Week 5: Training Programme - Improving self-confidence through self-talk

Post title: Training Programme: Improving self-confidence through self-talk  
Week no. 5
Date: 19/04/14

Aim of week: to decrease anxiety levels by increasing self-confidence through self-talk to improve performance

Hi Performer X, thank you for completing last week’s tasks, after completing them you should have felt that performance had further increased in both training and competition as your anxiety levels were lower and looking at your results that is what has happened.

Why I have chosen improve your self-confidence.

This week we are going to improve your self-confidence, this is because when I was looking at your results for the CSAI-2 questionnaire that you filled in, it shows that your self-confidence level is low, you only achieved 16 which is a low score and you should be scoring between 27 and 36 for self-confidence, so due to you having a low score in self-confidence this will be something that we will work on so that it can increase making your performance better. Having a low self-confidence level will automatically make you performance decrease because you don’t believe in yourself and you don’t believe that you can win when competing but having more self-confidence will help you will performance because the more you believe in yourself then the better you will perform because you believe that you can win therefore you want to push yourself so that you come in first place.

What is self-confidence and self-talk?

At some point in life, all performers/athletes will experience doubts about their ability to perform, these doubts are normally due to negative self-talk undermining feeling of self-confidence and self-esteem and interfering with performance.

Self-confidence is a feeling of trust in a person’s abilities, qualities, and judgement.

Many sports persons need help with their self-confidence as this is something that lacks in many athletes and is a key thing and is the difference between winning and losing a competition because if you don’t believe in yourself when performing then the judges that you are performing for also aren’t going to believe in you because you aren’t putting across a performance whereas if you have good self-confidence then the judges are more likely to give you a higher score because you are making them watch you whilst you are performing.

Self-talk is where you are convincing yourself that you are good enough to perform by changing negative thoughts into positive thoughts.

Self-talk is something that many athletes do in both training and in competition because it changes all their negative thoughts into positive ones therefore reducing their anxiety levels and increasing their self-confidence level.

Technique – what it involves.

To increase your self-confidence we are going to use something called self-talk and as explained above, self-talk is where you change all your negative thoughts into positive thoughts. An example of using self-talk to increase performance is just before you go on the dance floor to perform whether it be for you solo or for the team performance, instead of thinking, “what if…..” and thinking of all the things that could go wrong think to yourself, “come on, you can do this” this will be very effective because you are giving yourself more confidence instead of self-doubt. This is something many performers will do just before they are about to perform to help with their confidence levels.

Tasks: Below are 2 tasks that I would like you to complete this week these tasks should be carried out in a quiet place when you are relaxed and they shouldn’t be rushed but do not over think them. Please complete these tasks and send them back to me.  

Task 1; below is a table that I would like you fill out and send it back to me. Within this table I would like you to think of a situation, e.g. the past few competitions I haven’t made it into the second round. Once you have thought of the situation I then want you to think about the thoughts that were going through your mind at the time, or if it is a made up situation what you would be saying to yourself. I would then like you to state whether you thought what was going through your mind was a positive or negative self-talk.

Situation	Self-talk (what you were thinking at the time)	+ / -

 

Task 2; now that you have established whether or not your self-talk was positive or negative, I would like you to replace the negative thoughts with positive ones, this is because most of your thoughts that you were thinking about during competition were probably the reason why you didn’t make into the second round because you doubted yourself therefore reducing your self-confidence.  

Negative self-talk	Positive self-talk

Good luck with this weeks tasks and I am looking forward to seeing your results.

Week 4: Training Programme - Improve Somatic Anxiety

Post title: Training Programme
Week no. 4
Date: 11/04/14

Aim of week: to improve somatic anxiety to further improve performance.

Hi Performer X, thank you for filling everything in last week and getting them back to me so quickly with your results, I hope that they have helped you to reduce your anxiety levels and to improve your performance. 

Why I have chosen to improve somatic anxiety.

This week we are going to try and improve your somatic anxiety. I have chosen this because even though your somatic anxiety levels are good, I feel that if we were to further improve this then your performance is likely to improve further because you are more relaxed when competing, as during some competitions you may feel tense because you are nervous.  

Somatic anxiety is the physiological and affective component closely associated with physiological arousal, e.g. increased heart rate, sweat production, etc.

