Motivation

Hi all.

First of all thanks to everyone who is reading my blog.  I am ecstatic to find that there have 402 views of my blog and not all of them are me logging in :-)  Perhaps I need to thank my mum for logging in so often, mums are good like that :-)

As I sit here it is 8 degrees celcius!  The expected minimum is 2.  The max today was 13 but it was 4 when I left home for todays game.  It is expected be a max of 11 tomorrow with a minimum of 1.  Sunday is expected to have a top of 3 with a minimum of -3....uuummm and snow!!!!!!!!!  what tha?  Apparently we are having an unexpected cold snap.

So my question today is how do you motivate 16 individuals to play their hardest for 7 innings of a softball game?  I say 16 as we began the season with 17 and one of those 17 quit the team on Monday.  It was a sad occurrence.  For the team it was a real blow, but for the individual, it was a courageous decision.  She knew she no longer loved the game and did not have the motivation to do the things required to be good.  So she made the decision to walk away.  I imagine that individual is now one relieved and happy individual.  Because she made the right decision for her.  Unfortunately I think she did come on to the team this year for the wrong reason, i.e., the expectations of others.  Who are those others, well at this stage in life it is usually the parent's.  Although most likely loving and best intentioned in their hopes for their child, some parents fail to truly read their children or even simply ask the child if it is in fact what they want to do.  It was interesting to watch the whole thing unfold.  There was blame placed elsewhere for her troubles, including at me, as well as a a drive to make others cut her.  You know the old story of knowing you want to break up with someone, but instead of just being honest, you drive the other to dump you instead...well it was kinda like that.  In the end when none of these strategies worked, she came to an honest decision to walk away on her own terms.

Like I said, bad for the team, but great for the individual.  The coach in me is frustrated, however the budding psychologist applauds the individual.  Afterall, as much as we push for selflessness in society, mental health comes from doing whats best for the individual in many circumstances.

So back to today.  We came out for a double header against one of the Ivy League schools, Cornell.  From everything we knew about them we are a much better team.  Watching them warm up, I was confident of this.  BUT first game came and went and we lost 4-2 in extra innings.  Our two runs came from 2 home runs.  This is a game we should never have lost and if we want to achieve the things we want to achieve this year, we can not afford to drop games to teams like that.  I for one was very disappointed.

We have spoken a lot about game time intensity and carrying that intensity through to the end of the game.  Not only have I/ we talked about it a lot, I have been pushing the point ever since Florida when I noted how we were pumped for the game against Notre Dame (top 20 team) and then had little intensity the next day against good, but lesser teams.  Same thing happened in Hawaii, we were pumped for our games against Hawaii, another top 20 team, and then down again for games against the next 2 teams we played.  I asked the team if we needed to pretend every team was a top 20 team?

So today we came out against Cornell after a massive week on the track, and put in a very low intensity performance.  I say this as a reflection on the whole team, however it goes without saying that some players have the right level of intensity whilst others do not.  What you generally see is a team of people waiting for someone else to 'do it' instead of each individual working to make it happen.

So in between games, I cringed as we walked to the club house where I knew, coach was going to hand out a colourful display of the English language.  She did not disappoint in the slightest.  And I must say on this occasion I didn't blame her.  She did not call on me to speak and I didn't mind because although I am always trying to keep it positive, I simply did not know what message to go with.  I did eventually have a couple of points but I was able to highlight those points after the second game.

So going out to the next game, a couple of changes were made and we smashed them 9-1 by mercy rule.  One of our girls hit a home run that was a frozen rope over right centre to finish the game....WOW!

So my question to the team was whether they are sick and tired of being yelled at and does it really take coach to open up a can of whoop ass on them to get them to pump up?  My two points to them were that they must, as individuals and as a team, find whatever way works to get to an acceptable level of intensity to play EVERY game.  I told them it did not matter how they did it, but they must do it.  And of course, each individual will need their own individual routine to get up for games.  For me I always wanted to win, so I actually needed quiet before a game...I didn't want to speak to anybody!  You basically couldn't talk to me before the first pitch of a game.  I was just so focused.  For others, it requires yelling and screaming, others a hard core song, for others a bit of argy bargy!  BUT whatever it takes each individual needs to find the way that works for them!

The second point I made was less to do with psychology and more to do with standards.  We must hit strikes and leave balls.  This is very important for our team.

I must say before I played softball in the USA in 1996, I was less interested in winning as I was in ensuring I played a good game.  My motivation at that stage was a fear of failure and a need to impress.  Probably both one and the same thing, but also both not ideal forms of motivation.  But once I began playing the USA, I learnt the meaning of playing to win.  Americans are all about winning and that is the only acceptable outcome of any game, although not everyone can win.  In Australia, I believe the motivation is different.  Competition, hanging out with mates, enjoyment and the inevitable party after the game.

Everywhere we look there are reminders of how important winning is!  I have a poster at home of a runner sliding into second base with the caption "Winners don't wait for chances, they take them".  I remember my favourite "No Fear" poster which says "Second place is for the first loser".  And there is the immortal words of Ebby Calvin 'Nuke' LaLoosh from Bull Durham who said "I love winning, you know, its like better than losing".

