Characteristics of a Positive Mental Attitude

Successful athletes:

Realize that attitude is a choice.
Choose an attitude that is predominantly positive.
View their sport---running---as an opportunity to compete against themselves and learn from their successes and failures.
Pursue excellence, not perfection, and realize that they as well as others are not perfect.
Maintain Balance and perspective between their sport and the rest of their lives.

How do you develop one of these? Some helpful tips:

Develop an awareness of your attitude and its influence through self-monitoring.
Realized that attitude is a choice.
Identify appropriate role models---FBF is full of them.
If you can find apt quotations, anecdotes and stories use them. Nearly every FBF coach has a favorite quote.
Emphasize a “commitment to excellence,” meaning you focus on getting better.
Emphasize “Mastery” vs “Winning.” You have control of mastery issues, but not whether you win or lose.

A major factor in developing a PMA is making self-to-self comparisons as opposed to self-to-others comparisons. There is a great danger in self-to-other comparisons. When a person sees the vast difference in ability of other runners he may conclude, “I could never do that,” or “she/he must have a natural talent for running.” You may reach a premature conclusion that “I’m just not good at that.” This conclusion can be discouraging and may result in the erroneous conclusion that “I’m not cut out to run a marathon.” Well you can figure out the rest from that.

However, the royal road to results is measured by our own progress. When we have this self-to self comparison in mind we can look to others’ accomplishments for inspiration, for models of excellence and for sources of high quality of information on our own improvement, not as targets of envy or jealousy.

As mentioned this morning, one of best sources on this topic is Marty Seligman’s Learned Optimism published in the 90’s. Dr. Seligman did the seminal research on pessimism and how people got depressed and turned around his research to study optimism instead. It is a great read and also great to work with you children in terms of their own self-concepts.