Sport Psychology and Sports Success
Frank
Jing-Horng Lu
National
Taiwan Sport University
Recently I finished a book’s chapter titled
“Golf in Taiwan: A Case of Social and Family Influences on Talent Development.”
I use Taiwanese women elite golfer Yani Tseng’s story as example to depict how
social others and family members contribute to her success. This book is tentatively
titled “Secrets of Asian Sport Psychology” will be published soon in an open
access.
One of the missions of sport psychology is
to study why people success in sport (under a label of “talent development.”)
In my chapter, I found Yani’s success comprised many social-psychological components.
One of these components is her parent’s role in cultivating her talent---unconditioned
care and love, provided with sufficient sources, and planned with high quality
education, all of these make her success. Also, her parents arranged experts in
golf and language so promote her abilities in every aspect. Also, they sent her
participating in many youth golf development programs either in domestic or
abroad such as Australia Hill Academy and U.S. Youth Golf Tours to accumulate
her experiences and skills. These developmental opportunities make Yani unique
and exceptional.
In addition to social influence, I also
introduced some examples of how sport psychology skills underlie her success.
She is not success all the way to her peak. She encountered many set backs and
slumps in her career. The most significant psychological skill lesson she
learnt was from a well-known sport psychologist ---Dr. Deborah Graham. In 2009,
Yani came to see Dr. Graham with a terrible set-back because she could not
enter a qualified round in the middle of that year (actually she was pretty
sharp in the beginning of the year). At their first meet, Dr. Graham tried to
find Yani’s problems by interviews. After several talks Dr. Graham completely
understood the major problems, she used a combination of goal setting and
concentration skills eliminated Yani’ negative thoughts and altered mental
state. The program was very successful. Later, Yani improved quite a lot and became
concentrated and confident in every shot and competitions, and had a successful
outcome in 2010, 2011, and 2012.
Sport psychology is an interesting field in
sport sciences. It includes many topics such as psychological skills,
motivation, personality, group dynamics, social influences, moral development,
burnout, psychology of sport injury, positive psychology (such as mindfulness,
resilience, and peak experience) to name a few. If you like sport psychology, I
welcome you contact sport psychology scholars near you, or visit professional
sport psychology websites such as Asian South Pacific Association Of Sport Psychology (ASPASP), Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP), International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP), North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA). You will find
something you like and have a different world in your life.
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