Motivation is a massive aspect of sports psychology and a lot of research goes into finding ways to motivate people.  We speak of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and have decided intrinsic motivation is the key.  Extrinsic motivation tends to create anxiety as we tend focus on outcomes outside of our individual control such beating the opposition, winning the race, winning the trophy, outplaying our opponent.  Why are these outside of our control?  Well, what if the opposition is better?  What if someone else is faster?  What if our opponent is bigger, faster, more skillful or simply better than we are?  We have no control over these issues.  Therefore if our motivation is extrinsic and we get an outcome outside of what we were aiming for, it can be incredibly disheartening and may lead to ultimate withdrawal from the activity as we feel far to anxious or hopeless.  We saw an example of this this week with our team mate quitting.  However if we have an intrinsic perspective, we are competing against tangible entities, against entities within our control.  These entities would include ourselves in beating a previous time, swinging the bat better than we did last time, learning from a strategy imposed by the opposition and not allowing them to beat you that way again, devising our own strategy to overcome some aspect of the game or devising a game plan and executing it.  We can control these things.  Therefore anxiety during competition is minimised and we are motivated to compete against outcomes that are achievable.  A simple intrinsic motivation may simply be to play 100% by our own very high standards.  This is something I am looking forward to challenging our team with.

Having extrinsic motivations also create expectations.  Expectations may be out of our control, such as beating the opposition.  Expectations are also imposed on us by others, such as our coaches, our parents, our friends, our team mates, our significant others.  Ever heard your parents tell you they expect your home work to be completed by 6pm?  Well for any athlete, the sun is still shining at this time and we want to be out kicking the footy or playing cricket.  So the whole time we are sitting in our room studying, we are pissed, we are continuously thinking about being outside and are not necessarily concentrating on our work.  However what if we could complete our home work under our own standards?  What if we knew we had to complete our homework at some stage before school the next day.  Perhaps we would get our drive to play sport out of the way during daylight hours, come in for dinner and then do our homework in our own time at a time designated by our self?  I would imagine the anxiety would be much less and the drive to do the homework a lot stronger as we had no competing thought processes.  This is the same for playing sport.

We need to play for our own reasons, we need to have our own motivations.  But those motivations must be enough to fit in with our own team goals or, dare I say, stay home and don't play.  At the elite level, winning is going to always be the major goal of any team and of any individual.  If we can agree on that point, we can then put that point aside and move on.  So assuming everyone is ultimately there to win, then each of us needs to find a way to have the right mindset to put in the best performance possible on any given day.  I say the best performance possible on any given day, because without doubt, we are going to be more motivated and feel better on some days more than others.  I must also add, that we as individuals have ultimate control over how we approach each game.  We have control over how motivated we are on any given day.  I would be the first to say that having a bad day, an argument with a loved one or a car accident on the way to a game would be a serious impediment to getting our minds where they need to be at game time, however we do have control over how we react to those incidents.  We do have skills for compartmentalising one part of our lives from another.  No matter what happens, that incident has happened and cannot be changed no matter how much we obsess over them.  But we do have control over what happens next.  One thing we also have control over are our own personal standards.

So even if we have a challenging experience that has the potential to distract us from our game or simply that we do not feel great before a game, we can still give one hundred percent commitment to our own personal standards for playing our sport.  What could our personal standards be?  Well to begin with they are issues directly under our control.  Take a hitter for example.  If we had an extrinsic mindset, or worse still, feel the pressure of expectations from others, such as get a safe hit every single at bat, then we are setting ourselves up for anxiety and failure.  Softball is a sport of imperfection.  If we hit .333 over a season we are considered great!  Therefore expecting a base hit every at bat is setting our self up for failure.  What we can control is our mindset going into our at bat, learning how the opposing pitcher throws the ball, watching the pitch out of the pitchers hand, selecting a strike to swing at and how we swing the bat.  I wouldn't even say hitting the ball is a standard as some pitchers will be better than others.  However if we stick to good standards every single time, we give ourselves a much greater chance of hitting the ball.  We may also set ourselves a standard of doing each of these things better each at bat as the game goes on.  This would in fact be a motivating factor as the game progresses.

So this is the challenge I am going to set our players tomorrow.  To work towards making each at bat better than their previous at bat.  Only they will know if they have achieved this goal, as their marker will be their own personal standard.  For some this may be watching the ball more closely for another it may be improving on their swing technique.  By attempting to better their last at bat, there are three positive possibilities. 1) this goal has a motivating (intrinsic) factor. 2) This goal gives the individual increasing focus as the game goes on and 3) It gives the individual strong standards (i.e., adherence to their hitting routine) by which to work by.  I recently came up with the following saying, if we stick to our standards, we can expect to reach our goals.  Another conversation can be had about setting standards, but that is for another time, when we have time.

I believe in this challenge, however the issue still remains, there must be buy in from each individual player, or dare I say, enough individuals to ensure the team can have success.  So I put the challenge out to each player, are you ready to play?

D