Motivation in Sport and Exercise
Motivational Styles, Anxiety and Sports Performance: A Case Study from Youth Football (Soccer)

When I met Stephen (a pseudonym) he was 12, and had been playing organised football (soccer) for 6 years. A regular ‘man of the match’, he was playing for a team at the top of the ‘A’ league in his district and he was watched regularly by academy scouts. His father had contacted me because Stephen had been feeling (but not being) ‘sick’ before and during games and experiencing tightness in his throat. His father thought that he wasn’t ‘worried’ about playing, but it sounded like competition anxiety to me.

According to Reversal Theory (Apter) athletes that are in a ‘serious’ motivational state (focused on goals or consequences) are likely to experience physiological arousal as anxiety. Athletes in a ‘playful’ state (focused on immediate enjoyment, or ‘in-the-moment’), on the other hand, are more likely to experience high levels of arousal as excitement, which is pleasant. So, the question on my mind was “why is a 12 year old not out there having fun?”.

Reversal Theory is a general theory of human experience that maps motivational states with emotional experience.

The 8 states are organised into four pairs (domains). At any point in time, only one state from each pair can be ‘in play’, which means that our experience is influenced by four states, although one or two will be more influential than others.

Each state is also associated with a particular ‘value’. These are:

Achievement (Serious), Enjoyment (Playful), Fitting In (Conforming), Freedom (Rebellious, Power & Control (Mastery), Care & Affection (Sympathy), Individualism (Self), Collectivism (Other).

Assessment

Assessment took place over the course of two meetings, plus phone calls and emails and focused on his motivations and experiences around playing football, paying particular attention to the timeline leading into games.

Stephen was a talented all-rounder when who regarded club football as “more important” than other sports, or playing football for his school. It was only when playing for his club that he felt sick. This is a clear clue to his state of mind. He also came across as being very modest, which would prove important.

Stephen said he wished that he could enjoy his football more. He wanted to play football in more of a ‘playful’ state but didn’t feel able to. Although he was playing OK he felt a little constrained, not terribly creative in his play (again a pointer to anxiety). He loved to be in the thick of the action in midfield, but also felt responsibility for the performance of the team. He described feeling nervous as he tried to emulate his club’s tradition of success. He described a strong desire to play professionally and was aware of the need to work hard and continually improve. He had not yet been picked up by professional club for their academy – his dad felt that this was due to his lack of physical stature rather than his ability.

At this stage a number of options were available:

1) Help Stephen to manage his arousal levels;

2) Help Stephen to access the playful state when he is feeling anxious (switch to excitement);

3) Help Stephen to find another focus that would bring a different ‘domain’ into play (i.e. another state from a different pair).

To make the best choice of intervention, however, required some digging to find the cause of the anxiety. If that was known, any intervention would be more effective.

I was curious to find out more about his experience of the ‘other’ state or in other words, playing football for his team-mates and identifying with their needs rather than his – his modesty was a clear sign of other-orientation. After more digging came the real ‘nugget’: Stephen felt a need to repay his parents for the effort and sacrifice that they made for him to play football, by playing better. He would dream of the day when he would buy their house, for example. As he focused more and more on the consequences of his performance, he became more anxious. It became clear that this was central to his experience.

Intervention

1) ‘Coping’ with the anxiety

With my help, Stephen worked out a plan that would involve focusing on things other than football for most of the journey, for which his father’s help was required, and then as he got closer to the ground he would refer to a list of process-related thoughts (which would bring the mastery state into play, and stop him from focusing on outcomes thereby moving the serious state out of focus and possibly even ‘reversing’ into the playful state). This list included trying to make an early tackle, talking to team-mates, looking for the ball from the kick-off, and passing well.

2) Breaking out of the ‘other’ state

This involved taking Stephen through a process of recognising and breaking down irrational beliefs (for example that he ‘owed’ his parents a performance, that he was responsible for people’s disappointment) before encouraging Stephen to find other ways of interpreting his experience of events.

We spent two sessions focusing on this approach and I was delighted when I had an email from Stephen saying that he had been felling sick as usual when he stopped himself and told himself that he didn’t need this, his parents weren’t worried about whether he won or lost, but wanted him to enjoy himself. He went through the rest of the game without feeling sick and, in subsequent games, the symptoms were significantly reduced or did not appear at all. The important thing was, in the end, that he believed the things he told himself that day. Stephen had taken on the principles of the intervention and really run with them!

At the end of the season Stephen was voted ‘player of the year’ by his team mates, and ‘player of the tournament’ in a prestigious competition that his team won. Who says you can’t enjoy yourself and be successful? All that was left was to keep in touch from time to time and check that he was still happy – and after a full season with nothing other than normal ‘nerves’ from time to time contact was finally terminated.

Useful Reading

Kerr, J.H. (2001). Counselling Athletes: Applying Reversal Theory. London: Routledge.

Apter, M.J. (2001). Motivational Styles in Everyday Life: A Guide to Reversal Theory. Washington: APA.

Do you want to improve your mental skills? Try Ken Ravizza's DVD "Mental Skills for Competitive Athletes" or Daniel Gould's DVD "Five Essential Mental Skills for Sport" 

For younger athletes, in Dan Gould's DVD "Mental Skills for Young Athletes"