Boosting Human Performance in Competitive Achievement Situations: Can We Indeed Learn from Sport Psychology?

To boost human performance, the complex behavioral science of getting ahead has to be broken down to its determinants. We will discuss some of the most important psychological underpinnings of human behavior and how we can harness them to perform at our highest levels and succeed in sports and other organizational settings.

To excel in any competitive achievement situation, it is critical to develop psychological skills, which, like physical abilities, can be taught, learned, and practiced. Such individual skills include the regulation of arousal, motivation and goal setting, self-confidence, decision-making and creativity, whereas working in teams requires appropriate group-cohesion and effective leadership. These components of mental preparedness are mandatory and can be learned from sports-psychology and applied to other settings, in order to better support, inspire and manage elite performers in general.

However, the assumption that scientific and applied knowledge that emerges in one domain can be used effectively in other domains, can be questioned. In a period of time when researchers from different fields have devoted efforts to increasing our understanding of how to establish optimal learning conditions/environments, practice arrangements, or training regimes that have the potential to enhance performance, one of the recommendations that is given to us is that practice/training should be task-specific. To attain better achievements, an individual should practice a given task consistently, repeatedly, and specifically. It would benefit him or her if this task-specific practice begins at an early age. Therefore, one can argue that the knowledge on how to improve human performance is domain-specific; that is, what is effective in one domain may not be so helpful in other domains.

The two positions described above are contrarian to some degree but while there are differences, they can be integrated as well. The general aspects of attention, motivation, goal setting and decision-making are needed for performance in competitive situations. But of course, task specific training is of utmost importance in such situations. However, tennis players for example, imagine cognitively several aspects of a forthcoming game while not on the court. They can imagine a ball coming at a certain speed from a particular angle and think how they would respond to it. A goalie in soccer preparing for an 11-meter penalty kick can imagine different scenarios where the ball would be kicked at, but he of course needs to practice different jumps in preparing for such kicks. He also has to lower his anxiety before a kick for which he can practice meditation and self-suggestion off the field.

Several examples will be presented from the way athletes prepare and train to how musicians, actors (and even firefighters) train, to highlight the dual aspects of performance in competitive situations.