaustion trials." Just as it sounds, the volunteers first set a baseline of their fitness by pedaling a stationary bike at an ever increasing difficulty level until they simply could not go any further, either quitting or pedalling slower than 60 RPM.  There were asked for their Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) on a scale of 1-10 of their perception of the activity's difficulty. On their second visit to the lab, they watched a video screen in front of them as they cycled.  For a slight 16 milliseconds (0.02 seconds), either a series of happy faces or a sad faces was flashed on the screen.  At this speed, the human eye is not able to consciously recognize an image, even though it does register with the subconscious brain.  For the group that saw the happy faces, they were able to pedal three minutes longer than the group that saw sad faces.  RPEs were also lower for the "happy" group. The research has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Marcora sees possibilities to help endurance athletes before and during races with positive subliminal messaging delivered by intelligent eyewear. Imagine a cross-country runner or a triathlete receiving ongoing positive reinforcement directly to his or her subconscious mind. For parents, we could send all of those well-intentioned, motivational phrases to our young athletes with a lot less yelling. With the same set-up at a third visit, the test subjects "saw" either positive words (Go, Energy, Lively) or negative words (Stop, Toil, Sleep) flash in front of them.  Again, the positively motivated group outperformed the negative group, this time by 17%.  Simply being exposed to motivating faces or words increased their effort and performance. Like all of those positive homemade signs along the course of a marathon, these results show that this reinforcement does indeed help change our attitude at a level that we don't even recognize.

Captain Clutch! Jeter scripts walk-off in home finale

When Pearce hit the HR to tie and knowing that Jeter would be up third in the bottom of the inning, you just felt something like this would happen. He's done stuff like this too many times in the past. What a way to go out!!

from MLB.com
Baltimore Orioles at New York Yankees - September 25, 2014 | MLB.com NYY Recap:

 NEW YORK -- There had been a healthy amount of discussion about orchestrating Derek Jeter's exit from the field, how best to provide that chance to say goodbye after this final game in the Bronx. The Yankees should have known that no one was going to script it better than he would.

After choking back tears for nine innings on his last night wearing pinstripes, Jeter stamped an exclamation point on the end of his New York career, slashing an opposite-field walk-off single in the ninth that lifted the Yankees to a 6-5 victory over the Orioles on Thursday at Yankee Stadium.

"This is all I've ever wanted to do, and not too many people get an opportunity to do it," Jeter said. "It was above and beyond anything I'd ever dreamt of. I've lived a dream."

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Dr. Tom Hanson, a highly regarded mental performance expert who also used to work with the Yankees full-time back in 2001, wrote today in his newsletter some important reasons why he believes this finish happened the way it did:

I left the Yankees feeling I'd be thrilled to have our son grow up to be like Jeter and I still feel that way.

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p.s. Actually, the first place to check is how much love you are blasting at yourself.  That's what I really want for my son to emulate about Jeter (and hopefully me).  Jeter loves being Jeter.  "That's easy for him, " you might say, "he's Derek Jeter." 

"No," I say, "he's Derek Jeter BECAUSE he thinks that way."  You don't become great and THEN think great.  You think great first.

Consistently, that is what you hear people say about #2, If you has a son, you wanted him to carry himself like Derek Jeter and if you had a daughter, you wanted her to marry someone like Derek Jeter ( and she probably agreed with you, like a jillion % ).

But the second point is even more important as it goes to the heart of why Jeter has been successful throughout his career.

First, he was well-prepared for success by his parents. Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay brought up some of the methods Jeter's parents employed raising him that were strong on personal responsibility, accountability and having a strong belief system in place. They raised him up well.

Second, and this is what Dr. Hanson was alluding to, he didn't put the cart before the horse as many players (and sons) do by thinking, OK when I'm successful, I'll work hard and do the things successful people do (like have an indomitable, positive mind-set). That's putting the cart before the horse. You have a positive mind-set and that leads to success.

I hate to go all Norman Vincent Peale on you, but it's true, and once again Derek Jeter demonstrated that, and many other great qualities last night.

RE2PECT!!