inside excellent life
As psychologists and coaches we will teach to develop in our athletes an open attitude towards mistakes if we are willing to accept that we may even fail in this task.
Are we willing to take this risk by getting 100% involved in this challenge?
Or do we just teach sports or psychological techniques convinced that they are enough to become good athletes and save ourselves from the professional failure?
Teaching young people who want to become expert athletes is a very challenging experience and different from working with adult athletes, who have already reached a high international level. They are young teenagers, boys and girls, who have chosen to devote their lives to the task of discovering if they have the qualities to emerge in sport and to turn their passion into a high-level sports career.
In individual sports, by high level we mean an athlete able to be competitive at the international level. In team sports, we refer to playing, at least, at the level of the two highest level national championships.
We know that once these goals have been set, they must be set aside because the athletes must focus on what they need to do to improve and lead their daily life. We also know that it is not easy to acquire this mentality because of the mistakes that are constantly made. They test the confidence that must support the athletes in reacting immediately to a single error as well as to an unsatisfying performance.
Teaching young people to acquire this open-mindedness to mistakes, interpreting them as the only opportunity, must be the goal of every coach.
Arrigo Sacchi stressed another aspect of this concept, stating that to win you don’t have the problem of winning, otherwise you will never be an innovator.
The objective is therefore “to do things well”, to have a work culture. We all know that “only those who do not do, do not make mistakes”.
If we are aware of this simple truth: we will train our athletes, transferring the idea that making mistakes is a part of the physiology of the race and not something that you can avoid. Let’s train them with this idea and they will become better and more satisfied.
Carlo Ancelotti, during the meeting with the referees, sai that he accepts the mistakes committed by the referees but not the one derived from the VAR.
It is evident from his words that even at the highest level there are less skilled or less experienced referees who make mistakes due to a lack of technical and psychological competences in managing the most important game situations.
It does not surprise me that this lack of competence is still present, because the referee sector is absolutely not engaged in understanding the psychological component of this type of error. I want to remind instead that when Paolo Casarin was the manager of the Serie A referees, about 20 years ago, I was lucky enough to be part of his staff and, contrary to what happened afterwards, we were engaged in identifying the mental component of the referee mistakes and promoting strategies to reduce it. The figure shows that top-level referees make mistakes because of two main factors: the pressure caused by competitive stress and the overload of analysis in decision-making. In all these years, to my knowledge, nothing has been done to improve this situation and, therefore, since individuals do not improve by magic, the referees still continue to make the same mistakes, (Source: Cei Consulting).
The 10 rules for successful training
Losing is a part of the game in which athletes are involved. Everyone knows it, few people accept it. They close out in shame of not having been able to win a race, to avoid coldly assessing what they will have to do in the next race.
Losing is seen as a wound at ourself: “It means that despite training, I cannot do what I know to do. In this way, the athletes don’t develop self-confidence and this explanation of defeat continues to weigh in the next race. The mind is not free, it is not focused on the present but it is taken to see what will happen this time: “Will I be able to do what I know to do or will I fall back into the same mistakes?”
A vicious circle is established limiting the athletes and the performances, because this negative attitude does not allow them to stay focused on the task, waiting for the catastrophe that at some point will come.
Then the justifications: I was tired, I did not sleep well, I felt the burden of responsibility, everyone expects I perform at my best, “Yes, I could … But it’s difficult… in those moments I don’t react”.
There is a well-established mindset to find alibi for the negative performance and there is no humility in saying: “Ok, I’ve got this and that wrong. Well, next time I want to commit myself to finding solutions to these difficulties.”
Competitions are not a health walk. For athletes the races are extreme tests and those who are most able to deal with the difficulties that the extreme situation offers usually win.
We as sports psychologists can play an important role in determining this awareness and teaching positive ways of living these extreme situations. It is not a problem to make mistakes. It is a physiological fact, because the one who makes the least mistakes wins. Making mistakes is part of the race, even those who win make mistakes. They probably make fewer mistakes and are less influenced by their mistakes.
We chill do mistakes: only those who are presumptuous can think differently. We make one mistake and the next minute we think: “I’ll correct myself in this way.”
How many times do you have to do this? I don’t know, it depends on the duration of the race but one thing is certain:
“It doesn’t matter how many times you fall, but how quickly you get up.
List of the most common mistakes made by athletes starting from their sentences.
If your athletes commit any of these mistakes, it means that you have not taught them to give value at their commitment in training:
In sports as in every other area of our lives we make mistakes. The perfect performance does not exist. Each performance is a mixture of skills and mistakes; usually win who commits fewer mistakes.
The mistakes are everywhere and they are an important part of human performance. We can’t hide from our mistakes. In addition, the result of the mistakes are always technical aspects, we see the athletes who are accelerating or slowing too much their actions, which miss a shot, too stiff to move, pulling the serve ball in the net and so on. Otherwise the cause of these mistakes can be attributed to different aspects. In fact, the mistake can be caused by different factors, going from technical incompetence to difficulties to manage the competitive stress, lack of concentration or because the athletes are too tired.
“When people feel stressed, of course, they no longer feel safe and are further inhibited in practicing new ways of acting. Instead they become defensive, relying on their most familiar habits … For all these reasons, learning … works best under conditions where people feel safe – but not so relaxed that they lose motivation. There’s an optimal level of brain arousal that helps people to learn, the state which both motivation and interest are high. A sense of psychological safety creates an atmosphere in which people can then experiment with little risk of embarrassing or fear of the consequences of failure” (From: D. Goleman, R. Boyatzis e A.MkKeee, Primal Leadership).
During the training to provide continuous feedback about commitment is a key point to enhance learning. Athletes should be aware about the commitment level they must show during exercises of every training session. The reasons why one should not engage just enough are as follows:
