The Proper Motivation of Athletes Psychology Essay (Essay Sample)

The Proper Motivation of Athletes
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The Proper Motivation of Athletes
Motivation is the most important aspect in the life of an athlete, since, generally, their career path consists of a continues series of goals, instead of individual separate ones. Aside from private training sessions with their coaches, athletes, especially Olympic athletes, are judged based on how they perform in comparison with other athletes, which could highly damage one’s confidence if they weren’t properly trained and coached on how to view their training and their abilities to improve. This is the main reason why Olympic coaches need to cater to each individual athlete’s needs with a different method of motivation, training, and goal-setting, whether extrinsic or intrinsic, to ensure the best performance and constant improvement possible.
In order to achieve continues motivation and improvement setting realistic goals, that are also attainable, is crucial. (Robert, 1982). The goals need to vary between being short-term and long term, while also achieving a balance between being too hard and too easy, but are also compatible with the main objective. If the goals are too easy, achieving them won’t require much energy or work from the athlete, while harder goals can give the athlete an internal sense of failure and demotivates them. (Morgan, 1979). The results of short-term goals should be analyzed for each athlete individually in order to determine the course of action required next, as some athletes might need a repeated challenge, while others work better with a variety in motivation and goals.