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.
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!