Transcript
KATE GOODGER
Obsession, drive, ambition, passion-- you might listen to all of those words and think, how do they relate to burnout? How do they relate to athletes? They are typically the kind of characteristics you come across in elite performers, and you might argue part of that is what they need to have in order to compete in that highly intense and competitive pressured environment. The challenge, however, is finding the right level of balance of those characteristics.
All of those characteristics help us to achieve training gains and performance gains that come out on the field of competition. The challenge, however, is they can become overplayed strengths. When something becomes an overplayed strength, that can put you at risk from conditions such as burnout, overtraining, stress, anxiety.
In this session, you're going to take a slightly different perspective to looking at burnout. The focus now is much more on the individual and the athlete perspective in terms of more personality-based characteristics. So things like their perfectionism, their nature of their drive and their motivation. By understanding these factors, you are beginning to now look at the mechanics of what might lead an individual to be at risk to burnout and also what might help individuals recover from that.
When I'm working with athletes at any level, one of the most important questions I want to get an answer to is, why do they do what they do? What is it that they love about the sport? What purpose does that sport serve in their life? By understanding their own motivation and their own drives, they can build the right performance environment around them that's going to fuel that performance versus an environment which is going to deplete it and could lead to that risk of burnout.
The final part in the session, you'll be focusing more on the individual environment and the climate that sits around athletes. So here, you'll start to look at how coaches and other individuals can help support athletes to safeguard against issues such as burnout.