It suggests that as there is an increase in somatic anxiety then there is a slight increase in performance. For example, if at the end of the first section of a cheerleading competition you/your team have the most points therefore making you be at the top of the leader board, then your somatic anxiety will increase slightly but your performance level will increase faster because you are wanting to stay at the top. (For graph - vertical = performance, horizontal = somatic anxiety).


As you can see in the diagram (opposite) there is a fall in performance, this is when the somatic anxiety still increases leading to a decrease in performance. This is do with the body and how it reacts to certain situations. For example, if at the end of the second round you have been knocked down to second place then your somatic anxiety will increase but your performance will decrease, this is because you are trying to get back to the top of the leader board but because you are trying so hard you aren’t actually performing to the best of your ability.

Technique – what it involves.

So, as I said we are going to improve your somatic anxiety and to do this we are going to use something called, “Progressive Muscular Relaxation”. This helps performers achieve their Ideal Performance State (IPS) in training and in a competitive situation by using Progressive Muscular Relaxation (PMR) techniques. This will benefit you because it will help you gain the suitable physical activation state especially if you ever experience muscle tension revealing somatic anxiety and connecting this with poor performance.

Using the PMR technique will help you in a competitive situation and within training session, this is because you will be able to relax your body whenever you feel tense and agitated. You will be able to use PMR is three different ways;

1)      As a deep relaxation tool for learning and preparation

2)      As a control relaxation tool for pre-competition

3)      For the moments requiring composure (calming down) during performance

Tasks: Below are 3 tasks that I would like you to complete this week, these tasks should be carried out every day and I would like you to record how you felt after each task and monitor progress and the differences each day.  

Exercise 1:

Task 1; find ten minutes worth of calm, relaxing music that you enjoy listening to. These will be used within the following tasks.

Task 2; I would like you carry out a ten minute relaxation session focusing on each muscle groups which you feel you use most within dance (this mainly tensed to be all muscle groups). You should tense and relax each muscle group, doing this will make it less likely for your muscles to tense up when in a competitive situation.

Task 3; once you have got the hang of how task 1 works, try introducing tensing and relaxing the muscle groups using different degree angles e.g. tense the muscle 50% and then relax the muscle, then tense the muscle 75% and relax the muscle and again to 10% and relax. This will be useful for specific muscle groups where heightened awareness of tension levels is vital, for example, for a dancer one might be the biceps and triceps, when doing a lift within a routine.

Each week of doing this you should reduce the time length that you do it, for example, this week you will carry these tasks out for 10 minutes, next you might reduce this time to eight minutes as the less time it takes for you to become relaxed the quicker and easier it will be for you when I a competitive situation. During your second week you should do this relaxation immediately after exercise, to reduce the chance of your muscles becoming tense as often.

Exercise 2:

If would like to think about your last competition that you did and think about how tense your muscles were and how it impacted your performance, then compare that to an upcoming competition that you are preparing for and see if there is any difference in your performance and whether the above tasks make a difference to how you feel and perform. Please could you record these and send them to me.            

Good luck with this, I am looking forward to seeing your results.

Week 3: Training Programme - Reducing Anxiety

Post title: Training Programme: Reducing Anxiety
Week no. 3
Date: 04/04/14
Aim of week: to reduce cognitive anxiety levels to increase performance levels.  

 

Hi Performer X, I see that last week’s goal setting task went well, keep working on your goal setting and you will find that over a period of time your will be improving further.

Why I have chosen to reduce cognitive anxiety for you.

This week, we are going to look at reducing your anxiety levels, in particular cognitive restructuring. Cognitive anxiety is the mental component of state anxiety, caused by fear, negative self-evaluation and threat to self-esteem. It is to do with your mental side, your mind, the more you worry then the more your performance will decrease. Opposite is a graph that might explain cognitive anxiety a bit better, all it is showing is that as cognitive anxiety increases then performance decreases.

For example, in a dance competition, if you are worrying about the other dancers being better than you then your performance will decrease because you haven’t got the right mind set and your mind is worrying and focused on something else and resulting in reduced confidence and performance levels. 

I have also chosen to do this because your cognitive score on your CSAI-2 questionnaire is high, so this needs reducing to result in having a better performance.

