A Player’s Path to Athletic Excellence: Embracing the Monotony
Imagine this: You're a high school athlete, passionate about your sport, and you dream of reaching the top. You see the glitz and glamour of professional sports on TV, the high-intensity performances, the world's best athletes. But what you don't see is the monotony of the days in between. The repetitive drills, the same routines, day after day. It's not always exciting, but it's crucial. Embracing this boredom might be the most important step you can take towards your dream.
The Hidden Challenge of Boredom
Boredom can be a career killer. It's not that you don't love your sport or the process of improving, but the repetition can be tough. Yet, it's this very repetition that builds expertise. The good news? There are psychological tools to help you navigate this. One of the most powerful is setting personally meaningful goals. But how do you set a goal that fuels your motivation over the long term?
Finding Purpose in Your Actions
There are three ways to make a goal more meaningful. First, find a goal that benefits you directly. These are goals that you enjoy or that lead to a larger objective that's important to you. Second, find a goal that serves others, an ideal, or something bigger than yourself. The third and most potent way is to combine the two. We'll call this a "purpose." This combination focuses on the deeper motivation for the goal, like helping others, rather than the content of the goal, like becoming an NBA player. This fusion can lead to greater persistence and deeper processing of information, both critical for developing expertise.
Putting It to the Test
Research with high school students has shown that having a purpose leads to seeing boring tasks as more meaningful and results in greater self-regulation and persistence. It can impact performance months into the future and increase the tendency to learn deeply from boring tasks. When students tapped into their larger purpose, they spent twice as long engaging in a boring task. Reflecting on larger goals and how they contribute to something bigger helps overcome temptation and persist.
Applying This to Your Journey
As an athlete, aligning your personal goals with the larger goals of your team or sport can be challenging. But this research provides a framework for unifying both personally meaningful and self-transcendent goals. Here's how you can apply it:
Respect Your Autonomy: It's essential to balance your personal goals with the larger team perspective. Establish social norms that foster self-transcendent learning, like "the other leaders on the team do this."
Connect Personal and Larger Goals: There must be a meaningful alignment between your individual pursuits and the team's goals. Consciously connecting the two can create a powerful force that helps you connect to the larger goal without losing yourself.
Self-Reflect: Identify a self-transcendent purpose. Reflect on how you can contribute to the team's goals and make the environment better. This reflection can lead to identifying goals that motivate team-oriented behavior.
Explain Your Reasons: Articulate your reasons for pursuing the larger goals. Advocating for a message helps you internalize it.
By applying these principles, you can transform the monotony into a mission larger than yourself. When it's tough to make something fun or interesting, tapping into a larger purpose can sustain motivation. Even disengaged students found motivation through this approach, suggesting that these self-transcendent purposes can motivate new behaviors in nearly anyone, and that those new behaviors will sustain over time.
Embracing boredom is simple, but not easy. But by connecting it to both personal goals and larger meaningful goals, you can persist when the going gets tough and improve your performance as a result. So, fall in love with the monotony. It's your path to athletic excellence.