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.