The New Season Ahead - Dr. Mike the Psych
The new season ahead
As one season comes to an end and the dark nights and mornings start to kick in, the next few weeks and months are going to test the motivation levels of the most committed athletes. How do you stay motivated during these months? How do you ensure that you put the same levels of commitment into your training on a consistent day to day basis? For some athletes this can be easy. For others they need to learn these skills. This article will take you through some of those skills. First we will look at where you get your motivation from and some of the strategies you can use to 'get the backside' out of bed in the morning. Second, we will look at how you can get the most out of your training session by putting a quality process in place so that the level of training is one that continually moves forward and fills the confidence tank and hence refills the motivational batteries on a day to day basis.
Where do I get my motivation from?
Motivation is an extremely simple concept when it understood right. We have two pre-dominant motivational orientations. On one hand we have the fear of failure. This is the fear of making mistakes, the fear of letting people down and the fear of losing or being the person that messes up big time. On the other hand, we have the need to achieve success. This is the need to achieve something big such as standing on the podium at the Olympics. Here in lies our answer! If you are pre-dominantly motivated by the fear of failure and you don't want to make mistakes, make this your long term focus. Set your goals around being the person that doesn't want to mess it up. I'm sure you will agree this is a pretty strong motivator as if you don't want to be that person, you will then make sure you do everything in your power to ensure that this doesn't happen. Likewise, if you are predominantly motivated by the need to achieve, set your long terms goals around being on the podium and what it will be like when you become the Olympic Champion. This will motivate you to get up to train on those dark mornings. Keep your goals in a place where you can see them, such as on the ceiling above your bed.
Making sure your training fills the confidence tank
The key to quality training is to ensure you have a quality process in place, which is carried out on a consistent basis. In the two Olympic sports I work with, we ensure that at all levels, there is a culture of aim, plan, do and review in everything we do. This enables us to consistently learn and ensure that we are continually working towards our goal. In shaving off the odd hundredth of a second here and there, we find out what works and this then replenishes the confidence tank which in turn increases the desire to come back and train harder the next time out to find further performance gains. The aim relates to what you want to get from the training session. Making sure you have a consistent goal in place for the training session is vital as you will then have something to measure against. Once you have the goal, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Work this through with your coach and identify two or three key process goals. The doing part is like Ronseal in that it does exactly what it says on the tin. This provides you with vital information which you can then review your performance. What worked well? What didn't go so well? What do I need to do differently? However, it is important to be aware that unless this process is introduced as a philosophy to your training, those performance improvements you strive for will not be as consistent.
