Building Confidence

September brings with it a season of change and a sense of beginning … back to school, back to work after the summer, a beginning of a new season of training. Change and new beginnings often bring a sense of nervous anticipation as we deal with all the feelings that are brought to the surface. How can we build our confidence to address these feelings? A recent article in the SIRC Collection looks at achieving your sporting success through strengthening your ‘confidence muscle’.

Three key points of the article are highlighted:

• Reflect on your past performances. Identify what factors contributed to success.
• Write a confidence resume. Write out past achievements, successes and anything where you are pleased with yourself.
• Do visualization exercises. Repeatedly imagine you are watching yourself in a movie being the best you can be for your next performance.

As in most cases, lessons learned in sport can be directly applicable to life. So the next time you are facing a new challenge, meet it head on by flexing your new ‘muscle’.

Order the full article from SIRC: (2010). Soar With Incredible Levels of Confidence. Ultra-FIT, 20(4), 40-41.

Looking on the Bright Side!

We have often heard that a person’s attitude can colour their view of any situation. Someone with a positive attitude will see a situation quite differently than someone with a more negative attitude. When we have a positive attitude about a situation things seem to go much easier than if we are fighting ourselves. So how can attitude affect us in our fitness and sporting lives? And how can we work with attitude to improve our performance?

A recent article from the SIRC Collection points to 10 things we should all know about attitude and how it affects us:

1. Having a good attitude is a choice.  A person’s state of mind is what they choose it to be. We can choose how we think about something and how we will act in response.
2. Attitude can be changed.  While we may have what we consider an automatic response to something, we can choose whether or not to have a different attitude to it, we can make our attitudes whatever we want them to be.
3. Attitudes aren’t shaped in a vacuum.  A great number of factors influence the development of an individual’s attitude, from personality and temperament, to family and social environments.
4. Attitudes can be enhanced by adversity.  Successful people recognize that adversity can be used to learn more about ourselves and in effect turn failures into successes.
5. Attitude can determine whether a person is a success or a failure.  Research indicates that for the most part, people with positive attitudes are much more likely to achieve success than people who look at things from a negative perspective.
6. Attitude affects a person’s relationship with other people.  A positive attitude often gives off an infectious energy just like another’s negative attitude often feels like the energy is being sucked out of you
7. Attitude can affect outcome.  Having a positive attitude will be more likely to breed success than an negative expectation or outlook.
8. Attitude affects what a person expects from life.  “Positive people expect more and tend to achieve more”.
9. Attitudes can turn problems into opportunities.  People with a positive attitude can adapt to just about any situation and see where it can be improved.
10. Attitude determines who a person is.  A person with a positive attitude engages in life unlike those with a negative attitude who see life as something that happens to them. “Individuals with a positive attitude live their lives with passion.”

Attitude can be developed as one aspect of mental training. Being mindful of our attitude during training, competition and performance, we can exert a conscious effort to approach situations with an attitude focused on success. Use attitude as one more tool in your arsenal for personal achievement on and off the field.

Reference:

Peterson, J.A. (2012). 10 Things Health/Fitness Professionals Should Know About Attitude. ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal, 16(1), 46.

Coaching for Excellence

Why are some coaches deemed more successful than others?  What sets them apart?

There has been much research concentrated around the concept of identifying ideal characteristics of coaches. A recent article boils some of these concepts down and outlines why coaches succeed while others fail and highlights the following habits of effective coaches:

• Make training more challenging and more demanding than the competition your athletes are targeting
• Learn and develop as a coach at a faster rate than your athletes
• Accelerate your rate of learning faster than your opposition
• Enhance your creative thinking skills
• Coach individuals - even in team sports
• Ensure that every athlete you work with out-prepares (in every aspect) their opposition
• Adapt your training plans and programs to optimize their impact on each athlete at every training session
• Performance practice - not practice makes perfect
• Adopt an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to talent development and performance enhancement
• Lead - The great coaches are leaders

So knowing which habits a coach should strive towards is most of the battle. But what are the things that should be avoided as a coach. There are reasons identified that coaches can fail:

• Compromise. Do not compromise on preparation
• Lacking belief in themselves
• Copying others. Be original, be creative. Adapt and improve upon others.
• Relying too much on learning from only within their own sport
• Relying too much on emotion
• Using the same programs over and over and over
• Failing to engage their athletes
• Lack of persistence
• Lack of vision
• Not spending enough time maximizing their strengths

A great coach doesn't hesitate to learn. Identifying where you are excelling and where you might make some changes or improvements to your coaching style can only benefit your coaching and your athletes.

Reference from the SIRC Collection:
(2012). A Pair of 10s: Two articles examining why coaches fail and what some do to succeed. Soccer Journal, 57(1), 44;46.