Coaching Guidance in Sport
"You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within." (Bob Nelson, 2002).
Self-Confidence
Self-confidence has been defined as “the belief that you can successfully perform a desired behaviour” (Weinberg & Gould, 2007) such as the belief in an individual’s ability to play football. Similarly, self-efficacy is more situation specific to a skill as it is “the belief in ones capabilities to organise or execute the courses of action required to complete a task” (Jowett & Lavelle, 2006), for instance believing in scoring a penalty. Having an understanding of self-efficacy is beneficial as it can affect an athlete’s effort level, persistence and activity choices (Weinberg and Gould, 1999).
Bandura’s theory (1977) of self-efficacy states that there are four determinants which effects the athlete’s behaviour and performance. A study by McAuley, (1985) supports Bandura’s model by showing that self-efficacy is a significant predictor of skill performance in gymnastics. Performance accomplishment will have an increase of efficacy expectations based on previous mastery experiences of a skill, correspondingly to vicarious experiences with the use of successful visual observations when teaching a new skill, helping to develop the mastery.
(Dash in the Middle, 2015)
Additionally demonstrations have been shown as effective by Horn et al., (2002) who discovered that the use of demonstrations increased the accuracy and consistency of female footballers chipping a ball into a target. Verbal persuasion can be influential when a valued coach offers encouragement to develop self-efficacy. Whereas emotional arousal levels can determine the skills success where an athlete’s arousal can be either too higher or low for the given task, causing a decrease in performance.
The Inverted-U Hypothesis (1908) reinforces Duncan et al., (2014) research by stating that the optimal level of arousal is at the midpoint of the continuum, as athletes with a high level of arousal during a competition showed a decrease in performance compared to lower arousal levels when training, but this differs due to their interpretation of their physiological state. Another form of self-efficacy is ‘collective’, which Bandura describes as the consensus between a groups capabilities to organise and execute the necessary actions to succeed (Bandura, 1997). Similar to Bandura, this theory has comparable determinants in addition with motivational climate of which is created by the coaches mastery performance climate and team size (Jaakkola et al., 2015).
(Psychscool, 2016)
Self-efficacy can also be seen in coach’s belief of their own ability and confidence in their player’s ability to a specific task. This can effect both self-efficacy and collective-efficacy by the athletes seeing you as a valued coach and can improve their performance due to confidence in the team and building motivation which is agreed by Sullivan et al., (2012) who also suggests that a coach with a coaching educational background can increase self-efficacy.
Building athlete’s self-efficacy is beneficial as it can influence behavioural consequences of effort, persistence and performance achievement as well as cognitive consequences of commitment, expectations and athlete’s concentration on a task (Bandura, 1990).
(Gap Year, 2015)
Coaching Guidance:
- Provide suitable/easy tasks for athletes to accomplish. Rediscovering past mastery experiences after an injury such as watching a past performance video, will help to build self-efficacy through achievement emotion.
- Allow athletes to retain the skill by multiple demonstrations and reproduce the skill themselves. For lower ability athletes, ensure that demonstrations aren’t over complicated.
- Having a valued member to encourage will increase their self-efficacy and performance. Joining in the activity with them can also increase their self-esteem. Verbally persuade and reinforce positive feedback to obese or those with movement difficulties during exercise.
- Produce relaxing techniques such as listening to music for your athletes as high arousal levels could decrease in their performance.