Session 5: What role does motivation and perfectionism play?

Introduction

In this session you will explore how an understanding of motivation, which includes the distinct case of those with perfectionist tendencies, can be helpful in understanding burnout.

Figure 1 How can attention to detail, drive and unrelenting high standards both help and hinder?

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A close-up photograph of a man using a pair of scissors to snip blades of grass so they are all of perfectly even length. The man uses a clear, upright ruler to help him.

Figure 1 How can attention to detail, drive and unrelenting high standards both help and hinder?

Motivation refers to the direction and intensity of one’s effort (Sage, 1977) and it is likely that within sport you have thought about your own motivation, and that of others, before. In this session you will investigate both the positive and negative aspects of what drives people in sport. You will do this by seeing how the Self-determination theory of motivation (Deci and Ryan, 1985) and ideas about perfectionism apply to a career-threatening episode experienced by a leading Olympic cyclist.

By the end of this session you should be able to:

• explain how Self-determination theory and the perceived satisfaction of the three needs of autonomy, relatedness and competence can be used to help explain burnout
• describe how the motivational climate that coaches create influences motivation and in particular how an ego-involving climate increases the risk of burnout
• discuss how the role of perfectionism and insights from case studies help explain burnout in some athletes.

First, watch this video, in which Kate Goodger introduces the session further.

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Transcript: Video 1

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.

End transcript: Video 1

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