A forgotten principle: First commitment and second the result

We know from Seligman and Dweck’s research that these types of attributions are pervasive and damage a person’s self-confidence in the long run.

I am convinced that the intervention with them, and in any case with young people, is to help them acquire a performance appraisal that has as its goal the development of the person and not the increase of pessimism toward oneself, with all the negative psychological implications that this entails.

This negative mindset has been learned from parents and coaches who are too result-centered and much less performance development-centered.

• When training is focused on task-focused attention, mistakes are interpreted as learning opportunities.
• When training is focused predominantly on the outcome, errors are evidence of the young person’s inability and slowness to learn.

Reward effort first and results second. And not vice versa. I’m talking about the ABC’s of teaching, but if today we meet many young athletes who do not think in this way, it means, at least in my opinion, that they have not been trained with this approach.