Blogs : Hugh Murphy

Self-Evaluation

“What do you stand for as an athlete and what does your team stand for?”

The question itself is harmless enough and perhaps it has meaning for many of you, but I’ve always felt a bit patronized by it. It seems artificial to me, something that makes the questioner feel clever and insightful but offers very little to the athlete. It suggests the importance of self-presentation over the importance of your actions and capabilities. As athletes we can’t waste our time with the artificial. We need to be definitive and rational in understanding what makes us good at what we do.

Every athlete has individual attributes and characteristics- things they’re good at and things they’re not so good at, etc. A team’s capabilities are dependant on the attributes of its individuals. Therefore, it is very important for: 1.) Athletes to evaluate their attributes, and 2.) Coaches to find the best way to make use of these attributes. You don’t stand for things, you DO things and you’re good and/or bad at things. As athletes we need to know what we are capable of doing and how we become capable of doing them.

Let’s look at some more useful questions…

1). What aspects of your event are you best at? - example: “My starts are very good. I have a good finishing kick for a distance runner. I keep my block leg really solid in the javelin. Etc.”

2). How did I become good at this aspect? (How did I learn to do X well?) - ex: “I watched a lot of film and had a good coach who taught me how to come out of the blocks well. I was born with good sprinting speed. I did thousands of drills to perfect my javelin block. Etc.”

3). What aspects do I struggle with the most? - ex: “I fade a lot over the last 30 meters. I never run as well in races as I do in practice. I always drop my hand right before I throw. Etc.”

The answers to these questions can give you some insight into the most effective ways for you to learn and improve as an athlete. These ways will be different for everyone since we all retain knowledge a little differently. Think left-brain vs. right-brain, aural learning vs. visual learning, etc. Take the answers to the above questions and break them down as much as you can. “What specifically did I do (or not do) to become good at X? How exactly did I do that? What steps did I take?” Be as specific as possible and most importantly, be honest with yourself. It’s hard to acknowledge your weaknesses and it’s even harder to credit someone else for your successes.

Hopefully this exercise will give you some true insight into “what you stand for as an athlete,” whatever that means. Self-evaluation is always good. It can hurt sometimes, but you’ll always learn something about how you operate and how you can operate more effectively.

I apologize to anyone who read my blog last week. I know, I promised that I’d write something more exciting in my second blog, but it looks like I’ve written another philosophical piece. This was not a mistake; I simply lied to you last week. I’ll probably try to lie to you as often as possible over the next few months. After all, it’s what I’m good at. My self-evaluation told me so.
post comment

I agree, but have a question

1:53 AM, January 19, 2007 .. Posted by just some guy I think

I understand your point of view on self-evaluation. But I was just curious if its limited to just track? Like for instance, the question "how did these little red dots get on my penis?" Can I break that down the same. For instance one of my better attributes is my ability to pick up drunk girls. Ergo I sleep around. How did I become good at this? Tons of practice. Consequently however I never really know the girls I'm sleeping with. And the aspect I struggle with the most is my standard of self respect therefore I sleep with really nasty girls. With all these factored in my self-evaluation would reveal I have herpes. Wow. I guess I answered my own question. Thanks Hugh.

Leave room for inspiration

7:01 PM, January 30, 2007 .. Posted by nschneeberger01

To say something is a cliché is not the same as saying that it has no value. Clichés can be very useful because they communicate thoughts and ideas that are common to the human experience in simple easy to digest sound bites. They may not be as moving and inspiring as some of Shakespeare’s more rousing prose, but they, like fast food, satisfy the appetite of the masses.

Mr. Murphy argued that athletes can't waste time on the artificial, but athletics, in its core essence, is artificial. All aspects of track and field are artificial constructions of our modern urban society. Most events have some authentic or real past, but the current forms are far removed from these. There is nothing natural about spandex, 9 lanes, 400m’s, Mondo, using gunfire as a trigger for motion, spikes, and fiber glass poles. All track equipment is specifically engineered and manufactured for the purpose of track and field, and it has no purpose outside of that context. But again, that is not to say that sport has no value, only to point out that athletes routinely spend time engaging in artificial activities.

Mr. Murphy’s error is in distilling all aspects of performance into tangible behaviors, and all individual differences in performance to differences in psychomotor and cognitive ability, and that teams are nothing more than a collection of individual abilities. While skills and abilities are important, people are not slaves to those abilities. People play above and below their ability all the time. Likewise, teams vary in the ability to convince individual members to fully engage their capability for the good of the team. In this way the Gestalts were right, the whole is different than the sum of its parts. Even in individual sports such as track where inter-individual coordination plays only a small role (pretty much just relays); there is still something more that can come from belonging to a team. Therefore, any accurate philosophy of human performance has to leave room for some less tangible dimensions of the human experience such as motivation, attitudes, values, belonging, teamwork, and inspiration.

I agree with Mr. Murphy that the question “what do you stand for?” is ambiguous and poorly phrased, but I believe it has potential. This question is trying to tap into a number of very important questions. Why do you participate in track and field? What value do you place on being an athlete? What are your goals? How good do you want to become? What are you willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals? How much are you willing to sacrifice to help your teammates achieve their best?

