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Mental Toughness - Coggle Diagram
Mental Toughness
Mental toughness is how we evaluate challenges, commitment, commitment, confidence, percieved control and resiliance
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Self confidence as a self-fufilling prophecy: The concept that suggests out of beliefs and expectations actually influence the outcomes we experience. If you have strong beliefs in your abilities, you are more confident with new challenges. If you perceive that you ae confident, you are more likely to show better persistence. It will increase the probability of success because you are more motivated towards achieving your goals.
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Negative self-fulfilling prophecy: if you expect something to go wrong, you create a negative self fufilling prophecy.
- This can lower self image and further increases expectation of future failing (helplessness)
Building self-confidence can help overcome negative self-fufilling. there are different type of self-confidence in athletes: -Physical skills, psychological skills, decision making, fitness, improvement potential, capacity to win. Elite athletes have a strong beleif in their abilities. This can help by:
- Staying calm and relaxed when under pressure and allowing greater attentional focus on a task
- Setting challenging goals pushing towards their limits
- Allowing for increased effort during endurance events
- Greater focus on strategy/tactics- playing to win
Why is it important for coaches to know when an athlete thinks they will not perform well in terms of a self fufilling prophecy?
Atribution theory
Atribution theory focuses on the reasons that individuals use to explain their succsesses and failures.
Locus of control: is something within our control or out of our control? (eg. is your teammates performance under your control, no its not)
Locus of stability: is something a stable factor (your ability) or is it unstable (luck/opposition)
Locus of causality: was the cause internal (your effort) or external (the opposition)
After defeat, Athletes usually use external attributes and blame other factors. But after success they use internal attributes and turn it into self-serving bias
If an athlete feels like defeat was because of their lack of ability (Stable and internal) and that their (good/helpful) actions have no impact on the outcome- this creates learned helplessness. For example, a player is bad at tackling and it affects the team, they feel that they contribute nothing towards the team and in turn do not want to play.
Attribution theory and athlete confidence: Locus of control and stability impact how confident you feel about winning.
Control:
-If an athlete believe they won due to things they did well (practice/effort), they have internal locus of control..
-If an athlete thins that they won due to outside factors (luck/poor opposition), they have an external locus of control.
Stability:
-If an athlete believes winning a competition was something that was always going to happen (they expected themselves to win because they think they are "good" at it) they think it is a stable factor
-If an athlete thinks that winning was luck/one time occurence, then it is an unstable factor.
Personal link: -If i believe that I will win a swimming race, and then i do win the race, that is a stable factor. If i believe i won due to the hours of training prior then that is a internal locus of control. However if i start to think that i won due to the poor opposition then that is my external focus of control, and, if i start to believe that i got lucky because it was a close race (milliseconds difference finish) then that is a unstable factor.
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Mental toughness in sport;
- perceived control: Disciplined thinkers. Individuals act and feel as if they are influential
- commitment: Individuals tackle tasks successfully despite the adversity of them.
- Challenge: Challenges are viewed as opportunities, stressors are viewed as challenges
- Confidence: Mental toughness contributes to confidence in athletes
- Resiliance: Promotes position adaptation in the face of adversity
Developing mental toughness: It is a malleable personality trait.
- Pyschological skills training (PST): Providing athletes with strategies to avoid, reduce or control their state of mind. It aims to evoke certain throughts and avoid others. Examples; Imagery, Goal setting, Self talk.
- Mindfullness: Using 'practices' to becomd more aware in the present moment, Examples; Body scanning, meditation. it promotes task focused behaviour, and for the individual to learn to accept the present moment is rather than try to reduce or avoid it.
High levels of mental toughness have also been associated with negative behaviours:
- Pushing through injuries
- Less compassionate or empathetic to others
- Self compassion: Kindness, common humanity, mindfulness. It can enable athletes to approach, embrace and move forward positively after setbacks. Mental toughness can be used to perservere through difficult training sessions wheras self compassion can be used to help athletes cope with setbacks.
Measuring Mental Toughness:
Some questionnaires focus on resiliance, coping. Whereas others focus on perseverance, determination.
- How could you measure it?
- self reports on scales
Limitations of self reported assessments for mental toughness:
- Self presentation: Individuals want to give a good impression of themselves
- Biases: Individuals might give the answers they think the researcher wants to recieve
- Mental toughness is malleable and can be changes through training (Individuals could change their mental toughness over time through training, leading to different answers over time)
Learned Helplessness: Learned helplessness is associated with an individual's self-perceived lack of control over their future. An individual beleived that their actions will have no effect on a desired outcome. They are setting themselves up to fail
- Athletes can believe that they will never be able to win or improve no matter how hard they try
- They then stop putting in effort
Learned Helplessness is not the truth, it is only a feeling. Athletes can use methods to improve their mindset to overcome learned helplessness and regain control over thier future. Coaches can help by:
-setting personalized tasks
- modifying feedback they provide (if my athlete doesnt think that they can improve, more positive feedback and easier tasks are given to the athlete)