Athletes Must Train their Self-Efficacy to Learn from Failure
In sports, seeing is believing. What’s more, belief leads to effort and this combination is what trains self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the mindset of how one controls their destiny. Renowned psychologist Albert Bandura in his preeminent book on the topic defines self-efficacy as the exercise of control over things that affect one’s life.
Correspondingly, the first step to learning from failure is using video review to get athletes to believe, which in turn will fuel the effort to train their self-efficacy. Specifically, athletes must use video review to believe two things:
- There are things under their control that they can change to prevent future failures.
- They can turn what they see on video from a mental model into a skill they can master.
Bandura elaborates on these two steps with more technical detail in what he calls the cognitive and transformational phases of skill development. The cognitive phase is where the athlete develops a mental model of what they must learn. The transformational phase is where the athlete converts the mental model into skilled action using the feedback of a coach.
To summarize, for an athlete to learn from failure they must first train their self-efficacy by starting with mental skills. Then convert those mental skills into physical skills.
Video review sessions are the catalyst for developing the mental memory one needs for mental skills. Physical training sessions are the catalyst for the muscle memory one needs for physical skills. Learning from failure requires connecting these two together repeatedly until the athlete masters the lessons they need to learn.