Flow
Athletes' wins and losses come down to psychological factors, not just physical ones.
It's a paradox: although we understand that both our physical and our mental state determine our performance, we only train our physical fitness and hope our “intuitive” psychology will do its job when we need it.
Leaving our mental preparation to chance means risking going into a race in excellent physical shape but with no guarantee we'll know how to make the most of it – we might even waste it by managing our mental state badly.
Most of us can probably remember a training session or a race where, without really knowing why, we not only performed really well but also had a feeling of total control over the run and a sense of fluidity despite the intensity we were holding. This state is known as flow, a concept first defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Later work applied to sport (Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi (1999)) highlighted that, to reach this state of flow, the task must include the following elements:
- A balance between your skills and the challenge you're facing.
- Complete concentration on the activity.
- Clear goals.
- Action and awareness merging into one.
- Total absorption in the task.
- Loss of self-consciousness.
- A sense of control over the activity.
- Not expecting rewards from outside the activity itself.
- Transformation of time.
- Effortless movement.
So some of the keys lie in properly matching the intensity of the task, or the goal we set ourselves, to our skills or the state we're in, so that our motivation level is just right.
If we define our goals in concrete, workable terms, learn to regulate our activation level and work on our focus, we'll probably be able to get much more out of our physical fitness, get closer to performing at our best and enjoy the process along the way.
Eva Parrado – PhD in psychology, specializing in sports.