Sport Confidence According to Bandura and Vealey
Sport Confidence According to Bandura and Vealey
Aaron Creed
Kinesiology 339I
2/21/2011
Sport Confidence According to Bandura and Vealey
In any sport, an athlete’s performance and success can be directly linked to two major aspects, his physical aptitude, and his mental readiness. It is common knowledge that athletics involve physical ability and those with the most physical gifts tend to outperform those without them. But look a little deeper and you find that behind the brawn and power of the athletes body lies something just as important, the power of the mind. Sport psychology is a science devoted to understanding how an athlete’s mind works, before during and after a competition, it is a study of just how exactly an athlete thinks and why. The mind is one of the most important tools an athlete has at his disposal, it has the power to hold back the most physically gifted person, and at the same time push a less gifted person to greatness. A crucial part of the “mental game” in any sport is sport confidence and it is the focus of this paper. “Athletes refer to self-efficacy as confidence and often attribute successful accomplishments to being confident”. (Short 2008) Confidence in athletics is extraordinarily important for two main reasons. Firstly, an athlete with poor confidence may very well destroy his performance, not because he was unable to perform at his best, but because he didn’t believe that he could and therefore never even attempted what he was truly capable of doing. Secondly an athlete with high confidence may bolster his performance and push himself past where he was in practice, or marks he was expected to reach because he was so confident in his abilities that he was able to exceed his past achievements and reach for new goals. The different mindsets and linked performances are precisely what make confidence so tightly connected to success athletically. Sport confidence can be defined many different ways, but the focus of this paper
Aaron Creed
Kinesiology 339I
2/21/2011
Sport Confidence According to Bandura and Vealey
In any sport, an athlete’s performance and success can be directly linked to two major aspects, his physical aptitude, and his mental readiness. It is common knowledge that athletics involve physical ability and those with the most physical gifts tend to outperform those without them. But look a little deeper and you find that behind the brawn and power of the athletes body lies something just as important, the power of the mind. Sport psychology is a science devoted to understanding how an athlete’s mind works, before during and after a competition, it is a study of just how exactly an athlete thinks and why. The mind is one of the most important tools an athlete has at his disposal, it has the power to hold back the most physically gifted person, and at the same time push a less gifted person to greatness. A crucial part of the “mental game” in any sport is sport confidence and it is the focus of this paper. “Athletes refer to self-efficacy as confidence and often attribute successful accomplishments to being confident”. (Short 2008) Confidence in athletics is extraordinarily important for two main reasons. Firstly, an athlete with poor confidence may very well destroy his performance, not because he was unable to perform at his best, but because he didn’t believe that he could and therefore never even attempted what he was truly capable of doing. Secondly an athlete with high confidence may bolster his performance and push himself past where he was in practice, or marks he was expected to reach because he was so confident in his abilities that he was able to exceed his past achievements and reach for new goals. The different mindsets and linked performances are precisely what make confidence so tightly connected to success athletically. Sport confidence can be defined many different ways, but the focus of this paper
Cited: Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: the exercise of control. Worth Publishers retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=eJ-PN9g_o-EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Self efficacy&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=dl1jTfavK5O6sQOOudSXDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false Giacobbi, P., Garner-Holman M., Hayashi S.W., & Vealey R.S. (1998) . Sources of sport- confidence: conceptualization and instrument development. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 20(1), 54-80. Vealey, R.S. (1988) . Sport-Confidence and competitive orientation: an addendum on scoring procedures and gender differences. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 10(4), 471- 478. Feltz, D.L., Short, S.E., & Sullivan P.J. (2008) . Self-efficacy in Sport. Champaign IL: Human Kinetics