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.

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental: Coaches Should Reward The Effort More Than The Skill

This articles (below) have an awful lot of Carol Dweck and Mindset: The New Psychology for Success and Angela Duckworth's True Grit in them. Perseverance and effort as the keys to success in sports as well as many other life endeavors.

Football coaches verbalize it better with "It's not how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you get back up". Of course, in football they spend a lot of time knocking each other down, so that makes sense from a coaching / motivational perspective. 

But think about baseball. 

Not a lot of time spent getting physically knocked down in baseball. Unless you're the high school version of Barry Bonds watching your moon shots leave the yard. Then maybe getting some extra dirt in your diet.  

But think about the mental aspect of the game or your life outside the game. How many times do we mentally or emotionally get knocked down and stay down rather than bounce right back up? Or check out and stop playing hard, so to speak, for innings or games or days or weeks on end? Oh yeah right, I'm the only one this happens to!! OK folks!!

There is so much valuable wisdom for athletes, students, teachers, parents and coaches tied up in some of the quotes below that they do bear repeating.  Definitely something to work on. 

Those life lessons from the ball field, you gotta love 'em!! Now, if we could just stop giving everyone in T-Ball a trophy, we might just have a chance to turn things around a bit.  


from 80percentmental.com:
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental: Coaches Should Reward The Effort More Than The Skill:

Our youth sports culture is similar to the classroom.  Kids who are divided into “A” or “B” teams at an early age are taught that their development path is set; the skills they have now are the same skills they will have in the future.  It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle as the “A” teams get better coaching, play in the better leagues against better competition and the talent gap widens.

 Often, parents can also, unknowingly, contribute to this cycle.  As in school, when a child is told that his or her success is due to his brain not his effort, the perception begins that when they do eventually struggle with a math test or a tougher opponent, there is little they can do to improve.

Jin Li, a psychology professor at Brown University, has also been studying cultural differences in learning and teaching.  One of her research projects recorded conversations between parents and children to hear the language used.  

 There were subtle differences between American and Asian parents when complimenting their kids.  While the Americans praised with phrases like, “you’re so smart”, Asian parents focused on the struggle, “you’ve worked so hard on learning that and now you did it.”

 “So the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the challenges, not giving up, and that’s what leads to success,” Li said in the same NPR interview.

 Every young athlete will face challenges as they move up the ladder from youth clubs to high school to college.  Instilling them with the belief that they can improve through hard work will keep them motivated to get to the other side of the wall.  Their support team of parents and coaches can help this process by rewarding the learning process.

“Think about that [kind of behavior] spread over a lifetime,” Stigler concluded. “That’s a big difference.”

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Why Boosting Perseverance Predicts Success More than a Harvard Degree

Posted: June 25th, 2010 by Michele Borba

http://www.micheleborba.com/blog/2010/06/25/why-perseverance-counts-more-than-a-harvard-degree-focus-on-what-really-matters-mom/

Did you know that more top CEOs in United States graduated from a state college than an Ivy League University such as Harvard, Yale, or Princeton?

Shocked?

Research is showing there’s a far more important predictor of a grad’s future success than the prestige of the school or faculty or even the price of tuition. What matters far more is the  graduate’s “personal drive quotient.”

Nothing beats stick-to-it-ness and hard work when it comes to boosting success-absolutely nothing. And research continues to confirm that crucial fact.

 One of the most fascinating recent studies on student achievement was conducted by Harold Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Stevenson sought to answer a question many Americans ask, “Why do Asian students do better academically than American students?”

Since 1979, Stevenson’s team of researchers conducted five intensive cross-national studies analyzing students’ achievement in the United States, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Hundreds of hours observing students and interviewing their teachers, the researchers reached a conclusion: a critical key lies in what parents emphasize about their children’s learning. Here’s the difference in parenting styles:

Asian parents strongly stress the value of effort with their children.  Over and again they tell their children, “Work as hard as you can, and you will be successful.” By expecting their children to work hard, and emphasizing the attitude: “there are no excuses for poor grades, you just didn’t work hard enough,” perseverance is nurtured in Asian children. And the parental expectations had a remarkable effect on their children. The researchers found on the whole, Asian children worker longer and harder than their American counterparts because they had recognized their success was based on how hard they worked.

