Today’s topic of the blog is going to be about a pet peeve of mine that I have noticed in young athletes the past few years. I don’t know if it is because now as a coach I pay more attention to other athletes (since that is my job after all) or if maybe I was oblivious to it as an athlete myself, but there is so much self-doubt, negative thought, and just giving up. I don’t understand! When did it become “cool” to talk yourself down and to give less than your absolute best (or talk other people down for that matter)?
Here’s my theory, it deals with a viscous cycle of Attitude Contagion, Self-fulfilling Prophecy, and Self-Handicapping.
Attitude Contagion is when a certain attitude spreads from person to person because of their proximity. What I mean by that is just like sickness and laughter, attitude (both positive AND negative) spreads like wildfire. All it takes is one person with a particularly bad attitude to drag down many people (or an entire team) who were otherwise quite positive before practice started. We all know how hard it is to be productive and at your best when you’re having a bad day, and bringing other people down to your level isn’t helping you! All it’s doing is hurting others. But nonetheless, I feel a negative attitude has become more of the norm on teams and in social groups. People feed off of others’ attitude and further spirals everyone down. This of course leads us to the next step…
The Self-fulfilling Prophecy is the tendency for predictions (either from external or internal sources) to influence the outcome in the direction of the prediction. What this means is that if someone, or your own thoughts, tell you that you can’t do something, then it is more likely that you will not be able to do it. OR, if people tell you can do something, and if you tell yourself you can, then chances are you will be able to do it! The body is amazing at accomplishing what the mind thinks. If you keep saying “don’t cramp, don’t cramp, don’t cramp” what usually happens? Cramp. If you dwell about dying in the 3rd 50 of your 200 free, guess which 50 becomes the hardest and worst 50 of the race…you got it, the third one. Hearing and believing these negative thoughts lead to negative outcomes, and then multiple negative outcomes brings us to the next stage in the cycle…
Self-Handicapping, a strategy people use to avoid giving effort in order to protect their self-esteem from failure. This basically means that an athlete will “make excuses” before their performance so that if/when they fail, they can say “I told you so.” This often leads to athletes giving less than their best effort because in their mind failure isn’t so bad when you don’t try, but failure when you try as hard as possible is much worse. An example of this is an athlete talking to parents, coaches, friends, etc. before a race and saying things like “I feel slow, I slept terribly last night, warm up was too crowded, I’m wearing an old suit,” etc. I’m sure you’ve all heard (or have personally thought) these comments many times. While some of these comments don’t necessarily have negative words in them, they have a negative connotation and people perceive it as negative. Which leads into, guess what?! Attitude Contagion.
It’s a detrimental cycle that I find is holding many athletes back from Exceeding Their Potential both in the pool, and in places like the classroom, social life, at home, everywhere!
The fix is simple everyone! First, people need to take control of their own attitude and mindset, then we need leaders to step up and take control of spreading their positivity through the rest of the team and throughout their life. Now I get it, everyone has bad days, and sometimes a bad day cannot be conquered. That’s ok, you can’t have great days without some crap days here and there. But what you can be in control of is how you handle that bad day. Your negativity does not need to be spread throughout your world, try to keep it from the people that will feed off of it that can’t help you. If you need to talk to someone about what’s happening, find someone you can trust to talk to. Talk to your parents, sibling, coach, or best friend. It doesn’t help anyone to drag down poor ol’ Becky who you only see at practice three times a week.
Like I said, attitude is contagious. Let’s spread positivity and have the self-fulfilling prophecy work in the positive direction rather than the negative, and let’s work together to eliminate this self-handicapping tool that only pulls people down. If you have trouble conquering your own self-talk and mindset, sign up for some Performance Consultations with Excel and let’s Build a Better Mindset!
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