Developing self-awareness is often the foundation work within sport psychology sessions. We are living in a time where we are constantly bombarded with information from technology, meaning we are often on autopilot and going through the motions. Being a self-aware person, athlete, coach or performer can improve your confidence, take responsibility of your actions and make better informed decisions that help you to get to where you want to go. How can we make changes if we don’t know what to change?
Being self-aware means you understand:
- Your strengths and weaknesses.
- Your values and beliefs.
- Your thoughts, emotions and behaviours in different situations.
- Your motivations.
- Your habits.
Being self-aware means you can then start to make decisions that make you the person and athlete you want to be, for example: understanding your strengths and weaknesses means you can adapt training to address those; which ultimately improve your performance.
3 tips to improve your self-awareness:
- Keep a Training log
This can be detailed or bullet pointed depending on the time you have and your goals. For example, picking one thing from training that you are going to work on for the week; one thing that went well in training and why; tracking how you respond to sparring a difficult training partner and how you will make improvements.
- Developing your own values
Spend some time to figure out what kind of a person do you want to be, what is truly important to you. Some athletes find they value different characteristics as a person than as a fighter; in that case, think about what kind of a fighter do you want to be or what kind of an athlete do you want to be. Once you have six characteristics you can set yourself action goals to use in training and competition.
If you want to try a values sheet just email: lenakessler0@gmail.com
- Schedule in some time with your coach to discuss the session
This could be five minutes on something that is working, one thing to improve on and how to work on this. Often it’s easy to see what we need to improve but lack on how to go about doing this; talking with your coach and setting clear goals for training will help to take action over making those improvements.
Those were some quick tips on how to improve your own self-awareness, what self-awareness is and why it is important. If you have any questions or have feedback please email me or message me on instragram: Lena.a.k
