What is your underlying motivation for doing well in triathlon? Material aspects of competition, such as prizes, trophies, money? More immaterial, egocentric aspects of competitive events, such as recognition and respect from peers? Or how about the desire for self-development, and to challenge yourself?
Sports psychology studies emphasize that athletes should be encouraged to improve performance using intrinsic (within yourself) rather than extrinsic (outside yourself) motivators. This is because, with extrinsic rewards, your self-confidence and overall satisfaction with training and performance are defined by external factors, which are out of your control.
For example, if you place poorly in a race, despite having performed above personal expectations, you may be very self-critical and get depressed, and this may affect future performance. If performance is evaluated by external factors, such as what other people may think of you, your objectivity goes out the window. You need this objectivity to learn from failures, and face personal challenges that may be inhibiting your further development.
In general, there are far more failures in fine tuning performance than there are successes, but learning from failure becomes a success if taken from the perspective of intrinsic motivation in self-mastery. Intrinsic motivation derives from a desire to achieve for achievement’s sake. Instead of defining how good you are from the perspective of external agents, you measure yourself against yourself. Your success relates to how you performed previously, regardless of the external reward.
By not setting goals to merely “beat” an opponent for some material or ego-oriented gain, you open the door for much higher aims in performance. This is because goals set as a construction of external events, i.e., whether you “win” or “lose”, are a source of great stress and anxiety due to the inherent uncontrollability of external events. Under intrinsic motivation, a greater scope for self-development and self-improvement exists (in comparison to external rewards) because intrinsic motivation assists in changing your perception of external events, rather than external events casuing a change in your perception.
These deep thoughts for the day have been adapted from: Behncke, L. 2004. Mental Skills Training for Sports: A Brief Review. Athletic Insight: the online journal of sport phychology. Vol. 6. Issue 1.
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Great post…I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately so your timing is perfect. Out of curiosity and if you don’t mind sharing, what is your intrinsic goal for your tri career?
Hope the training is going well!
That is an interesting question Chris. The success of a person’s triathlon career is generally defined extrinsically – number of race wins, world record times, Olympic medals… and we often frame our goals that way: “I want to be an Ironman World Champion”. It is a lot more difficult to define an intrinsic goal for a whole career. Saying you want to do your best sounds like a cop out, but “your best” is a pretty complex thing. I think that it would be great to feel like you have done everything you can, physically, mentally, spiritually to enhance your performance… To be able to consistently get to a place in your races where you can push past your perceived (or maybe not even acknowledged) limits. To have a mental space conducive to freeing your powerful body to do amazing things. Maybe this sounds a little flakey, but so it goes with intrinsic motivators!
On a more day to day note, I find that I can sometimes be too hard on myself and take the intrinsic thing to a not-so-good extreme. I just did a 2000m TT in the pool this weekend and although my time improved a fair bit over the last one I was really unhappy bcause I felt like I lost my mental focus 1/2 way (I wasn’t able to tune out a distraction and get out of a circle of negative thoughts that I was having). Even though the test was just to gauge my own personal improvement I dwelled on the feeling of “I didn’t do as good as I could have”, rather than “damn, that was my fastest ever 2000TT in that pool, nice work!”. I think that to be a real champion you have to be good at feeling good about yourself, focusing on positive feedback, and staying objective.
Cheers, H
Thanks Trevor and Heather for the great insite. Although I agree with most of what you said, and this could just be me and my internal motivators working and not as a general for everyone, I need that “failure” in order to push myself faster and harder. I”m currently in the process of training for my first full Ironman so obviously I do not have the skill or expertise that you have in reguards to Ironman training but I have been a competitive athlete my entire life so I feel I know a little about the desire to compete and what it takes for me to have the will to win. To site one of your examples: in your 2000m TT in the pool, personally, I would have felt like a failure. But in turn used that failure to the next week go out there with the intention of swimming the same time but without the laps in focus I know my competitors are training this hard and I need to train even harder to beat them. Again for me personally I need the “person to beat” in order for me intrinsicly motivate myself forward.
hello Brian!