Dr. Lisa Cohn and Dr. Patrick Cohn discuss in their article, Help Your Young Athletes Improve Confidence with Pre-Game Rituals, an aspect of sport psychology that teaches the importance of a pre-game ritual. What goes an hour or so before a game is crucial. Something that could really hurt an athlete’s performance before a game or competition is: A parent sizing up the other team/ competitors in front of their kid. This is not going to motivate them, it is just going to make them even more anxious than they are already feeling. They need to be away from the competition, and only focusing on themselves and how they are going to perform.
Finding a pre-game ritual that works for a specific athlete is very important. Here are a couple suggestions:
1) Listen to music: make a playlist of your favorite music. Typically high energy music is best, but try anything that would help you focus. The main goal is to get yourself isolated from your family and friends, and embody your role as an athlete. You cannot have any outside distractions.
2) Picture positive: envision yourself scoring that goal and making that basket. Filling yourself up with positive feelings will boost your confidence which will in effect your performance. This can relate to both self-fulfilling prophecy and self-efficacy. With self-fulfilling prophecy, your beliefs affect your behavior. If you believe that you will be successful, it is more likely that you will end up fulfilling your original beliefs because you will act and perform like a winner. Self-efficacy is confidence in being able to perform a task at a certain level. If you have this you will be further motivated which will increase your performance and perseverance.
3) Visualize: this relates to the above suggestion, but even more than just thinking positive, visualize yourself making that difficult jump shot or going through your routine. This is in itself a rehearsal because it programs the athletes mind and body, and helps keep athletes focused.
As a former competitive figure skater, I had my own pre-competition ritual. An hour before I was scheduled to skate I would separate myself from everybody. I would find a quiet place or some place where I did not know anybody around me, blast my music very loud with my favorite band, and start warming up and stretching. While I was to my stretching stage I typically switched the music over my skating routine's music. I would visualize myself out on the ice doing my routine over and over again. Each time I would see myself landing every jump and executing every spin perfectly. After I finished this I would talk only to my coach until I went on the ice who would give me brief motivating lines from time to time while helping me further stretch. People would come up to me and wish me luck, but that is not what I needed. I needed to be one with myself, and be completely in tune with my body. Any distraction could potentially make me lose all of my focus. Something that I always tried to do, but was always difficult not to do, was to not look at other skaters. Either on the warm up ice, or during their routines. Seeing a competitor mess up may boost your confidence, but seeing a fellow competitor skating a perfect program could be very distracting and stressful. It is just important for athletes to remember to stay focused on themselves and their performance. Nothing else and no one else matters until you finish that game or performance.
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