Tag Archive for 'abitudine'

Atalanta-Juventus: what I learned

What I learned from the Coppa Italia final Atalanta-Juventus.

Pretension - Juventus has finally demanded of itself to play with the attitude that has been its own in past years of a winning and tough team. Until now, this was expected to happen but it hadn’t, except in a few rare matches. The self-esteem of a group depends on the level of success achieved, in turn this depends on how much a team expects from itself. The demands must be matched by behaviors on the pitch. When this does not happen, the behaviors are insufficient, the expectations become limited or unrealistic as in the case of Juve where it was expected to win, without showing the appropriate behaviors. The effect over time, is evident in few successes and a reduction in collective self-esteem. Yesterday’s Juve welded together the expectation and “who does what at the right time”. This union determines the standard of play of the team.

Habit - Atalanta plays very well and this is decisive in the league because they play against many lower level teams and the result of the single match is not decisive for the final result. In the cups instead, the single matches are decisive and the defeat determines the elimination. Matches like these require a different mental approach compared to those in the league, as the opponents are often at least of the same level and winning these matches is a must if you want to move forward. It’s not enough to be good, you also need to acquire the habit of playing these matches, and in any case quickly develop the attitude of someone who plays to win. There is no advantage in playing well if you lose, the emphasis must be on playing with intensity and concentration. The phrase that best illustrates this concept was expressed by Alex Ferguson when he said that he could not wait for the 75th minute to arrive, because he knew that his team would certainly score at least one goal or when talking about the quarter of an hour of the Grande Torino, when Valentino Mazzola pulled up the sleeves of the shirt. in my opinion Atalanta must acquire this habit.

It’s essential to coach the habit to be ready

The athletes often imagine that on race day they will be ready to face it. The results teach that this result occurs infrequently. It happens more often that athletes get scared, they get too worried and provide poor performance.

The athletes have to train themselves to change. The habits become useful only when behaviors that define them were repeated, repeated and repeated again. We must not settle for train-enough-well, because we do not build winning habits. We have to continually improve and consolidate the progress made.

It’s a kind of emotionally compelling work. Each exercise must be first mentally imagined, just as if we were providing that exercise at that time. Only after this mental exercise, the athletes should switch to perform the exercise. The principle is: the performance starts when the mind is ready to begin. Never before.

The justification don’t follow this procedure  it’s to think: “If I’m wrong anyway?” We are too focused on the outcome. We find difficult to accept the mistakes and when we do wrong, too easily we become upset or depressed.

One of the main purposes of the workout is to accept the mistakes, going immediately back at the personal optimal emotional condition.

 

 

How an habit is established

Any behaviour that can be reduced to a routine is one less behaviour that we must spend time and energy consciously thinking about and deciding upon. Habits therefore free up time and energy for other matters. As Charles Duhigg puts it in his book “The power of habit”, “this effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage… [for] an efficient brain… allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviours, such as walking and choosing what to eat, so we can devote mental energy to inventing spears, irrigation systems, and, eventually, airplanes and video games”. Duhigg then moves into the area of how they are formed and how our brains fall into habits and draws on the research from disciplines such as – advertising, sports, addiction, religion and others. According to Duhigg, it comes down to a simple,three-part loop: cue, routine and reward.

In the author’s own words: “first, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical, mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future”. If everything lines up, the brain ‘remembers’ the loop, and is predisposed to using the same routine when the same cue comes up again in the future.

The more often the brain uses the loop to good effect the deeper the behaviour becomes ingrained— to the point where the behaviour itself becomes more and more automatic. Eventually, the cue ends up being so bound up with the reward that the cue itself will trigger a craving for the reward: “the cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges”. Habits could be brought about by a craving for positive emotions, or accomplishment or relationships.

We are what we do daily

Aristotle said that “We are what we do consistently. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” In fact, the sport is full of stories of young people who have been ruined by their talento (physical and technical), because they thought this gift was enough to be successful and then when life put them in face of conclusive evidence they have lost and disappeared. Because we are what we do every day; study, work and training for athletes. So excellence comes from the habit of training with a total commitment and dedication. Who does not understand that this is the way to go day by day believes to go ahead mainly with the natural talent, but unfortunately it’s only an illusion that the first bumps will destroy.