Motivation in Athletics

The last couple of blogs have discussed detractors, those things that knock us off our path toward manifesting our vision, if we let them. The two we have looked at so far are distracters and low frustration tolerance. Rather than scaring you with yet another detractor (and there are too many of them) I wanted in this posting to write about a model of motivation that had a strong influence on me in creating my model for self motivation.

My research for my book, Motivate Yourself, a step by step guide to becoming all you can be, revealed three fields in which there was lots of research: education, employment and sports. These are all important and large industries, so the magnitude of the research being done is not surprising. I am an athlete (amateur), so I was particularly interested in sports motivation, how coaches and trainers motivate their athletes. One model of motivation was particularly interesting. It is called the Resonance Performance Model, or RPM. It had a large impact on the creation of my model.

RPM focuses on the motivation of high performing athletes. Dr. Doug Newburg, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, developed it after interviews with hundreds of these athletes.

Just as my model for self motivation has three elements or factors, Dr. Newburg’s model has three elements:

1) the dream,
2) extensive preparation,
3) a strategy to overcome obstacles.

The dream refers to one idea, one concept that captures the athlete so totally that he makes a commitment to making the expression of this one idea his life’s work. The person has a dream, and he wants to express that dream in his life. This is why the word resonance is in the model’s name. The athlete’s intent is to make his or her external reality be in conformance (in resonance) with that inner reality, the dream.

In RPM, the dream is not a goal you set. The dream is inside of you, something you live every day.

Extensive preparation is the second element in RPM. Preparation involves all the activities you engage in to make your dream happen. For a high performing athlete who is in resonance, however, this preparation is not drudgery. It is not something the athlete is compelled to do. Instead it is something he wants to do, something that has real meaning to him, something that is an integral part of the dream. The incredible amounts of time a high performing athlete spends preparing for competitions makes the dream a part of his or her every day existence. The preparation becomes part of the resonance, that merging of the internal with the external. Newburg asserts that striving for the goal may actually be more resonating than achieving the goal.

The third element of RPM is the strategy to overcome obstacles used by the athlete in resonance. Newburg uses the term “obstacles” very broadly. There are external obstacles, such as rejection, losses, and injuries, and internal obstacles, such as fear and self-doubt. They sound like the detractors we have been discussing, so the way the athletes deal with these obstacles is instructive to all of us. Newburg found the way the high performing athlete deals with obstacles is different than how lesser performing athletes deal with them. Instead of taking the obvious step of just returning to the preparation stage and increasing the duration or intensity of the practice, or modifying it in some other way, the high performing athlete first revisits the dream. Instead of going back to the second element, the preparation, the high performing athlete returns to the first element, the dream. The high performing athletes interviewed by Newburg explained that when they revisit their dream, they are reconnecting with the feelings that motivate them to do the activities they do. Revisiting the dream can include watching videos of performances, reading journals the athlete had kept, listening or just thinking about what is important to them. It may also include redefining the dream.

This contemplative, internal activity allows the high performing athlete to reconnect to the dream, his inner world, which allows him or her to integrate that inner world with the physical or outer world, the performance.

As you become more and more familiar with my model for self motivation, you will become more aware of the influence Dr. Newburg had on me.