From part 2, you now have the mentality of the greats but what if your child rejects it. You must do more unfortunately but it will be more than worth it!
For your child to accept the mentality and be willing to fully integrate it into their game and their lives, you must understand the psychology behind elite performance. This is a step deeper than mentality because this is teaching your child HOW to think instead of WHAT to think!
To teach your child how to think, you need to help them change the way they perceive competitive pressures and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help with just that! It helps athletes with MENTAL PERFORMANCE which means having their mental state aid in good performance as opposed to hindering it. This is done by reappraising or changing the original meaning you give to a situation.
There are 3 psychological needs of athletes (this goes for all people as well) and they are (2019, Towler):
Competence: in sports this is being able to compete at a high level
Autonomy: in sports this is feeling in control of their situation
Relatedness: in sports this is bonding with teammates and the coaching staff
CBT hits these needs because it makes an athlete self-sufficient (autonomy), able to better handle and deal with competitive pressures to play their best (competence). Only after the first 2 needs are met, then can an athlete bonding with their team (relatedness). With CBT, athletes can:
Identify problems
process negative thoughts and feelings
persevere through failure
There are 3 steps to Cognitive Restructuring (A technique within CBT) that can help your child achieve success! First you (2018, Hayes):
IDENTIFY. Identify your child's problem, the thinking pattern underlying the problem, and the emotional and behavioural impact of the thinking pattern preventing the athlete from performing well.
EVALUATE. The evaluation stage involves introspection of their thinking patterns to find the thoughts that caused the harmful response (yelling at a ref or coach) to competition stressors (like a bad call or criticism from their coach).
MODIFY. Lastly, you want to modify those harmful thoughts by helping your child intentionally create thoughts that will help them reach their sports goals and help their team win.
Once you change how your child perceives situations and pressures in sports, (if they truly love the sport and want a future in it) they will be intrinsic motivated to get better and obtain the inner drive to be great!
Learn in part 4 how Psychvancing can help you child be great!
Continue to Part 4 below!
Reference:
Towler, A. Why the basic psychological needs autonomy, competence and relatedness matter in management and beyond. (2019, September 7th). CQ Net.
Hayes, S., Hofmann, S. Process-Based CBT. (2018) Context Press.
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