If you’re an athlete, have you ever been unreasonably mad at yourself and your sports performance, even if say, your team has been winning? You may be mad at yourself because you feel you should perform at a higher level. For example, you may be thinking that you should have more stats, more accolades, and generally just be making a bigger impact on the field. By beginning to obsess over this stuff, an athlete’s purpose begins to shift from one of a team mentality, and a desire to win, to a more selfish purpose. For example, a stat and accolade-oriented purpose. When this happens, it shows that an athlete has tied his or her identity to their sport.
What does it mean for an athlete to associate their athletics with their identity, and why do athletes do this?
For starters, when an athlete associates their sport with their identity it means that they are using their sport to determine
their self-worth and how others perceive them. The reason athletes pair their performance with their identity is that as long as they have played their game, the validation they have received from coaches and their peers has been a huge measurement
of how they are performing in their sport. On top of this, the more high-performing an athlete is, the more time the athlete spends playing their sport. To put in as much time as a high-achieving athlete puts into their sport, it is only natural to start to feel that a bad performance (or multiple bad performances) directly reflects who they are. It then may start to feel that all the work put in has been a waste.
If you tie your athletics to your worth, will it make you perform better or worse?
The short answer, in my experience and opinion, is worse. It puts an unnecessary amount of pressure and will make the player more selfish. For example, if you self-evaluate yourself with the amount of goals you get or the stats you contribute during a game, it is going to make you play more selfishly, and take more shots, which could negatively affect the team. Second of all, if an athlete doesn’t feel worthy outside of their success in sports, when they’re not performing well, they may feel helpless, insecure, and purposeless. A lack of confidence is a huge disadvantage in sports because it makes the athlete less likely to take risks which is vital to making good plays. Also, if an athlete is thinking too much in their head while they play, whether it’s about their poor performance or their hunger for a certain stat or recognition, it pulls an athlete out of the process of their sport and may make them forget what they actually need to do to play and win the game.
How do you overcome this mindset?
Athletes need to be able to self-validate themselves because external validation is never going to be consistent or in an athlete’s control. Also, in the instance of an injury or another sport-ending event, athletes will no longer be able to rely on the external validation that they have received in the past in order to determine their worth. In order to overcome this type of thinking, you have to reshape your purpose. If you find that you have been playing selfishly, an easy way to reshape this is to remove yourself from your purpose. Especially in team sports a huge purpose could be to play for your team. Reminding your self of the support of your teammates, how hard they have worked, and how much they deserve success could motivate you to play for your team to be successful. The same could be said for playing for a coach. Another way to reshape your purpose is to remind yourself why you play the sport. For example, as a lacrosse player, I play lacrosse for the culture of being on a team, getting to understand the strategy behind it and the intensity of how high speed and high thinking it is. Therefore, I could state my purpose of playing the game as being for those reasons, therefore making me more graceful and poised every time I play which will overall allow me to play better because I am less stressed and more calm and clear-headed.
Overall, in order to compete at a high level, and to be happy and proud of yourself, it is essential to disassociate your worth from your sport. Associating your worth with your sport can make you play more timid and insecure. In order to overcome this mentality try to reshape your mindset surrounding why you play the sport, and try to play for a reason outside of yourself. Remember, “WHO YOU ARE does not equal what YOU DO” (Sidelin-edUSA).
