Some athletes have responded to the blog I wrote about the need to be the best fan of ourselves, saying that it’s really hard to do it, because the mistakes as are the negative performances too harshly test this belief. I agree and in fact I consider the self-confidence as the culmination of a process of psychological maturation and certainly not the starting point. This does not mean that we have not to do everything must be done to become self-confident, without which we cannot sustain the commitment needed in sport, school or job. Who wants to excel must be prepared to strongly support the commitment through any kind of difficulty. In this sense, we can say that the hard engagement must become a lifestyle, not something to show only when all goes well. In fact, we should know that we must be prepared to spend more hours than that in the beginning we had planned.
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But how hard it’s to be the best fan of ourselves! An athlete should show this belief toward him/herself and instead it’s one of the hardest things to do. A few examples:
- A girl says to me “I did four races this year and none went well … then I’ll stop I cannot continue to do well only in training.”
- A boy says to me “I was competing well then I thought that I could not continue in this way and so I made some mistakes and I did not get into the final.”
- Another boy at the world championships before the final “This time I have to take a medal.” It came in fourth.
- A girl “this time I lose bad, I did not believe in myself.”
Each of them has been working as a professional athlete, it’s their main activity, it’s that one in which they want to have success in life. On these occasions they have not proved to be the best fans of themselves. Competitive sport requires a high level of self-confidence and recklessness to know that the next time will be better than this one. This awareness comes from the engagement in training, to know that it is true that 1, 2, 3 0 multiple times I will lose, but it does not matter because continuing in this way the results will come. The important thing is to continue to sustain ourselves, especially when things go wrong. In summary sit needs:
- Total commitment in training
- Total support in the race regardless of the results
- Confident expectation of good results
I often wonder who has the sense to keep talking about excellence in sport when continually discover how doping has got into this world and how the ethics in many athletes confuse with the code of silence. The ethics in these cases is to protect another athlete who dopa, according to a pathological definition of morality, according to which you must protect your environment regardless of the actions are illegal and immoral. The main reason given to justify this approach to doping consists in thinking that it’s not possible to excel without this help. Taking this point of view, those who oppose, condemning this kind of sports culture, he is considered a moralist who wants to impose anachronistic rules, since all dope. Domina Embé philosophy: “Have you seen that that athlete took doping”, “Embé that will never be, so they do it all, if you want to win there is no alternative.” This philosophy is characterized by two main ideas: “So much the worse, the better” and “They’re all thieves.” When this view is widespread among adults, many have begun to take drugs to participate in Master events; there are cases in which parents have asked the doctor a “little help” for their son, increasingly gyms have become places of sales of illegal products and there are doctors and physiotherapists who have undertaken this type of advice to increase their earnings. It’s instead starting from the wide distribution of this bleak conception of sports culture that we must respond and continue to talk about excellence. Regards the absolute level of sports performance, depending only on the commitment and dedication of the athlete, prepared by teachers and programs as value. We must not give in to the philosophy dell’Embè because this devastates our young people and their teachers. The doping in sport and any illegal action must be fought by spreading the culture of commitment and the right to dream that it is possible to achieve any result. We have to legally pursue who uses doping but at the same time we need to change this culture of sport deadly. Children and young people are our future and they have to learn that they can have success thanks to their efforts. We must do more and better because the coaches are not only professionally competent but totally involved in a work ethic vision of their work.
One parent wrote to me talking about guys that improve their sport performances by getting the times bringing us to suspect the use of doping and of how to support his/her motivation to continue the commitment to sport. We have to face with two problems. The first concerns the suspicion of doping. At this regard, if you want to know more you should discuss about this with the managers/coaches of your sport club, to understand if your perception is correct for them or whatever. If you continue to have these doubts you should decide what you want to do and what are the procedures for reporting these allegations to the anti-doping commission of the sport federation.
In relation to the motivation of the young swimmer who feels helpless and demotivated, first the parent must certainly listen him/her, accepting the feelings of disappointment and anger. At the same time we must tell you that in the sports world there are athletes who choose shortcuts, while there are others who base their improvement only and exclusively on their commitment. These last must be his/her model and should refer to them thinking about the future as an athlete. As in any other human activity there will always be those who get the results with the fraud, they may win some battles but they will not win the war until we are many who practice a sport clean. In my opinion these are the reasons for which I would speak to my son, telling that hard work pays off, maybe more slowly at the beginning, but no one can ever take away the satisfaction of knowing that we are what we are thanks only to ourselves, to our commitment and dedication. I think this is a good reason to be proud of ourselves.
