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 will be a comparison between two psychologists theories on just what sport confidence means. These two psychologists are Robin S. Vealey and Albert Bandura. Each of these psychologists has a set theory on what sports confidence is and what it means, and this paper will be an in depths look at the similarities and differences between the two. In order to make an accurate comparison between the two theories of sport confidence, it is first necessary to understand each on its own.
Bandura defines sport confidence as “belief in one’s capability to organize and execute the course of action required to produce given attainments. ” (Bandura, 1997) Bandura believes that there are four fundamental elements involved with improving ones sport confidence. Successful Performance – the athlete must experience success within the intended sport for confidence to increase. Vicarious Experience – an athlete increases sport confidence by using some sort of model like for instance watching an instructional video.
Verbal persuasion – this is more or less positive verbal reinforcement that builds confidence through confirmation of performance. Emotional Arousal – how excited an athlete is about a sport greatly influences how confident they will be about their performance. Bandura’s approach to sport confidence is to overcome certain elements on the path to building confidence, if one or more of these elements does not occur correctly the athlete is likely to have a stunted level of confidence in his sport, and as such his performance will not be the best possible.
Vealey defines sport confidence as “the belief or degree of certainty individuals possess about their ability to be successful in a sport”. (Short 2008) Vealey’s theory includes a set of descriptive terms that combine to predict how an athlete’s performance is likely to go. The terms are; personality trait of sport confidence, competitive orientation, and situational state-specific sport confidence. The personality trait of sport confidence is a term that describes how confident the athlete usually is in any sort of competition.
Competitive orientation is a term that refers to one of two options for an athlete’s orientation, either performance orientation or outcome orientation. These previous to terms combine together to form the athletes state-specific sport confidence, which is how confident the athlete is in a particular situation. Vealey believes that success and performance are connected very closely to the mindset the athlete brings into competition. She also believes that if you are able to quantify and compare exactly what the mindset is, that one can predict how an athletes performance is likely to go.
This idea allows for sport psychologists to be able to understand how there athletes are going to perform before a competition, and have a distinct set of tools that can tell them exactly what is occurring and why, from the perspective of the athletes psychology. It is also useful to pinpoint what portion of vealey’s theory might be holding a particular athlete back, and improving that specific part of the athletes mindset in order to improve the overall performance.
Both Bandura and Vealey are leading psychologists, and both of their theories on sport confidence are two of the most highly regarded theories regarding confidence in sports and athletics. As such it is very likely that there are certain things that their theories hold in common and this holds true. The first similarity is the most obvious one, both of these psychologists theories take into account the fact that confidence is a hugely important part of an athletic performance. Both of the theories are centered around the idea that the more confident an athlete becomes, the more likely to be successful that performance is.
This leads to the fact that both believe that precognitive mindsets have a lot to do with the confidence that the athlete will have about their particular sport. That is to say that the way that the athlete interacts and thinks about their performance prior to the actual competition, greatly effects the confidence that they have entering the competition. This is obvious when a direct comparison is made between the two theories different components. Bandura’s theory says that sport confidence is directly related to self-efficacy, how inclined a person is to believe in themselves.
It says that the four elements; successful performance, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and emotional arousal are “effective in developing self-efficacy. Each of these elements is critical in understanding how an athlete can develop self-efficacy and self-confidence”. Vealey (1988) When compared to the components of Vealey’s theory and the three elements; personality trait of sport confidence, competitive orientation, and situational state-specific sport confidence the two are different in the specifics of their application, but fundamentally similar in that both take place before the competition of interest.
Although there are strong similarities between the two models, there are also distinct differences that set the two theories apart from each other, allowing them to be completely independent. The most striking difference becomes apparent when comparing the difference in the elements proposed by either theory. Bandura’s theory contains four elements that are more or less free standing, they do not interact directly with one another. In stark contrast in order for Vealey’s theory to work, the elements involved must interact.
Another relevant difference present among the theories is the context of the elements, although their specifics are different, it is also worth noting that they are different in their internal and external sources. Bandura’s theory claims that the elements effecting an athlete’s confidence in a competition involve external influence as much as internal influences. The first element successful performance, and the last element emotional arousal are both internally driven experiences. The other two elements, vicarious experience and verbal persuasion involve an external force effecting the confidence of the athlete.
In contrast Vealey’s theory model describes elements that are internal forces. All three of Vealey’s elements take a perspective that the athlete generates all elements that involve their sport confidence from internal mindsets that act upon one another to effect the overall performance. In athletics and competitive sports, confidence plays an incredibly important role in the success of the individual athlete. In order to ensure success it is necessary to understand what drives an athlete to succeed and what dooms an athlete to failure.
Confidence is an issue that can do both of these to even the most seasoned veteran and as such understanding how an athlete develops and gathers confidence is as crucial as practice the physical movements of the sport. Bandura and Vealey each offer a theory on how sport confidence works in hopes to understand it. Upon comparing the similiarities and differences between the two psychologists theories it becomes obvious that neither is more right than the other, and the only way to successfully interpret either is by overlapping the theories and trying to understand how they work together.
Sport confidence can not be explained by one set of elements, but rather is an small fraction of athletics that is effected by a slew of things. The fact that both of these are leading theories in the realm of confidence in sports explains why there are similarities between the two, but it’s the differences that speak the most. In order for there to be differences it means that either they are either both wrong, or that they are only a part of the whole truth. The latter is much more likely the right nswer, and as time passes it is very likely that new developments will lead to an even better understanding of sport confidence, developments built off of the similar comparisons like this one.
Works 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
