Sport Psychology Blog

Obviously it's important to have good relationships with your teammates, but not many people think about the importance of relationships between competitors. Your relationship with your opponents can greatly affect your mental health and performance. There are some extremely competitive athletes who actually hate their competition. They purposely try to become enemies with their competition. This may help them with motivation at times, but overall, it is not a good way to live. With this "me against the world" attitude, you isolate yourself, grow bitter, and miss out on fulfilling friendships. This not only hurts your social skills and mental health, but it can also hurt your performance in game. If you make competition too personal, and play with too much anger towards your opponents, your performance can worsen. You may not be able to control your emotions, which can lead to choking and bad decision making. To prevent this, you need to build better relationships wit

Everyone knows that after you reach a certain level of success, it becomes harder to motivate yourself. You may get too satisfied with yourself, become complacent, and lose motivation to work hard. Most people don't want this to happen. They want to maintain their motivation and success. But for even the people who want to do this, they still have trouble. So how do you successfully maintain your motivation and success? One way is to simply enjoy the process, the grind, and the journey, which are always with you (they don't go away after becoming successful). However, this doesn't always give you the boosts of motivation that you need sometimes. Another way is by adopting a " proud but not satisfied " attitude. By never being fully satisfied and finding new, bigger goals to challenge yourself, you can maintain your motivation. After you have a winning season, aim to win your division next year. After you win your division, aim to get to the conference champi

You may have heard people say, "look good, play good" when talking about team uniforms. Is there any truth to this? Does the way a uniform look affect a team's performance ? Surprisingly, I believe it does! Here are a few ways in which uniforms affect performance. First of all, I won't talk about the functionality of uniforms. Obviously light weight uniforms can help performance, but I just want to talk about the way uniforms look. Confidence : A great looking uniform can give a player confidence , which improves performance. A uniform shouldn't be the main source of confidence for an athlete (it should be past success, preparation, and positive self-talk ), but there is something about a good looking uniform that gives athletes confidence, whether it is subconscious or conscious. Everyone feels better about themselves when they look good. A uniform can make you look sleek, fast, strong, tough, and intimidating, which can give you confidence in your ability to

Your ego, or your sense of self, has great influence on your life. We all know the negatives of having too big of an ego. Your ego always wants to be stroked and protected. It's constantly looking for ways to feel good about itself, to feel superior. This distorts your thinking. It leads to counterproductive behavior, such as not accepting responsibility and deflecting blame. It can hurt your relationships when it tries to bring others down in order to try to make itself feel better. Lastly, an ego can become arrogant, which can lead to complacency. This is why it's so important to control your ego and not let it get too big. By doing this, you can think clearer, accept responsibility and criticism better, become unselfish, have better relationships, and stay humble and motivated. All of this makes you a better, more successful person. However, it can be a mistake to think that you can get rid of your ego entirely, or to think that having an ego can never be good. It's

You can read as many sports psychology, self-help, and leadership books that you want, but you’ll still be missing out if you haven’t learned about cognitive behavioural therapy. Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, does what so many other books try to do - make you happier, more motivated, and successful - but it gets straight to the heart of the matter. That’s why I love CBT so much. To me, it is the most practical form of psychological therapy. The best part about it is that you can learn it yourself! So let me help teach CBT to you by reviewing Christine Wilding’s book, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy . The premise behind CBT is that by analyzing your own thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and the relationships between them, you can find ways to make changes to them to improve both your mental health and outcomes in life. Chapter by chapter, Wilding teaches you ways in which you can do this. By the end of the book, you’ll have a toolbox of strategies and coping skills that you can