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.
See the interview with Antonio Conte is embarrassing, because he cannot find reasons to explain the absence of Juventus today after the 70th of the second time against Fiorentina. Trivial errors: first goal on a penalty kick; second, Buffon error; third, Fiorentina player let alone as if it was a recreational match, and the last, the counterattack. Fifteen minutes in which Juventus was physically present on the field and not mentally. Not only the team did not struggle, it did not really play. It’s hard to see how the team that in the last two years has made of the total commitment its winning key now it’s missing it, not just today, because in this championship it has taken already 10 goals . Players tired and mentally satisfied? It is notpossible to play for three consecutive years always at the best and this is the way in which it occurs? Impatience with a leader who always remember to the players the value of the hard work? The team higher class level of this year were led to believe that you can win by engaging less? Only Conte and the team may know. Waiting for Real Madrid.
The search for talent is often based on a basic idea that can be summed up as: Why teach a dog to climb a tree, when the monkeys do it so well. Apparently the reasoning is flawless and as a result scientists have made search for them and discard the dogs. Then arose the first problems, so for example the lemurs while being at ease on the trees are too slow, others are too unruly and attack and so on. Despite these limitations still many scientists screen athletes/monkeys on the basis of their physical characteristics and motor skills. The nature leads us, however, also other examples that are not usually considered. The story of the caterpillar becomes a butterfly or that of the swan as a young is not really a splendor as it is an adult teach that the appearance, so how the young are at a given moment of development, may not correspond they will become. These stories should teach us that research on talent should not be based on the simple sum of the capacity possessed in a specific time but must be a long-term journey, because it’s not true that the best at 14 years old, they will be also at 16 . Commitment and dedication are two dimensions that usually are not part of the dimensions examined, however, they are considered as the most important by top athletes; they should instead begin to be taken into account. The other key aspect to succeed as an athlete is to assess the degree of improvement of the young during the competitive season. Athletes initially less competent can come to compete with the best ones, thanks to a greater willingness to learn from training. So do not discard a priori all dogs, interesting surprises may be happen.
Learning new psychological skills to improve the performances is not difficult indeed it is quite easy. Despite more and more athletes embark on the road of mental training, many drop out after a short period, while continuing to think they’d like to be more confident, more focused, more tough and so on. This is because many think that the psychological preparation is something that it could be learn in a few months (a few anyway) and then in a spontaneous manner when you go in competition you will be mentally ready. In fact, many athletes have difficulty understanding the psychological preparation to the race is a real form of training and as with the physical and technical training who continue for ever the same applies to the mental. It means the athlete should strive to improve mentally every day that is dedicated to the sport, there can be no shortcuts.
Jacques Commeres is the assistant coach of the French basketball team and introduces the theme of the training of adolescents all’INSEP Congress held in Paris. According to the coach, basketball is a sport that requires discipline and creativity. He said that young people today are different from those he has known since he began his career. For him the impatience of youth and their need to stay connected can be a problem as to develop and validate what you have learned during the training sessions because it needs certain time after the workout. Personally, I think the young people of the ’80s were more rebels than those of today and permissive education was already very popular among parents. I agree on the problem that the technological revolution that has invested them reduces their ability to pay attention for long periods of time. The adolescents need to be trained in school as in sports to tackle the tasks with a commitment to remain constant over time and motivated in performing those repetitive tasks that are present in any business.
The case of Mattia Destro, Roma player, who is going through a period of time in which he did not score a goal can be interpreted as an example of mental laziness that is present in the players, the coaches and managers. The general interpretation of this phenomenon is like, “it does not matter, it happen that attackers have a period in which not score a goal, it happened to Tom, the famous striker who then started to score.” These are justifications that we find only in the football. If my daughter was studying and then take the bad grades, I would not say for sure, “then go.” If a young in a company began to make mistakes you would not say for sure, “no matter it is just a temporary block”. In football, however this happens, you train and then you do not play well, but it does not matter sooner or later you will improve. In football, also there is no rush to recover because everyone expects that to happen at any moment. It’s dominant then the magical thinking, that every moment can be good to start scoring. It’s clear that with this mindset nobody will think that he could be helped by a program of mental training built just for him, because he does not need, but what counts is to cultivate the illusion that you enter in the field and score a goal, and so will everything passes. Nor should we forget that these players earn a lot of money for that in any case their life continues to be quiet for this reason. If you get bad grades in school or at work if you mess up you could lose the year or to be fired, and perhaps for this reason that these people are much more committed to practice what they need to do to improve.
