Читать книгу Sports Psychology For Dummies - Leif H. Smith - Страница 59

Fame and fortune — what more could you want, right? These factors can definitely influence your motivation, but if motivation were as simple as fame and fortune, everyone would be motivated to be rich and famous and every rich and famous athlete would be motivated to perform their best all the time.

Think about yourself: Are you getting rich and famous playing your sport right now? Chances are, you aren’t. Even if you’re a pro athlete, you may not be making tons of money — for example, a typical rookie player in Major League Soccer may earn only $40,000 per year. If you’re still in school, you’re playing for free, and even if you’re a famous college athlete, when you first started out, nobody but your parents knew your name.

Fame and fortune can be motivating factors in sports (just as they are in other areas of life for most people), but they’re never enough to sustain you to achieve and work hard all year. You need an internal passion that takes over in order for your long-term motivation to last.

Think about the unhappy rich and famous athletes you’ve read about. Research indicates that there isn’t a huge difference in life satisfaction between people who make $50,000 a year and those who make over $1 million a year. When you achieve a certain level of money and fame, more money and more fame aren’t going to do anything more for you. The best athletes don’t play for financial security — they play for the love of the game.

Along with fame and fortune, external motivators such as these only take you so far. You will not be motivated long-term if you are trying to please your parents, seek the approval of your coaches, or attend a certain college because others think it is a great school. Ultimately, motivation comes from within for the long haul. Other external factors can motivate you on a short-term basis, but research shows that this sort of motivation is short-lived. If you want to be your best in a certain sport, it ultimately has to come from within.

We work with athletes all of the time who have the ability to compete at a Division I level, many times at some of the top schools in the country. It is easy for these athletes to get caught up in this process and choose a school because it is famous and/or they hear from parents, coaches, and teammates that they should attend this school. All the while, the athlete may not even want to compete at the college level. Or, they might just want to compete at a smaller, Division III school and have more balance in their lives. We see athletes all of the time who are motivated to choose a school based on external factors and what others think. But it almost never works out. They end up miserable in their sport and school, not performing and sometimes sitting on the sidelines for all four years. Or they end up transferring, which is another significant stressor. Make sure you make the decision to play sports at the collegiate level, or any level, based on your own internal motivations rather than the motivations of those around you.