Skinner argued that the science of human behavior should be focused entirely on observable behavior totally ignoring the “black box” of consciousness. But even a single action, like taking a step, has intention behind it. That step is going somewhere, doing something. There is a whole web of cognitive activity behind that simple step. That web of activity is not chaotic and random. In those patterns of cognition and emotional arousal, we find goals, values, and our identity. There is both rationality and irrationality in these patterns, and both are important.

Feelings and emotions matter. Being in a good mood, a supportive environment, being cheered on at practice, can help the individual achieve levels of performance that would not have been achieved alone. They are not required, but they can help.

I often use the metaphor of sharpening a sword. Workouts are the sharpening stone, your body is your sword. Your values and motivation are the pressure that holds the sword to the stone honing and sharpening the edge. If you don’t know what you value (i.e., stand for) or even worse, if you have no values, then there will be no sharpening. The blade will only be dulled by the stone.

p.s. Hugh, I like stated purpose of your blog. It is a welcome addition to the “I ran Xm Y times this week with Z rest”-type blogs. Keep it up the thoughtful analyses.

response

10:47 PM, January 30, 2007 .. Posted by hmurphy

Mr. Schneeberger, <p>

Thank you for the thoughtful response. <p>
After re-reading my entry I worry that it suggests too much of a black and white, uninspiring approach to training and competing. I don't want to take the poetry out of track and field. I agree that motivation and inspiration are very important for athletes. However, I must disagree with your ascertation that emotion can lead a person to perform above their abilities. I would argue that emotion is simply a way for us to describe changes in our hormone levels (adrenaline, testosterone, etc.)- hormones that can help athletes get more out of their physical abilities, but not exceed their physical abilities. Similarly, I think motivation, inspiration, emotion, etc. can be used to 1. boost these hormones in training and competing, 2. improve training by making track and winning seem more important, thus more deserving of an athletes time. <p>
I think it is important to be definitive in your goals and honest in your self-evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses. Once you have determined all this, you can start asking, 'Why?'. From here you can find your motivators and inspiration. A question like, "what do you stand for, etc." is a very vague question to ask yourself if you're trying to rationalize or get to the bottom of why you're performing the way you are. Basically, Skinner had to determine specific steps to get his bird up those boxes without flying. Then he had to find the bird's motivator, food. <p>
I hate to argue too much because I feel like we are closer in opinion than this response would suggest. I guess I have always had problems finding motivation in one-liners from sports psychologists and coaches. Maybe my internal conversation is to blame. I've never been able to convince myself of anything in sports through positive or negative self-talk. <p>
Thanks again for your response. I really do appreciate it.

I agree with your disagreement

12:40 AM, January 31, 2007 .. Posted by nschneeberger01

Hugh,

One of the reasons I responded to your post, first time ever for a TS blog, was because it did ring very true. I hate to say this, because I'm only a few years older than you and it is a terrible cliché, but it sounds very much like something I would have said when I was your age. I was a javelin thrower, fought through injury, expensive private school, etc, and had a similar rational/empirical philosophy about performance when I finished college.

Two important things have changed since then. 1) I began studying psychology and researching motivation and the extent to which mood, emotions, and all that "soft stuff" influences behaviors, perceptions, and goal driven behavior. I have a whole dissertation proposal proposing a study looking at the relationship between motivation, climate, and performance controlling for differences in actual ability. 2) I also had the pleasure of working for a head coach who showed me that genuine inspiration has an important place at the table. He's the <a href = "http://www.trackshark.com/blogs/marcp/1020/Last+Couple+Weeks.html">head coach </a>that predicted a sub 4 minute mile for no particular reason last weekend. He taught me that believing in people can make them believe in themselves, and that alone can make the difference between success and failure.

Agreeing with your disagreement, I misspoke when I said that people can perform above their ability. That just doesn’t make sense. What I was trying to say is that someone with less ability and skill who is fully engaging their ability and skill (i.e., performs close to their theoretical maximum performance) can and will beat an athlete of superior skill and ability who does not fully engage their ability and skill. It’s the classic underdog story that we love so much. Where many sport psychologists fail, I believe, is in talking as if there is one size fits all approach to engaging one's skills and abilities, or one specific set of right values that are associated with achieving that peak performance consistently. As you noted, achieving peak performance is a very personal thing that defies vague generalizations and requires serious self-reflection.

Without getting to Psych-geek at you, it is interesting that the first thing that you said was important to be definitive in (i.e., "I think it is important to be definitive in your goals...") is one possible definition of motivation. There is an important and well-supported theory of motivation called Goal Setting Theory (Locke and Latham, 1990) that proposes that goals are "simultaneously the cause of action and the standards for evaluating its outcome." Having goals is synonymous with having motivation because goals are a key reason for engaging in certain behaviors and following certain courses of action. A friend of mine named John Donovan has dome some interesting research looking at how athletes (specifically track and field athletes) revise their proximal and distal goals over the course of a season, but if I keep typing, I will be full-on psych-geek (as if I haven't gone their already).