Self-Awareness and Performance

Are you standing in your own way while trying to get your best results? Self-awareness is made up of athletes understanding their own personalities and behaviors. Through self-awareness, athletes learn about their strengths, limitations, motivations, and needs. With their coaches' guidance, athletes can begin to self correct.

When athletes take greater responsibility and have ownership of their results, they begin to understand what behaviors contribute to high performance and which ones contribute to poor performance. Through this development of self-awareness, athletes learn to self correct their technique and strategies. They learn to make better decisions in practice or in a race, when it matters the most.

Understanding how and why you perform as you do is the key to becoming ‘self-aware.' Once you, as an athlete, become self-aware, you can start to recognize the finer details relating to personality, behavior, and motivation that consistently draw out your best training and best performances.

Keeping a log of mood, thoughts, and habits in your daily routine, training sessions, and races will help you start to see patterns and repeated actions that consistently lead to success or failure. Becoming aware of these strengths or weakness will allow you to self correct when you recognize getting off track, and know exactly what to do to reset for success.

For example;

Let's say you are faced with a situation that frustrates you and your habit is to get angry and then quit. This leads to repeated failure, and when put under pressure, this might cause an outcome you aren’t happy with.

To self correct, when you notice the first sign of feeling frustrated, you take note of that feeling as your trigger. As soon as you feel that frustration, you pause, create a new action, and reset your action to one that leads to success.

Developing an acute sense of self awareness and creating a list of triggers, actions, and habits that lead you to success or failure will help you learn consistent tools to always perform at your best when it matters the most and bring out your best results every time it counts.