inside excellent life
TAIS is a system for assessing attentional and interpersonal style and these data show that élites’ emotional overload is an important component reducing their performance, including world record holders, who instead suffer less the environmental distractions and cognitive mental overload. This also explains why top athletes use psychological preparation programs to reduce competitive stress.
We handle an innovative aspect of psychology. It regards the psychology of performance.
The challenges:
• Know the best professional experiences to use as a yardstick of our professional action
• Understand what it means continuous improvement in this field
• Get in line or higher than the sector average
We have to evaluate ourselves in relation to:
• Short- and medium-term professional goals
• Psychological implications of this work for the psychologist
• Performance Profile required for these targets
• Who / what can promote my profession
• Risks and possible individual, professional and environmental difficulties
• Quality of the work program
• Quality of service provided
• Customer satisfaction
In any sport to be focused on the present is one of the key success factors and its main enemy are the emotions arising in the athletes’ mind to distract them from the performance.
Any young athlete who learned the necessary skills to be competitive at his/her sport level should devote much of the training to improve this competence to compete with a winning attitude.
Otherwise, the technique will not help anything, rather it will be a source of further frustration for the young athletes not able to use it in the race, because they are dominated by an emotional condition that hinders them.
If you want to be competitive you have to train vigorously your self-control, it’s the only way you can prove the fundamental value of the technical skills.
The self-control of the sports performance is a very difficult task even for the expert athletes.
But who can be defined as an expert? Who is able to effectively manage a sequence of increasing challenges in specific situations.
Self-control is based on the development of the self-regulation skills in three distinct areas:
The expert athlete must be accurate and consistent in performing these activities of self-regulation by monitoring in the same time the results of the performances, so as to be aware of what are the best conditions to compete effectively and increase self-confidence.
The mental coaching is the means by which to train these skills.
The question of the intensity of the workout is always a hot topic in the training of athletes at international level. The question you should ask is “where I lose intensity?”" Earlier, during or at the end of my performance? It’s on the basis of this assessment that the training should be modified. Many athletes instead suffer this deterioration of the performance, saying: “I missed just a little to win.” Do not ask instead how to change the training to eliminate this problem. At wich category you belong as athlete or coach, to those who arehappy to be good or to those who seek the best for them?
The last two Sundays I have been with shooters, 16/19 years old, and I realized again how important it’s for them even in training to be supported by a calm and peaceful mood. Trap shooting is a sport that requires before shooting a condition of total concentration followed soon after by a period of relaxation and waiting for about 40 seconds before the next shot. This psychological situation is repeated 25 times, which is the number of shots for each round. The confidence to perform effectively the shot and as a result to hit the target, is based on a mental state of calm that when it fails opens the door for a thousand doubts that hinder the performance. To these young athletes is then required to be 25 times in this state of mind, and especially after having made a mistake it’s not easy to push away the critical thoughts that appear and getting focused on the next shot. Perform this task, to quickly find serenity after an error is an exercise that educates their mind to react more positively otherwise there would be a very real possibility of committing right after another. Thing that can happen on the other hand, as it is impossible not to make mistakes. So this exercise, to relax and focus, must be performed each time, knowing that in any case some plate will not be equally hit, who is more constant in this exercise will improve more quickly than others. In this way the shooters train them to maintain a calm and peaceful mood with the awareness that it’s the basis of the confidence of knowing how to hit the next target.
Every day I realize more and more how the self-esteem of the athletes is challenge during the races. It happens for the high expectations that those who have high commitment have toward their performances. This does not mean that athletes are individuals with a low level of self-esteem. The situations they face require they test every time the will to do their best. Only the musicians live in situations of this kind or students who want to excel. If these are the circumstances that athletes have to face, it’s necessary that the daily workout is different than in the past, because it’s one thing is to learn/improve the technique, but something very different is knowing replicate during competitions, when the emotional tension can destroy even the best coaching. Are the coaches aware of this difference and are the athletes willing to get more involved ?
The awareness can be defined as the “miracle that, in a heartbeat, draws our mind and reassemble it, allowing us to live every moment of our lives” (Thich Nhat Hanh). Jack Kornfield has described it as “the innate human ability to deliberately pay full attention to the situation in which we find ourselves, to our practical experiences, and learn from them.”
Awareness is the basis of mental coaching, maximize learning and improve performance requires an understanding of ourselves and the emotions that underlie it. The consciousness of this moment is specific to each activity and determines the condition of readiness for action: a global psycho-physical state, involving what is going to happen, that is the performance.