Instead of prioritizing how much effort our kids put into their learning attempts, research found that most American parents emphasized: “So what grade did you get?” or “How many did you miss?” or “Did you win?”

The researchers also found that the effort a child put into their process is not nearly as important to the American parent as the end product of the grade or score.

Stevenson also found American parents place a greater emphasis on their children’s innate abilities. They tend to lower their academic expectations for their children if they perceive them to have lower academic abilities.

An Asian parents’ philosophy is different: any child can succeed regardless of an IQ score or handicap–success is all a matter of how hard you are willing to work.

Just think a minute of the long term effect of stressing effort could have on our children!

Our kids would learn from an early age that there’s nothing that can stop them from succeeding if they put their heart and soul into their endeavors. They would see mistakes or failures as just temporary setbacks, instead of as excuses to quit. If they just keep on trying, and use their mistakes as learning clues, they’ll ultimately achieve their goals!

Daniel Wolpert on Why you have a Brain - To hit a fastball, of course!!

Yogi Berra is credited with saying "You can't think and hit at the same time". As usual, Yogi was correct, apparently you cannot 'consciously' think and hit at the same time. However, you can think 'subconsciously' and hit. Who'd have thunk it?

Metrics for the subconscious organization
http://blogs.sas.com/content/valuealley/2012/01/17/metrics-for-the-subconscious-organization/

Think about what it’s like to learn to ride a bicycle, or play the piano, or hit a fast ball, or to coach a group of middle schoolers to do the same. If asked to explain how you stay balanced on a bicycle, you probably couldn’t do it. If you tried to think about each finger finding the right piano key, you could never play a series of chords let alone an entire song. A fast ball reaches home plate in four-tenths of a second, two-tenths faster than your conscious brain can register it. Yet somehow, you still manage to ride a bike, play the piano, and hit that fast ball, often with considerable skill. What’s going on here?

A new book out by David Eagleman entitled, “Incognito – The Secret Lives of the Brain”, investigates these types of abilities and explains how much, how very, very much of what we do and what we think is managed by subconscious processes completely outside of our conscious control and often beyond our conscious awareness (i.e. temperature control, digestion). It was Freud who first described this “iceberg” of mental processes, with 90% of it below the conscious surface, now further advanced by modern science, which has discovered that your subconscious makes its own decisions several tenths of a second before the conscious mind is aware of that decision. The “you’ of your subjective conscious experience is a minor player when it comes to most of what it is your body does, primarily brought into action only when there is a tie vote or a conflict among your subconscious processes. How do we know this is true, that the brain really works that way? Because you can hit a fast ball. Some part of your brain made the decision to pull the trigger and swing away before your conscious self was made aware of that decision.

Great stuff from Sports are 80 Percent Mental. This is where science meets real-life, on the baseball field.

"So, our brain is constantly doing Bayesian calculations to compute the probability that the pitch that our eyes tell us is a fastball is actually a fastball based on our prior knowledge.  Every hitter knows when this calculation goes wrong when our prior knowledge tells our brain so convincingly that the next pitch will be a fastball, it overrules the real-time sensory input that this is actually a nasty curve ball.  The result is either a frozen set of muscles that get no instructions from a confused brain or a swing that is way too early. "

Sports are 80 Percent Mental...