Technique – what it involves.

Cognitive reconstruction is trying to reduce the negative thoughts to turn them into positive attentional focuses to improve performance, so it is trying to prevent you from worrying about things, having self-doubt and fearing the consequences, e.g. worrying about an upcoming competition and then fearing what the consequences will be if you don’t do well in it. This is where the attribution theory comes in. The attribution theory relates to the reasons we give for our or the team’s performance, these thoughts can be before the competition or during the competition. If you are being positive about yourself and your performance then you are more likely to have a successful outcome. However, if you don’t believe in yourself then you aren’t going to get very far in the competition, resulting in you not qualifying for the next round and not placing for a trophy,

Attributions can be split into four types; ability, task difficulty, effort and luck.

Ability – this is the genetics you have that allow you to be the athlete you are, e.g. whether or not you are flexible.  

Task difficulty – this is the difficulty of tasks given to the athlete and how they approach the task, e.g. how you approach trying to master the splits.

Effort – this is how hard you try to win when in a competitive situation, e.g. do you try your hardest and put everything you have into it to try and win or do you just dance instead of performing.

Luck – this is whether something plays right for you, e.g. are the judges biased towards one dance school.

These four categories are then placed under two headings; these two headings are – Locus of control and stability.

Locus of control – this is who is responsible for something that is happening, is it you or your opponent. So, who is responsible? This is further split into internal and external.

Internal – this is you or your team, so in your case it would be you and how you let yourself down and what the reasons where of why you didn’t perform well.

External – this is someone else or something else that controlled the  outcome / performance – so in performer X’s case there opponent would be someone from both a different dance school and someone from your own dance school that are in the same category as you, they then perform better than you meaning that they win instead of you.

Stability – this is whether something can change or not, this again is further split into stable and unstable.

Stable – this does not change, your performance doesn’t change it always stays the same.

Unstable – this is changeable, your performance can and will change through each performance you do and each competition that you do.        

The attributions, (all information from above), can have effects on; future expectations and emotions.

If the outcome is failure but the attribution is stable and internal then the performer  can believe that they are always going to fail, this will lead to the performer becoming depressed therefore leading to a decrease in motivation and lead to learned helplessness.

If the outcome is successful but the attribution is stable and internal then the performer is always going to win, this is because the attribution is internal, this means that you can change it because it is in your control, leading to the performer becoming more confident and motivated this is called mastery orientation.

The table opposite is showing what each attribution category falls under.  

 

 

Tasks: Below are 3 tasks that I would like you to complete this week

Exercise 1: Performer X, I would like you to:

Task 1; fill out the Attribution Analysis form that I have sent you, saying why you think you have been successful and why you have been unsuccessful within a competition.

Task 2; fill in the table saying whether each reason you have given under both headings is a positive or a negative thing to your performance.

Task 3; everything that you have put under the negative column, I would like you to re-phrase into a positive. (E.g. the other team underperformed therefore making my team win, turn this into a positive, my team where the better team and on the day performed better).  

Exercise 2: Performer X, I would like you to repeat all of the above tasks again but straight after a competition, so once you have competed sit down and complete these forms so that you can see the difference between when your actually performing and when you are looking back to try an remember.

Please complete these tasks and send them back to me so that I can see what you have done.

Completed tasks by Performer X

Below, shows that Performer X has sent back the attribution analysis table (task 1). As you can see she has listed all the reasons why she thinks she was successful and all the reasons why she thought she was unsuccessful. 

She then further completed task 2, as shown below.

 

This is showing how Performer X has categorised her attributions. This is showing how each thing affects her performance; this is because when she was focused and concentrated then her performance was good therefore leading to a win but when she was nervous and tired then her performance decreased therefore not winning in the competition.

Performer X then carried out task 3, she re-phrased all the negative points into a positive ones.

So as you can see performer X successfully carried out task three as she was able to re-phrase all her negative points into positive ones. By doing this it should mean that your performance will increase and carry increasing and after a period of time all these negative things that keep coming up with get less and less until there are no negatives at all and you feel confident about your performance and therefore more likely to win.

Performer X will do this again after her next competition and then analysis her results to see if there are any differences between the two.

Also, by doing this you can see where you went wrong in every performance allowing you to improve for next time.