“Only praise behavior that you want to be repeated. Never use false praise.” Dean Smith
According to sports psychology for basketball, emotion is a built-in alerting system.
Feelings often occur strongest when you feel possible risks and threats. Perceptions of risk and threats can easily trigger emotions and stress hormones which might affect your performance.
Eliminate Self-Defeating Behaviors
Once you learn a new habit, it begins to appear more and more. Situations, similar to the original learning moment, start to trigger the overwhelming feelings and the related self-defeating habits.
To change self-destructive patterns, you must first believe you can change those habits.
A new behavior begins by accepting that you can control your reactions. You have the ability to develop mental toughness.
You can change unhealthy habits, by re-engineering your reactions. The change grows out of knowing the triggers of your sabotaging patterns.
By understanding these triggers, you can take a mindful approach to creating new healthy habits.
Keeping a journal of your self-defeating behaviors will help you learn your triggers.
The journal should include a description of the situation, your feelings, and your behaviors. The journal will help you understand when you are most likely to sabotage yourself.
Change Damaging Messages in Your Head
Your “voices” inside your head keep commenting on your moment-to-moment experiences, the quality of your past decisions, mistakes you could have avoided, and what you should have done differently.
These voices can be mean and make a bad situation much worse.
Rather than empathize with your suffering, they criticize, disparage, and beat you down at every opportunity!
Re-engineering your voices inside your head involves taking control of what messages you send to your head.
The key to overcoming self-defeating habits is to control the messages on your head.
Focus on your positive thought patterns, instead of the negative self-talk.
You change when you manage your triggers and build healthy experiences into your life.
It is essential to identify and foster your mental skills and strengths.
To do this, consider important “defining” moments in your basketball career. Take into particular consideration times where you feel your character traits have been developed through a particular “defining moment.”
No matter how strong the negative thoughts are do not give in to self-doubt. Talking negatively to yourself when something goes wrong will benefit you and may result in you feeling helpless.
Immediately change that self-doubt by using positive self-talk. Use that experience as motivation for improvement. Consider how you can turn a negative situation into a learning opportunity, to build your mental game in basketball.
*Download the free mental game assessment and get started on Improving your Mental Game in Basketball.
Hi Delice,
My name is Tony McCuin. My son Xavier just received a scholarship to play basketball at Fanshawe College in Canada. He is a solid point guard that works really hard. His issue is he self sabotages himself anytime something good happens. He is a month away from leaving and he is worried that the coach won’t like him and that his shot is not good enough. He shot looks great, but I’m watching him literally take himself out the game. He has been this way since he was 8. No matter how well he did in AAU he still never builds on his success. I have worked in sports tv for more than 20 years (I directed Sportscenter before moving on to direct UFC and the NFL pregame and Super Bowl shows). so I’m around athletes all the time. I’ve tried everything, but I can’t seem to get him to believe in himself (and yes I’ve even asked him a few times if he wanted to quit). I need a different approach. I need him to believe in himself and not just believe what I believe about him, if that makes sense.
Anything that you can do to help will be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Tony McCuin
Good Morning Tony:
I responded to your message yesterday by hitting reply on my phone and it bounced back this morning. My apologies. I have copied and paste my response below. Cheers!
Hi Tony:
Thank you for reaching out. I can certainly provide you with general information, however, the best advice is when I can speak with the athlete and do some assessments.
In general, from what you wrote, it sounds like he is experiencing fear of failure or fear of success. Sometimes when athletes fear success they exhibit sabotaging behaviors. I would dig a little deeper on these two topics. There is a lack of confidence so building confidence will help him tremendously. I would inquire and assess for anxiety and if it is present, get to the root cause of it. Lastly, I would suggest helping him develop a positive mindset by teaching him strategies to eliminate self-defeating behaviors.
I hope this helps. All the best to you and Xavier!
Delice Coffey, MA, LPA
Psychologist/Mental Game Coach
Ed.D. Candidate