The emotions and attitudes we experience before and during our performance influence our development. If we adopt a positive attitude then we will surely have interest, pay attention, and be prone to feelings of encouragement to achieve goals, determination to acquire new skills, and tenacity in the face of mistakes.
When self-evaluating learning positively we tend to experience emotions of enjoyment, pleasure, and gratification during the learning process. If, on the other hand, we make a previous negative evaluation, we will tend to experience emotions of bewilderment and hesitation, with little desire to acquire new skills.
This will generate a conflict between the perception of the performance to be accomplished and the perception of our skier Self, generating undesired anticipated consequences. If the negative evaluation occurs during performance, then we are likely to feel emotions of anger or disinterest and will interpret the effort as a punishment. This induces a decrease in concentration and the realization of being involved in an unpleasant activity.
When participating in lessons, emotional responses related to the effort involved in improving skiing are experienced. It is generally positive at moderate levels of effort while an increase on effort levels generates negative emotional tendencies.
The beginner tends to face the activity with a certain accumulation of expectations and an overload, both physical and mental, will result in initially negative emotional experiences produced by general tiredness, muscular pain, and continuous concentration towards movements and actions that, being in the assimilation phase, demand continuous monitoring. If these conditions of high effort persist, it is very likely that he will consider abandoning the activity.
Emotions and skiing performance
The role of emotions in competitive performance covers a significant area in sport psychology. Emotions have personal and social consequences and can both facilitate and hinder sport performance to the point of causing desertion.
Emotions are performance predictors. Research has found that pleasant emotions such as joy, delight, and pleasure, in the absence of negative emotions such as fear and nervousness, help to enhance athletic performance. Athletes who use this emotional regulation strategy manage to reduce the intensity of negative emotions while accentuating the positive ones because they are convinced that it will help them achieve better performance.
Studies also show that some athletes believe that emotions such as anxiety, anger, or fear can enhance their performance and therefore tend to intensify them, while others believe that such emotions decrease the chances of achieving a good execution so they are prone to reduce their intensity.
Many of the emotions generated when skiing come from past experiences that are transformed into beliefs and attitudes that impact and interfere with present performance. Over time these attitudes become emotional habits that cause behavioral automatisms that are difficult to modify. This generates two situations: the racer feels that his path to success is blocked and does not have the capacity to remove the obstacle. For example, if a novice athlete feels that the slalom course is making it difficult for him, he will initially tend to turn the situation around, experiencing anger and irritation. These emotions may at first help motivate him to find the solution but if he is unable to do so, then he will most likely experience frustration and helplessness, accepting that he will not succeed and stop trying.
It is acceptable to feel disappointed when making mistakes and not being able to execute the proper technique in a given situation. Not only is it suitable but it is okay to feel this way since it demonstrates that what the athlete is doing has meaning to him and that he exhibits ambition to improve.
The racer’s own evaluation of the situation determines the emotion he experiences. His emotional states depend on the results or achievements attained and the reasons he attributes to the causes of those results. The evaluation of the result, the execution, or the performance are subjectively considered as successes or as failures, producing happiness or sadness, respectively.
According to Donatella Spinelli, professor of psychobiology, negative emotions are part of sport as distractors and antagonists of concentration, and as undesirable disruptive elements of sports performance. They affect the athlete both physically and mentally. Physically, shortness of breath, increased muscle tension, and loss of coordination lead to a general decrease in performance. Mentally, negative emotions affect his confidence in achieving the proposed objectives disturbing the focus of attention, motivation, and triggering frustration.
Distinction between emotional threat and emotional challenge
In competitive activity, emotional threat is generally related to the pressure to win, to achieve a good result, or to attain a better position in the rankings. For athletes it seems that winning is what matters and failure is almost unacceptable, which is emotionally threatening because, if they do not succeed, a negative emotional chain is triggered that starts with feeling hurt by their own performances.
In contrast, emotional challenge is associated with enjoying skiing despite not achieving the desired results, emphasizing having fun and considering the competition as enriching, stimulating, and motivating. Skiing with this perspective reveals that the athlete possesses the skills required for the activity, which generates confidence through positive emotions such as enthusiasm, pleasure, and fun. It also makes it easier to focus attention on what needs to be done, keeping negative thoughts away.