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Daniel Wolpert On Why You Have A Brain Posted: 31 Mar 2012 06:35 PM PDT Daniel Wolpert is absolutely certain about one thing.  "We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements," stated Wolpert, Director of the Computational and Biological Learning Lab at the University of Cambridge.  "Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you."  After that assertive opening to his 2011 TED Talk, he reported that, despite this important purpose, we have a long way to go in understanding of how exactly the brain controls our movements. Daniel Wolpert The evidence for this is in how well we've learned to mimic our movements using computers and robots.  For example, take the game of chess.  Since the late 1990s, computer software has been playing competitive matches and beating human master players by using programmed tactics and sheer computing power to analyze possible moves.  However, Wolpert points out that a five-year-old child can outperform the best robot in actually moving chess pieces around the board. From a sports context, think of a baseball batter at the plate trying to hit a fastball.  It seems intuitive to watch the ball, time the start of the swing, position the bat at the right height to intercept the ball and send it deep.  So, why is hitting a baseball one of the most difficult tasks in sports?  Why can't we perform more consistently? The problem is noise.  Not noise as in the sense of sound but rather the variability of incoming sensory feedback, in other words, what your eyes and ears are telling you.  In baseball, the location and speed of the pitch are never exactly the same, so the brain needs a method to adapt to this uncertainty.  To do this, we need to make inferences or beliefs about the world. The secret to this calculation, says Wolpert, is Bayesian decision theory, a gift of 18th century English mathematician and minister, Thomas Bayes.  In this framework, a belief is measured between 0, no confidence in the belief at all, and 1, complete trust in the belief.  Two sources of information are compared to find the probability of one result given another.  In the science of movement, these two sources are data, in the form of sensory input, and knowledge, in the form of prior memories learned from your experiences. Thomas Bayes So, our brain is constantly doing Bayesian calculations to compute the probability that the pitch that our eyes tell us is a fastball is actually a fastball based on our prior knowledge.  Every hitter knows when this calculation goes wrong when our prior knowledge tells our brain so convincingly that the next pitch will be a fastball, it overrules the real-time sensory input that this is actually a nasty curve ball.  The result is either a frozen set of muscles that get no instructions from a confused brain or a swing that is way too early. Our actions and movements become a never-ending cycle of predictions.  Based on the visual stimuli of the approaching baseball, we send a command to our muscles to swing at the pitch at a certain time.  We receive instant feedback from our eyes, ears and hands about our success or failure in hitting the ball, then log that experience in our memory. Wolpert calls this process our "neural simulator" which constantly and subconsciously makes predictions of how our movements will influence our surroundings. "The fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise," he explained. We can get a sense of what its like to break this action-feedback loop.  Imagine a pitcher aiming at the catcher's mitt, releasing the ball but then never being able to see where the pitch ended up.  The brain would not be able to store that action as a success or failure and the Bayesian algorithm for future predictions would be incomplete. Try this experiment with a friend.  Pick up a heavy object, like a large book, and hold it underneath with your left hand.  If you now use your right hand to lift the book off of your left hand, you'll notice that your left hand stays steady.  However, if your friend lifts the book off of your hand, your brain will not be able to predict exactly when that will happen.  Your left hand will rise up just a little after the book is gone, until your brain realizes it no longer needs to compensate for the book's weight.  When your own movement removed the book, your brain was able to cancel out that action and predict with certainty when to adjust your left hand's support. "As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down," said Wolpert.  "But we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is and then combine those in a real Bayesian way." Our movements, especially in sports, are very complex and the brain to body communication pathways are still being discovered.  We'll rely on self-proclaimed "movement chauvinists" like Daniel Wolpert to continue to map those routes.  In the meantime, you can still brag about the pure genius of your five-year-old hitting a baseball.

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Try This!!!
From exploratorium.edu
http://www.exploratorium.edu/baseball/reactiontime.html

Click on the "play ball" button, then move your cursor over the part of the screen that shows the baseball field. As soon as you see "swing batter," click on your screen as fast as you can.

Fastball Reaction Time imitates a 90-mph fastball thrown by a major league pitcher. While this exhibit doesn't test if you could actually hit a fastball, it does test whether you could react in time to hit one. When you see the "swing batter" screen, a signal in your eye sends a message to a part of your brain that controls your muscles. Your brain must then send a signal to your muscles, telling them to click. Although it takes some time for the signal to travel along each nerve, the major delay in your reaction time occurs at the junction points in between the different nerves involved, and between the nerves and the muscles in your fingers.